His pilots communicate from the battlefield using Google Hangouts as the Ukrainian army fights off an enemy advancing on vital territory during a 37C heatwave
Maxim Tucker
July 17, 2024
The Times
Amid computer screens crawling with activity, the officer stands and watches the enemy. One monitor shows a group of Russian soldiers creeping through the undergrowth towards the suburbs of Toretsk. On another, a drone feed is fixated on the last house in the area with an intact roof. “Right now, four Russians are hiding in that house. We are trying to destroy them,” says Major Artem Osadchyi, the commander of the UAV battalion of Ukraine’s 32nd Mechanised Brigade. A former artilleryman, the changing nature of the battlefield has forced the 28-year-old to alter his role.
His brigade’s infantrymen are only a hundred metres away fighting house to house to clear the Russian troops who have advanced suddenly into this area, in an effort to flank strong Ukrainian positions on the heights and along the canals of the town of Chasiv Yar. “This is Toretsk. They’ve blocked them there and our pilots are now conducting fire support. We are trying to get them out,” the major explains.
The Russian assault began in earnest here on June 18, when President Putin’s troops streamed into a string of Ukrainian-held settlements just outside Toretsk. Taken together with the town itself, this area had a pre-war population of just under 70,000. The town is the new focus of the Russian offensive, which has seemingly been thwarted in the Kharkiv region to the north.
The Russians are still advancing on the outskirts despite a summer heatwave, where temperatures exceed 37C. The sun punishes soldiers on both sides, who are out in the heat with full packs, body armour, rifles and ammunition. “There are too many of them. They’re coming from the other direction too. They have very big ambitions right now,” says Osadchyi. “Their goal is to take this city. At any cost,” he says.
The men and women of the 32nd Brigade were brought into the Toretsk sector on July 1 to hold the line and stop the Russians.
In the blacked-out room, the major presides over a bank of screens, maps, codes and tablets manned by two officers shouting orders to operators in the field closer to the front. Osadchyi orders his men to “open up, open up the stream now” and get the first-person view (FPV) drones out. The building catches fire after four FPV suicide drones strike it. The flames send three Russians soldiers running out into the street, down the road to cover in a new, larger building as the drones pursue them.
The major’s pilots are logged in from the battlefield via a Google Hangout. WhatsApp messages ping back and forth in chats with maps and screenshots highlighting Russian positions. Many of his pilots are women, the major points out. The Russians have female troops too.
This week two Russian servicewomen were captured by Ukrainian forces when they approached their lines in civilian clothes, claiming they were fleeing the fighting. “Their goal was to understand where our positions are. We’re fighting Storm Z and Storm V units, and some of them are convicts from women’s prisons,” the major says.
The Russians were able to advance here because Ukrainian troops are short of manpower. A neighbouring brigade, the 24th, was pulled in to defend Chasiv Yar, leaving Toretsk sparsely protected last month. The 32nd’s deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dubey, is deeply frustrated by what he believes is a government failure to win the information war over recruitment. “Society has the impression that everyone who is called to serve dies. Every single one of us. So of course people are afraid, but it’s not true,” says Dubey, arguing more should be done to explain why mobilisation is necessary. “For example, let’s take one mechanised company of 100 people. Some five to seven people can die in one campaign. About 30 wounded, many of whom recover. In addition, people resign amidst illness, give birth to three children, go to take care of their mother or child, and in a year, out of these 100 people, for example, less than 50 remain in the company. And those guys need a rest.”
The Russians are also being helped in Toretsk by the slow delivery of western arms to the sector, he adds. For Toretsk residents such as Svitlana Feshchenko, Putin’s mission to “protect” Russian speakers like her in the Donbas has taken everything she has, she says. “We practically don’t have a house, there is no roof after a glide bomb hit our friends’ house. Our people are left without a home, without their entire life, without a way of life. They destroyed everything completely. They took everything from us.”
Ten years ago Feshchenko sent her daughter, Diana, to Kharkiv, believing she would be safer there, only to see her new home in Kharkiv attacked eight years later. Having evacuated Toretsk at the start of the invasion, she returned last month to help elderly relatives leave. “It was very scary. There were explosions left and right in front of us, drones, on the way out on the highway, drones were flying bombs past us left and right, we were lucky to survive,” she says. “We just can’t feel anything any more. We are empty in our souls. Only anger, aggression. Devastation.”
For the civilians that have lost loved ones, that sense of loss is harder still. The most difficult part of Dubey’s job is attempting to comfort mothers who have lost a son, he says, even after the news is broken to them by a recruitment centre with a trained psychologist.
He says that the hardest moments are when his men are missing in no man’s land, and the mothers demand “give me my son to take back home”. It has been weeks since he saw his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter. “Crying, screaming, tears, cursing. You just have to try to take this calmly, say that everything is being done to ensure that if we know for sure that he is dead, we do everything we can to bring his body back.”
For the soldiers of the 32nd Brigade, at least they have a route to channel their anger. “When we drop bombs on them, they radio in, yelling that they’re out there wounded,” says Osadchyi. “We hear their intercepts. They’re told to stay there till the end. To the last man, no retreat. And then they die.”
By the time the day is done, a platoon of 15 Russians, each trying to advance in small groups of three or four, have been wiped out. “That’s their tactic now, to advance in small groups, find cover and mass there until they can attack our trenches,” the major says. “We have to be very careful we don’t miss them, because we can’t see everything. But if we do, we hope our infantry will finish the job.”
Maxim Tucker was Kyiv correspondent for The Times between 2014 and 2017 and is now an editor on the foreign desk. He has returned to report from the frontlines of the war in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. He advises on grantmaking in the former Soviet countries for the Open Society Foundations and prior to that was Amnesty International’s Campaigner on Ukraine and the South Caucasus. He has also written for The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek and Politico.