Hunted by drones, stalked by snipers and surrounded by minefields, soldiers fighting in Ukraine can’t risk even a small lapse in concentration.
That is why Col. Dmytro Palisa, commander of Ukraine’s 33rd Mechanized Brigade, instructs his soldiers to ignore speculation about a possible cease-fire.
“They start relaxing, they start overthinking, putting on rose-colored glasses, thinking that tomorrow will be easier. No,” he said in an interview at a command post on the eastern front. “We shoot until we are given the order to stop.”
As diplomats and European leaders thousands of miles away talk about a possible truce and how to safeguard it, Russia and Ukraine are engaged in bloody battles as intense as any of the war. The furious fighting, tearing across the Ukrainian front, is, in part, a late play for land and leverage in the talks, which the Trump administration says are making progress.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine says he believes Russia intends to launch new offensive operations “to put maximum pressure on Ukraine and then issue ultimatums from a position of strength,” as he put it last week.
Kyiv wants to deny Moscow that advantage.
Ukrainian forces remain outnumbered and outgunned — much as they have been since Russia launched its full-scale invasion more than three years ago. But they have largely halted Russian advances so far this year and are now engaged in localized counterattacks to claw back land.
Military analysts tracking battlefield developments confirm that the already glacial pace of Russian advances has largely stalled, even though Moscow’s forces continue to launch assaults along key parts of the front.
‘This war keeps changing the rules’
In interviews from the front line, Ukrainian soldiers and military leaders credited several factors for their resilience: New defensive strategies that more completely integrate drones, rapid adaptation to shifting threats, signs of Russian fatigue and improving morale under a new commander of ground forces, Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi.
“This war keeps changing the rules,” Colonel Palisa said. “That means we constantly have to adapt. Every night, before going to sleep, we already have to plan an alternative strategy for tomorrow.”
The Ukrainian retreat from most of the Kursk region of Russia earlier this month promises to again reshape the contours of the fight. Tens of thousands of soldiers dedicated to Moscow’s seven-month campaign to retake Russian land there can now be redeployed.
Col. Oleh Hrudzevych, 35, deputy commander of Ukraine’s 43rd Mechanized Brigade, said that the Kursk campaign “really pulled a significant part of enemy forces” and firepower from other parts of the front.
For instance, he said, while battles raged in Kursk, there was a 50 percent drop in the number of aerial bombs — one of Russia’s most effective weapons — in the Kupiansk area on the northern edge of the eastern front, where he is deployed.
Russian forces, he said, have been limited to “mosquito bite” tactics — small assaults that generally end in failure. But he expects that Russia may now redirect some forces to his area.
Capt. Yurii Fedorenko, commander of the 429th Achilles Unmanned Systems Regiment, said that the main task along the northeastern part of the front was keeping Russian troops from expanding their small foothold on the Oskil River.
Unable to erect pontoon bridges because of the threat posed by Ukrainian drones and artillery, the Russian forces have been using small boats to ferry men and equipment across the river under the cover of bad weather.
Captain Fedorenko said that for nearly a month, Russian units had failed to expand their position and continued to pay a heavy price to hold the land they have.
“We conducted a drone flyover of a small tree line about 200 meters long and quite narrow,” he said. “In that one tree line alone, we counted around 190 enemy bodies.”
Drone footage shared by the Ukrainian military with The Times generally supports his account. But it was not possible to independently verify the precise number of Russian soldiers who were killed or injured, or to measure the Ukrainian losses over that same period of time.
Hundreds of miles away, on the banks of the Dnipro River on the southern front, the Russian forces are searching for weak points in the Ukrainian line.
Two months ago, Russian troops launched a series of cross-river assaults — using some 15 to 20 boats in each attack, soldiers said — but the effort failed.
Now, the Russian military is launching probing attacks, trying to press north along the river toward the city of Zaporizhzhia, which is under Ukrainian control. President Vladimir V. Putin and other Russian officials have said publicly that their goal is to fully control the city and the surrounding area.
But their plans to try to encircle Zaporizhzhia were put on hold when Russian troops were redirected to Kursk, said Sr. Sgt. Andrii Klymenko, who has been fighting in the area for many months. His claim was supported by analysts who track Russian military movements.
“Now they’re simply going to revive it,” he said.
A ‘Mad Max’ aesthetic
Much of the most ferocious fighting continues to be concentrated in the rolling hills and ruined industrial cities of the eastern Donbas region, where after three years Russia has failed to seize control of two coveted targets: the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Colonel Palisa oversees a stretch of Ukrainian defenses south of Pokrovsk, a city in Donetsk, where Russian offensive operations made the bulk of their progress last year.
But Colonel Palisa said that aggressive drone warfare and smart defensive tactics had, for now, blunted Russia’s advantages. “The enemy hasn’t advanced a single meter in this sector for the past three to four weeks,” he noted. “As of now, we can say that we have stabilized the situation.”
At the same time, he added, his forces have had to adjust to a growing threat: the proliferation of Russian drones tethered to ultrathin fiber-optic cables that render them immune to electronic jamming.
“When they didn’t have fiber optics, we could still move around,” he said. After the fiber-optic drones appeared, he said, his brigade lost some 10 vehicles in just seven days.
“That made me realize that we had to completely change our approach and abandon vehicles altogether,” he said.
Like their Russian counterparts, Ukrainian soldiers now frequently use quad bikes and buggies or move on foot. They often wear cloaks that mask a soldier’s heat signature from drones outfitted with thermal vision cameras.
Netting has been strung over critical supply roads, a simple but effective defense that Colonel Palisa said had cut successful enemy attacks by more than half. And soldiers now routinely carry shotguns along with their assault rifles.
It makes for a sort of ‘Mad Max’ aesthetic as tanks and armored vehicles mix with civilian cars, motorcycles and quad bikes retrofitted with cages and jammers.
The low-tech adaptations, along with a broad restructuring of the military, are strategies that Kyiv hopes will allow Ukraine to continue fighting — even as its primary military ally, the United States, pulls back support, increasingly repeats the Kremlin’s narrative and pressures Ukraine into cease-fire negotiations.
On the front line, any talk about a lasting peace still feels like a dangerous fantasy.
Soldiers say they believe that the fighting will continue until the price of war becomes too high for the Kremlin to bear and Ukraine is made strong enough to deter any future aggression.
“We are fighting for the right to live,” Captain Fedorenko said. “Americans must understand that this is not about pressuring Ukraine into some abstract peace. Such a peace is not possible — because Ukraine did not start this war.”
Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from eastern and southern Ukraine.
