SLOVIANSK, Ukraine (news agencies) — One Ukrainian brigade had defended the same block of industrial buildings for months without a break. Another had been in Avdiivka for nearly the entire two years of the war, bone-tired but with no replacements to relieve them.
Ammunition was low, and the Russians conducted dozens of airstrikes every day, using “glide bombs” to obliterate even fortified positions.
Russian soldiers came in waves: First lightly armed grunts, to force the Ukrainian defenders to spend precious bullets, followed by well-trained soldiers. Sometimes there were ambushes involving special forces or saboteurs who popped out of tunnels.
As morale plummeted, a battalion commander — in charge of hundreds of men — vanished under murky circumstances, according to law enforcement documents seen by media. One of the soldiers with him was found dead. The commander and another soldier with them haven’t been seen since.
Within a week, Ukraine had lost Avdiivka, the city in the Donetsk region that it had been defending since long before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Nearly surrounded and vastly outnumbered, the Ukrainians made the decision to withdraw and avoid the same kind of deadly siege soldiers experienced in the port city of Mariupol, where thousands of troops were taken captive or killed.
media interviewed 10 Ukrainian soldiers to reconstruct how dwindling ammunition, overwhelming Russian numbers and military mismanagement led to the worst Ukrainian defeat in a year. The same problems pose risks for Ukraine’s near future.
“We weren’t so much physically exhausted as psychologically, being chained to that place,” said Viktor Biliak, an infantryman with the 110th Brigade who had been in the area since March 2022. The men joked darkly that the only way out was to die, get wounded or go to prison.
His unit was on the southern outskirts of Avdiivka, in a well-fortified position called Zenith, which has been on the front lines since Russia first attacked in 2014. Normally the men would dig fortifications, but Biliak said there was constant Russian fire, and no energy or equipment beyond hand shovels.
Some of their trenches were hardly worthy of the name, just over knee-deep, according to images posted to various brigades’ social media accounts. That meant when soldiers retreated, nowhere was safe to withdraw.
A soldier named Oleh arrived in mid-October with the 47th Brigade. Ill-trained Russian infantry, wearing new uniforms and marching in rows, made easy targets, he said. The Ukrainian equipment worked, and ammunition supplies were at least enough to return fire.
The Russians were easy to take prisoner, and some had served for little more than a month, according to their documents.
“They don’t know where they’re going, and when they’re asked what their job was, they usually said that they were supposed to take shelter in a basement and wait for the next forces,” said Oleh, who like most Ukrainian soldiers asked to be identified by only his first name or nom de guerre.
But by the end of November, during a major Russian assault, the Ukrainians realized something had changed: The skies filled with glide bombs, enormous unguided Soviet-era weapons retrofitted with a navigational targeting system that obliterate everything around them , as well as motion-sensing explosive drones that could enter buildings and hunt personnel.
With ammunition stocks running low, Ukrainians fought back with whatever caliber of ammunition was left in the warehouses. For every shell they fired, the Russians fired eight or nine, the men said.
“When you have different types of shells, they have different trajectories, and you have to calculate where they will fly, where they will hit. This is a kind of chaos,” Oleh said. “And the longer it went, the more we got this stew of shells for all kinds of weapons.”
Among the Ukrainian soldiers, the idea of retreat took seed. There were no reinforcements, no more ammunition and no changes in their orders.
Hundreds of Ukrainian forces withdrew to Avdiivka’s coke plant after repeated Russian onslaughts last fall.
Its 10-kilometer (6-mile) perimeter enclosed a sprawling warren of buildings, staircases, chimneys, railroad tracks and aboveground pipelines. The roughly rectangular Soviet-era property was surrounded by open fields on three sides and a neighborhood of weekend cottages on the fourth.
In other words, a near-perfect defensive position.
They tried not to think of the infamous last stand at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, one of the coke plant’s major customers before the war, and the place where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers died or were taken captive by Russia.
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