What I learnt touring Ukraine’s 400-mile front line

Lieutenant Mykola Stryhunov didn’t see much of Britain when he came for Nato training last summer. He spent the whole time at the Ministry of Defence exercise area on Salisbury Plain, where all he got was “a glimpse of Stonehenge from the bus”.

He wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing anyway. He and his comrades in the 80th Air Assault Brigade were preparing for their role in Ukraine’s counter-offensive, with Salisbury’s chalk downs standing in for the Donbas.

They stayed at Camp Knook, set up to train British troops for D-Day, and practised many of the same old-school infantry techniques. There was close quarters combat, how to clear trenches – and how to step into the breach if comrades were killed.

“The training was good, moving away from the old Soviet ways, and teaching soldiers to think for themselves,” said Lt Stryhunov. “They emphasised that each person has to learn to be a leader, in case his comrades die.”

For Lt Stryhunov’s unit, that was a possibility they couldn’t ignore. Once back in Ukraine, their task was to take Klishchiivka, a village outside Bakhmut, the mining town over which Kyiv and Moscow have battled for more than a year. If Bakhmut seems like a big fight for a modest prize, Klishchiivka was even more so. The tiny farming hamlet was only home to 500 people anyway, and was already reduced to rubble. Yet with Russian troops well dug-in, it took two months to capture.

“There was a lot of Russians there – Wagner guys, Chechens, all sorts,” said Lt Stryhunov. “They fought very hard.”

Finally, on Sept 17 – Day 571 of the war – the 80th unfurled their flag in Klishchiivka. While it may not have made big headlines globally, within Ukraine it was a different matter. President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the troops in his nightly address, saying that “step by step”, Ukraine was winning. And in local media, military pundits discussed Klishchiivka’s capture keenly, like football fans dissecting their team’s victory in a key qualifier.

It may, however, be some time before the next big match. Autumn has arrived in the Donbas, bringing rain and then frost. Leaves are falling from the trees, removing what little cover remains. Soon much of the battlefield will be a quagmire. The summer fighting season is ending – and with it, perhaps, any hope of Ukrainian forces making a decisive breakthrough this year.

That was the dream scenario at the start of the counter-offensive in June, when Western backers thought that a combination of Ukraine’s warrior spirit and Nato equipment might quickly overwhelm Russia’s defences. Kyiv’s battle-hardened generals, though, always warned it might take far longer – an assessment that Lt Stryhunov agrees with.

“We are going to win,” he says. “But I think it is going to take years, not months.”

The question is whether Ukraine’s supporters in the West can wait that long. In the United States, there is the looming prospect of Donald Trump being re-elected next year, who has threatened to slash military aid. In Europe, the recent election of pro-Russian populist Robert Fico as Slovakia’s prime minister has exposed cracks in EU support. And with the recent horrors in Israel threatening to destabilise the Middle East, other international crises are jostling for attention.

So how has it gone so far? The Telegraph recently embarked on a three-week tour of the counter-offensive’s 400-mile front-line, from Bakhmut in the north-east to Zaporizhzhia and the Black Sea port of Kherson in the south, meeting everyone from spearhead infantry squads to tank and artillery units. Joining the dots is not easy. In the thick of war, most soldiers care only about the patch of land right in front of them, while those who do know the bigger picture often decline to talk.

It is fair to say, though, that not even the most upbeat commander would describe their progress as spectacular. The counter-offensive’s central thrust was from Orikhiv, near Zaporizhzhia, where troops aimed to push 50 miles south to Russian-held Melitopol on the Azov Sea, cutting Russia’s land bridge to occupied Crimea.

But the operation’s first weeks faltered, as German Leopard tanks and American Bradley Fighting Vehicles got bogged down in the formidable hazards of Russia’s Surovikin Line. Named after the Russian general who devised it, it is an 80 mile stretch of landmines and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank traps running south of Orikhiv.

Five months on, parts of the Surovikin Line have finally been breached, but progress remains slow. According to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based military think tank, Ukrainian forces are currently just south of Robotyne, barely 10 miles from their starting point near Orikhiv. Losses have been high, even though commanders prioritise soldiers’ lives over quick-hit results. Up and down the front-line, the counter-offensive has reclaimed not much more than 250 square miles of turf.

Yet given how hard it can be just to take just one square foot of territory, those gains are not insignificant. Take the capture of Klishchiivka, where even getting within striking range of the Russians was hard.

“Geographically, it was very hard to operate there as the Russians could see you up from the hills, and every bit of the village was covered by their artillery fire,” said Lt Stryhunov’s comrade Mel.

“We would get dropped by vehicle near the village, and then walk 2.5km [1.5 miles] while carrying 40 kilos [88lbs] of kit each. We’d be exhausted even by the time we started the fight with the enemy. Then if someone was wounded, we’d have to evacuate them all the way back again.”

Watching headcam footage of Lt Stryhunov’s troops advancing through Klishchiivka gives a glimpse of the perils. The soldiers plan their moves not street by street, but house by house, aware that every step could be their last due to landmines or sniper fire. Often, they can’t even see their enemies, relying on eyes-in-the-sky from the 80th’s drone operators.

“Two f—-ts 30 metres in front of you,” barks a commander over the soldiers’ radio at one point, using the standard front-line pejorative for Russian troops. “If you can, go there and kill them.” A 10 minute gun battle ensues, during which hundreds of shots are exchanged and the Russians eventually lie dead.

The subsequent capture of Klishchiivka alarmed the Kremlin, who knew it could help provide a bridgehead for nearby Bakhmut. They tried desperately to take it back, launching hastily-planned “meat storms” – blind charges involving hundreds of troops. According to the ISW, that led to a near-mutiny by Russia’s 1442nd Regiment, who posted videos online complaining about their treatment.

It is small victories like these that maintain Ukraine’s morale – even if the effort required is phenomenal. Oleksandr, a soldier from the 3rd Assault Brigade, which was also fighting in the area, says that every day offered “1001 ways to die”.

“Once a shell exploded just two metres in front of me, and I only survived because the night vision fixture on my helmet took the shrapnel,” he said. “A few centimetres’ difference, and it would have been in my head.”

What such hard combat has not done is give Ukraine many telegenic images to show Western leaders, who have to sell their military support for Kyiv to voters. Front-line villages such as Klishchiivka are usually long-deserted, so all the soldiers usually “liberate” is the odd stray dog or cat, who they adopt as pets. Even flag-planting photo-ops are limited because of the risk of Russian drones.

Justin Crump, a military analyst at the intelligence consultancy Sibylline, believes Ukrainian progress is actually “fairly substantial”. But he adds: “On the map it doesn’t look huge, as the Russian strategy is just to hang in as much as possible to prevent Ukraine making any spectacular-looking gains. What you don’t see is how much it’s costing the Russians to hold them back.”

Like two boxers, both sides are seeking an opening on the front line where they can deliver a decisive blow, keeping their opponents guessing as to where it might come from. Ukraine’s threatened haymaker toward Melitopol, for example, might be a feign for a sudden jab around Kherson. Russian forces, meanwhile, have recently assaulted the town of Avdiivka, 50 miles south of Bakhmut, while also attacking around Kupiansk, 100 miles north of Bakhmut.

Wherever the fighting, though, Ukraine still feels it is battling with one hand tied behind its back.

It is not so much about whether they have fancy Western armour. According to Oleksandr, who drives a Soviet-era T64 tank in Ukraine’s 93rd Brigade near Bakhmut: “A tank is more about your skills, not how modern it is.” Rather, it is about the lack of fighter jets, which leaves Ukrainian forces with no air cover as they advance and imbalances in manpower.

“Each Ukrainian soldier is precious” said Miron, an artillery commander. “If we get one wounded, we stop and do evacuations, whereas the Russians can lose half a battalion in an assault and just replace them with another that will lose the same amount – they just treat them as bodies.”

Troops also complain that if the West had armed Ukraine quicker, Russia would never have had the months it needed to build the Surovikin Line in the first place. They bristle, too, at Western carping over the pace of the counter-offensive, saying that many foreign officials have no idea how tough it is. An oft-cited story is of how a German Nato trainer advised a Ukrainian tank commander to simply “drive around” Surovikin’s minefields – apparently thinking they were laid thinly enough for that to be possible.

“The West has no real memory of a war like this,” said Vadim, a soldier with Ukraine’s 128th Territorial Defence Brigade, tasked recently with holding the village of Staromayorske, midway between Bakhmut and Zaporizhia. “It’s as tough as the First World War.”

“Anybody who thinks they can fight better than us is welcome to come here and try themselves,” added Miron. “Our enemy is more powerful than us in every way, except spirit.”

Even the most dedicated Ukrainians, though, will find it hard to fight in the incoming winter. It is not just about vehicles getting bogged down in mud and snow. At minus 20C, neither soldiers nor kit function well, according to Daniel Ridley, an ex-British soldier who served four years with the Ukrainian army, and who now runs the Trident Defence Initiative, a private training programme for Ukrainian soldiers.

“At that temperature, nobody wants to even move out of their trench, never mind carry out an assault,” he said. “Much of the electronic kit that modern armies rely on a lot also stops working – at minus 20C, drone batteries will die in a minute and thermal vision won’t work.

“The trenches also end up like ice rinks – I remember having to crawl through them sometimes, because it was too slippy to stand up. If it’s a really cold winter, nothing big is likely to happen from either side.”

Then again, not all the key fighting is on land. Alina Frolova, deputy chair of Kyiv’s Centre for Defence Strategies, points out that the damage being done to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet by Ukrainian sea drones and British Storm Shadow missiles is threatening Russia’s wider ability to protect Crimea. “It’s slow going on the ground offensive because the Russians are well-prepared there, but there will be a breakthrough sooner or later,” she says. “It’s just hard to say when.”

In all likelihood, though, that “breakthrough” may now have to wait until at least next spring, by which time the war will have been waged for two full years. On the first anniversary of the invasion last February, President Zelensky was asked how he’d feel if the fighting was still raging a year later. “That’s a drama that I don’t even want to think about,” he replied, saying he feared Ukrainians’ morale would sap.

It is a drama that now looks like becoming reality. And it would hardly be surprising if morale was to drop. Already, an estimated 70,000 Ukrainian troops have died – roughly tenfold the total Western combat deaths in the 20-year War on Terror. Around 120,000 Russians have perished too, yet Putin shows no sign of letting up.

But if the soldiers The Telegraph met in recent weeks are anything to go by, the will to fight is still there. It is, perhaps though, less a question of morale, and more of having no other choice.

“Sure, people are tired,” said Maxim Artemchuk, a soldier training at the Trident Defence Initiative. “But if we start to negotiate, our enemy will realise we are weakening.”

“War has casualties, of course, but the most important thing for humans is freedom,” said Vadim as he cuddled a “liberated” kitten from Staromayorske. “Without that, there is no point in living anyway.”