His unit decimated by Ukrainian fire, the last surviving soldier in a Russian assault took cover in a shallow crater while Ukrainians shouted at him to surrender. As he lifted two grenades in the air, a Ukrainian drone swept in from above and exploded.
Soon, the smoke cleared, a surveillance drone overhead showed, revealing the Russian soldier’s corpse. That day’s attack, just north of the destroyed city of Avdiivka, was repelled. But the Ukrainians were under no illusions: There would be many more.
“They come in waves,” said Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, the deputy battalion commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “And they do not stop.”
As the war enters its third year, Ukrainians find themselves outmanned and outgunned. After dominating the fighting in the first year and battling mostly to a standstill in the second, they have relinquished the momentum to Russia. Now they are digging in and fighting to hold on.
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Kyiv recently announced the allocation of nearly $500 million to build fortifications along its border with Russia and to create a deeper defensive line in the eastern Donbas region that can serve as fallback positions should the Russians achieve a major breakthrough.
But their attacks in Avdiivka and elsewhere along the front serve a larger goal: to seize the advantage at a time American military support to Ukraine has ceased, and to overwhelm the Ukrainians with sheer mass.
Last month, journalists from The New York Times were able to watch several recent battles with commanders and drone operators around Avdiivka and another ruined city, Vuhledar — two key hot spots on the eastern front.
Since Russia began renewed offensive operations in October, it has lost 365 main battle tanks and some 700 armored vehicles, “but only achieved minor territorial gains,” the British military intelligence agency said last Monday.
As cannon fire thundered above ground last week in Avdiivka, more than 150 Russians crept through a narrow pipe underground to an important Ukrainian fortified position in a recreational facility called “The Tsar’s Hut.”
At a campaign event on Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin, who is running for re-election, appeared to cite the operation as evidence of success on the battlefield, saying Russian soldiers “seized 19 houses and are holding them.”
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