By attacking Vuhledar, Russia heralds new push to seize southeastern Ukraine

They pushed hard for the past four days, but we stopped them, said Dykanka, a Ukrainian fighter whom The Washington Post agreed to identify only by his call sign because of security risks.

Amid artillery bursts that shook snow from bare tree branches, Dykanka, 43, made a break along a tank track that cut through a forest outside Vuhledar. An exposed cache of ready-made 155 mm howitzer shells nearby was marked as US Army artillery.

Vuhledar is at a critical juncture on the battlefield near where the eastern front meets Russia’s line of control to the south, which in turn forms Putin’s coveted land bridge to Crimea from mainland Russia. It is located near a railway line connecting Crimea, a hub for Russian troops and supplies, and the Donbass region.

Dykanka and other fighters said Russian troops are making almost daily efforts to crush Ukrainian forces defending Vuhledar and breach Ukrainian lines running northwest and southeast of the city.

So far, the Ukrainians have held them off, fighting back with artillery, much of it donated by Western allies, machine gun fire and improvised bombs dropped by drones.

But as the first anniversary of the invasion approaches and Moscow deploys tens of thousands of reinforcements to the front, military analysts and soldiers on the ground say the momentum Ukraine seized last fall in two major counter-offensives has stalled.

And near Vuhledar, at least, the initiative has gradually shifted back to the enemy, they say.

You could feel the tension in the last week, said Andrii, a machine gunner who had just come off a five-day stand outside Vuhledar where he slept in a log-covered trench while not keeping mounted Browning trained on Russian positions. .

We are more on the defensive, Andrii said. We don’t make any profit from here.

Further north near Bakhmut, a months-long offensive led by Wagner mercenaries helped Russia capture the salt mining town of Soledar, and Kremlin forces are now poised to take control of the town. Near Vuhledar, they have not gained any significant ground since November, when Russian forces recaptured Pavlivka, a village just to the south that has changed hands more than once since the invasion nearly a year ago.

But in a recent interview with The Post, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, said there are now more than 320,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, more than double, according to Moscow’s estimate, the initial invasion force of 150,000. Ukraine, in turn, is in dire need of more troops and weapons.

Putin has insisted Russia will achieve its war aims, including in a speech last week celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany at the Battle of Stalingrad. And its newly installed commander, General Valery Gerasimov, said last month that Russia’s position in Ukraine had stabilized enough for forces to focus on completing the liberation of the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Donetsk is one of four oblasts in eastern and southern Ukraine, along with Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, that Putin has illegally claimed to have annexed, even though he does not control them militarily or politically.

Ukrainian military officials and outside military experts, however, say Russia may not be able to exploit its size advantage.

Troop shortages, command failures and, more recently, dwindling ammunition prevented the invaders from capitalizing on costly early-war captures of towns such as Lysychansk in the Luhansk region.

At first, they had the equipment, but they didn’t have the men. Now they have the men, but they don’t have the equipment, said Konrad Muzyka, a defense analyst and director of Poland-based Rochan Consulting.

Western weapons have further disrupted Russia’s usual military doctrine of mass superiority of troops and weapons to pierce the enemy line and then advance deeper into enemy territory, Muzyka said. The U.S.-supplied HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), which was deployed in Ukraine last summer and uses GPS-guided munitions, has proven particularly effective in targeting this kind of concentration of forces.

Muzyka and other military experts say that a victory over Vuhledar and its environs, by itself, would have limited military value for Moscow, an observation they have made similarly about Bakhmut. If Vuhledar falls, it will be a small tactical victory at best, he said.

But every city captured, big or small, represents a step toward Putin’s goals. And in Moscow, where military officials have faced harsh criticism from war hawks over its military defeats so far, there is growing pressure for victories, even symbolic ones.

Many Ukrainians fighting here believe that this is exactly what Russia is after.

Vuhledar is not a strategic priority from a military point of view, but it is a strategic priority for Russian propaganda, said Oleksii Dmytrashkivskyi, a military spokesman for the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The forces fighting for Vuhledar, analysts say, are mostly marine infantry troops from Russia’s 155th Pacific Fleet Brigade, a force similar to the United States Marines. Their presence creates a rematch between Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which has deployed forces to the region. The 72nd faced and heavily defeated the 155th in the fighting around Kyiv in the early weeks of the invasion.

Dykanka, the soldier resting in the forest, said his side was enjoying a second encounter. There are already a lot of dead Russians over there, he said. They were just waiting to bring fresh meat.

While the skirmishes here are numerous and aggressive, including 13 separate attempts to penetrate Ukrainian defenses on Wednesday night, they do not indicate that a major force is being assembled, at least not yet.

Intelligence estimates suggest that Russia has about six tactical battalion groups in rotation around Vuhledar, about half or less than a major operation would require, according to Muzyka.

Instead, Russia may be trying to force Ukraine to divert troops from Bakhmut and other hot zones to Vuhledar. Or they may be testing Ukraine’s strength at different points along the 140-mile frontline that runs through Donetsk and Luhansk. Or possibly implementing a tactical diversion for an attack planned for another area entirely. Or a combination of all of these.

It’s hard to know where we are in the movie, said Dara Massicot, a policy researcher at the Rand Corp., when asked about the prospects for another major attack. Clearly, there was a directive to make progress. But I see no signs that the force is ready.

He orders the forces to do more than they can do, Massicot added, referring to Putin. This could be a preview of how they handle a new attack.

For civilians in the region, Russia’s motives are less important than the overwhelming disruption the fighting has imposed on their daily lives. Thousands of residents have fled the surrounding villages, leaving abandoned houses to shelter soldiers and dogs roaming the snow for food. Many of those who remain are elderly. The small town has been devastated by the fighting, with damaged buildings on nearly every block, according to a Ukrainian platoon leader who was in Vuhledar this week.

Even humanitarian volunteers have stopped coming in recent days, according to Valentina Kalic, 70, who was walking in the village of Katerinivka. The house, which a passing Ukrainian fighter said was a tank fired from the nearest Russian position, has been hit repeatedly.

It’s scarier at night, Kalic said, setting down the bucket of red winterberries she uses to make blood pressure medicine. We just sit in the hallway and pray he doesn’t hit us again.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces say they continue to hold out around Vuhledar.

In a disused government building that serves as a backup base several miles to the north, a platoon rested on a recent night after a series of deployments, reviewing video of its attacks like a sports team watching replays.

That was too far, a soldier said as drone footage on a widescreen television showed a shell hit behind a tree line. The units’ reconnaissance drones had directed the targeting to a Russian hideout. Missed and second shot. It was very close.

Then there was a third. Boom, he yelled as a plume of smoke, dust and military equipment exploded onto the screen and the room erupted in cheers.