‘We have to take more risks’: Ukrainian forces hold the line as battle for Donbas heats up

Amid the intermittent sounds of outgoing artillery fire, a Ukrainian unit is using heavy machinery to build new trenches a few kilometres from the eastern town of Bakhmut. Russian forces have made gradual gains in the area with World War I-style, quasi-suicidal frontal attacks backed by well-equipped Wagner mercenaries. With Bakhmut dangerously close to being encircled, Ukrainian troops are adding more defensive lines to fall back on. 

“This line is being fortified for when Bakhmut falls,” Igor, a Ukrainian soldier, tells FRANCE 24 from the top of a hill. Ukraine’s objective: to ensure that the fall of Bakhmut doesn’t turn into a breakthrough for Russian forces. 

“We are willing to pay the price to win,” he says, referring to the large number of Ukrainian casualties. “But victory is now in the hands of our allies, who must provide us with better weapons.”

FRANCE 24 heard this, mantra-like, from virtually every soldier as we visited several secret locations on the Donbas front line. The request for additional Western weapons is growing more urgent as Russia pushes forward. This time, Moscow is not sending poorly trained convicts to fight a battle of attrition like the one that has been raging in Bakhmut since August. In areas like Kreminna and Vuhledar, Ukraine is now facing assaults from professional mechanised infantry units.         

With Western armour not due to arrive before late spring or summer, Kyiv’s forces have to defend the front armed with Soviet-era equipment.

Several ageing T-64, T-72 and T-80 Soviet tanks are scattered in a pine forest some 20 kilometres from Russian lines. The numbers after the “T” offer a rough idea of the year the first models were put into service – long before the soldiers we met were even born.

‘Not enough to push the Russians back’ 

Once the soldiers receive the coordinates of their targets, tanks advance in pairs to engage the enemy. After firing, they move away from the front line, returning to their initial positions or heading to another location.  

“Right now it’s very hard because the enemy is pushing [forward] and we don’t have enough armoured vehicles to push them back,” a soldier from Ukraine’s 25th Tank Brigade, going by the call name “Volunteer”, tells FRANCE 24.

“Our most urgent issue is the shortage of ammunition,” says a senior officer also named Igor. “In practice, it means that we have to take more risks because we must go closer to the enemy to make sure that we don’t waste any shells.”

The tank company commander insists that the delivery of Western tanks would make a big difference on the battlefield.

To prove his point, he invites us to step into his T-80. Seconds after squeezing into the cramped gunner station, we realise how reliant on technology the crew is for something as basic as visibility.

The T-80 optics system is terribly outdated, with different viewers for daylight targeting and thermal imagery – moving from one set to the other would quickly cause neck strain. On modern Western tanks, the gunner has easy access to daylight optics and thermal imagery on the same screen. Thermal imaging is very useful, even in broad daylight, for identifying targets in dense areas like forests or cities.

“And the shells are stored right under where you are sitting,” grins Igor. A hit or fire triggering an explosion right below them – what people posting on social media call the “flying turret” – is the ultimate nightmare for crews operating Soviet-era tanks.

Western tanks have the capacity to engage the enemy from farther away and can cooperate more easily on the battlefield with other infantry and artillery units, explains Alexandre Vautravers, editor-in-chief of Revue Militaire Suisse. Vautravers is a Swiss colonel and former deputy commander of an armoured brigade who has hands-on experience with such weapons.

“Tanks in Ukraine are now being used as mobile artillery. There have been very, very few tanks destroyed by other tanks in this conflict. Western tanks and armoured vehicles can give an edge to Ukrainian forces by allowing them to move and shoot at the same time. But it would require two or three weeks of intensive training,” he tells FRANCE 24.

But Western tanks are unlikely to be the silver bullet that pushes Russian forces out of Igor’s front line. The company commander ranks anti-tank mines as one of the biggest threats in this area – something to which Western tanks are not immune.

“Even with Western tanks, it would be hard to punch through Russian lines in Donbas because it’s a front that has been fortified for almost the last 10 years,” says Vautravers. Russian-backed separatists have controlled Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas since 2014. 

Besides concentrated artillery and anti-tank missiles, defensive lines in this area include deep ditches, concrete obstacles and minefields.

Flying five metres above the ground

Mikhail isn’t worried about minefields. The 39-year-old pilot from the 12th Army Aviation Brigade flies an MI-24 “Hind” attack helicopter. Five gunships from his unit, which includes MI-8 transport helicopters, are parked on an open field on the eastern front. Maintenance workers are busy lubricating rocket pods while others check the alignment of the helicopter blades. They need to be ready to take off in an instant if their commanders send them a target’s coordinates. 

“Everybody has a role to fight against the Russians. When the infantry can’t move, they call the helicopters (…) Our sorties can last up to one hour and we destroy our targets 90% of the time – but it’s very dangerous,” Mikhail says.

The Donbas front is heavily fortified with air defences and MANPADS (man-portable air-defense systems). The pilots explain that the higher they fly, the more likely they will be targeted by enemy surface-to-air missiles.

“The Hind’s specification manual indicates that we should not not fly under 20 metres. But we can get detected by portable radars if we go up higher than 10 metres. So, I usually fly only 5 metres above the ground,” says Mikhail.

Like other Ukrainian soldiers, the pilots have high hopes that better-quality Western arms will help counterbalance Russia’s superiority in numbers. But they are also keenly aware that the promised armoured vehicles will not arrive in sufficient numbers on Ukraine’s battlefield for several months.

That will be too late to help fend off Russia’s winter offensive.

In the meantime, Ukrainian forces are turning to what they call “trophies” – Russian armoured vehicles that have been seized and repurposed after being abandoned by their crews. In a secret location outside Kharkiv, we visited a discreet military workshop where mechanics work around the clock to put them back into working order.

A BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicle with broken tracks lies rusting in a corner. It is used as a reserve for spare parts; mechanics tell us it has already helped breathe new life into two similar models. Several Russian tanks are packed into a small courtyard, the letter “Z” still visible on their armour.

With more than 500 of its tanks captured since the beginning of the invasion, Russia has ironically become the first foreign nation to provide Kyiv with tanks. But Ukraine’s hopes for reconquering its occupied territories remain pinned on a long-awaited future arsenal of Western-supplied weapons.