Near Avdiivka, Ukraine
CNN
—
Straddling the frontlines, the small town of Avdiivka has become the epicenter of the war in Ukraine. Still in Ukrainian hands – just – it’s enclosed on three sides by Russian troops and cannons.
Pounded by the Russians, the town itself is unrecognizable.
Concrete carcasses mark what were once the town’s tallest buildings, seemingly floating amid small hills of rubble. The cross atop the town’s church, bent double by an explosion, points accusatorially at the Russian lines.
Amid the ruins, Russian and Ukrainian troops clash, preyed upon by drones and the occasional tank. Casualties are heavy on both sides but especially among the Russian attackers, who have thrown wave after human wave against the entrenched defenders.
“Meat assaults” is how one Ukrainian sniper, “Bess,” described these attacks to CNN. His callsign means demon in Ukrainian and the scene he recounts is hellish. The dead soldiers, “just lie there frozen,” the Omega Special Forces Group officer said from a house several miles behind the frontline in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
“Nobody evacuates them, nobody takes them away,” he said. “It feels like people don’t have a specific task, they just go and die.”
“Teren,” the commander of a Ukrainian drone reconnaissance unit in the town, said that even “if we can kill 40 to 70 servicemen with drones in a day, the next day they renew their forces and continue to attack.”
In 18 months of fighting around the town, he said, his pilots from the 110th Mechanized Brigade have killed at least 1,500 Russians. Still, they keep coming.
Joseph Ataman/CNN
Reliant on the Soviet kit they have, not the Western arms they crave, Ukrainian troops have learned to be more creative with their weapons in battle.
Ukrainian casualties are a closely guarded secret, but the battle has turned into an attritional slog, matching seemingly chaotic Russian attacks against the limited, but determined, resources and manpower of the Ukrainians.
In a surprise trip to Avdiivka in late December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the battle for the town as an “onslaught,” adding that the battle could in many ways “determine the overall course of the war.”
Ukraine’s leaders appear conscious of the criticisms around the defense – but subsequent fall – of Bakhmut in 2023, acknowledging the obvious tensions between holding on to locations without huge strategic significance and protecting the lives of soldiers.
“Every piece of our land is precious to us,” army chief Valery Zaluzhny said, but in Avdiivka, “there is no need to do anything remotely reminiscent of a show.”
But those lives depend on weapons and arms.
On an ice-bitten January morning, the mercury idling at -22 degrees Celsius (-7.6 Fahrenheit), CNN watched another team of Omega special forces troops race to their firing position around Avdiivka.
Rushing to set up their Soviet-era rocket launcher – bolted on to the back of an American pick-up – one of the men flicked the switch to launch a salvo.
Clicks – and curses –…
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