The men of the 5th Separate Assault Brigade, under the command of Major Ruslan Habinet, are determined to defend the key strategic town of Chasiv Yar from Russian invaders. The sacrifice needed to do so cannot be comprehended by those at home reading the news, he says
Maxim Tucker
May 27, 2024
The Times
The Russian armoured column roaring towards his lines would be his men’s greatest challenge yet, the Ukrainian commander thought. Major Ruslan Habinet’s 5th Separate Assault Brigade had already seen off President Putin’s last big push to seize the town of Chasiv Yar, denying him a symbolic win before Russia’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations. But it had come at great cost. After more than two years’ fighting, his brigade had lost 40 per cent of its original strength.
As Ukrainian reserves and newly released supplies of western artillery shells were being rushed north to counter Moscow’s new offensive in the Kharkiv region, on May 18 the brigade’s drones detected 20 Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and troop transports bearing down on their positions. “Most of that new US aid is going to the Kharkiv direction,” said the major, 30, who commands the brigade’s tanks and artillery. The boom and crash of incoming artillery rounds spoke to the Russian advance at his command centre in the town of Kostyantynivka, seven miles from the front.
Starved of the ammunition and decimated by casualties, sickness and desertion, the Fifth Brigade is a shadow of the fighting force that had once helped hold the neighbouring city of Bakhmut. “The enemy sees the shortage, understands it and takes advantage of it, stretching our reserves, dispersing our firepower. I want to be honest with you: often we simply do not have the ammunition to stop them,” he said.
Falling back was not an option. Despite its larger size, the battle for Bakhmut, which is nestled in a bowl of lowland, had been of symbolic rather than strategic importance. By contrast, the fight for Chasiv Yar is key.
The Siversky-Donets canal forms a natural barrier facing east, backed by heights from which to fire down on to Russians advancing towards any of its three bridges. The road into it is flanked by forest where the Ukrainians can conceal their positions.
Should the town fall, the Ukrainians will have to defend Kostyantynivka, a critical road and rail junction, along mostly flat land. Ukrainians holding the line south of the brigade at the town of Toretsk would face encirclement, as Russian troops are already moving forward to their west, at the village of Ocheretyne. From Kostyantynivka, the Russians could sweep north to Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, the last significant Ukrainian-held cities in Donbas.
That makes the largely abandoned Chasiv Yar, which had a prewar population of 12,756, a vital waypoint for President Putin to complete his capture of the coveted Donbas region. And the Russian column, headed for a suburb on the town’s outskirts, was clearly a serious threat. The major held back until the vehicles were in range of all his weapons, then gave the command to expend more of his dwindling supply of shells. “We hit them with everything we have. Each time it’s so close to the edge of whether that is going to work or not. You just do it and then see how it goes,” said the major.
Neighbouring units, including elements of the Kraken special forces detachment, the 41st Mechanised Brigade and artillery brigades joined in too. “There is a lot of firepower working here. The scale of the war that is happening now in Ukraine, it is more serious than any ordinary citizen can possibly imagine reading the news,” the major said.
The Russians had sent the vehicles forward to disgorge their infantry as close as possible to the Ukrainian positions, the major said, and did not seem to care whether they returned or not. The Russian tactics here are to get into the outskirts of a settlement, cling on and push forward incrementally into neighbouring houses until, slowly but surely, the town is overrun.
The Ukrainians were not about to allow that to happen. One after another, 16 of the Russian vehicles ground to a halt, destroyed or damaged by a hail of artillery, suicide drones and anti-tank weapons fired by infantry.
Above them, surveillance drones provided a bird’s-eye view of the battle for their commanders. The remaining four Russian vehicles beat a hasty retreat but not before the column had inflicted more losses on the precious few infantry the commanders of the Fifth Brigade have available to them.
Senior Lieutenant Oleksiy Tarasenko, 28, is deputy commander of the brigade’s second infantry battalion, a position usually reserved for the rank of major. His hasty wartime promotion speaks of dire losses among an already small professional officer cadre frequently targeted by Russian drones and snipers.
The brigade started off as an elite volunteer unit but is now 90 per cent mobilised men, although after two years of war, several are now experienced enough to provide the brigade’s backbone of non-commissioned officers. Mobilised or not, all of his men were heroes, Tarasenko said. “It is not glorious like in the movies; this is our everyday work. When an officer hits a tank with a grenade launcher, or a soldier kills ten Russians with his rifle, this is just a routine act,” said the lieutenant.
An infantryman must sit in trenches for a week in abject conditions, under constant artillery fire, waiting for commanders to signal that an enemy assault group is approaching. “Then he comes out of his hiding place, kills several infantrymen with his assault rifle, repels the enemy assault with his comrade, and sits in the position several more days without water or food, because there is no way to get it to him,” the lieutenant said. “For me, heroism is not about how the person kills with his rifle but about the psychological determination to go on sleeping under the ground in those conditions.”
The brigade has sought to address its manpower problems by trialling new technology with some success. The semi-autonomous “Shablya” machinegun platform allows a soldier to operate it remotely from cover, apart from when it needs fresh ammunition or a change of batteries. “I saw a very successful use of a Shablya with a large-calibre Browning gun, when very accurate fire was carried out at more than 2,000 metres, and a group of infantry was wounded or killed when approaching our firing positions,” Tarasenko said. The guns were a good idea, but came with drawbacks. “Even if they have relatively minor problems — say a circuit board burns out or a tiny piece of shrapnel damages its mechanism, you cannot use them effectively for days or even weeks,” said Tarasenko. “No one sends us trained operators or engineers, only the robot, and we have to choose people to deal with it. Within five days, a person needs to deal with a robotic platform they have just seen for the first time in their life.”
Lieutenant Serhiy Kraynyak, a former farmer, now commands a platoon of the brigade’s robotised systems, and is enthusiastic about getting more. “It’s very good — like a big Game Boy. If we had this when we were defending Bakhmut it would have been ideal to place three or four in different sectors in high-rise buildings, operated from the basement, and control a sector completely,” Kraynyak said, patting his robot weapon. His platoon also uses remote-controlled robots to evacuate the wounded and relay food and ammunition, saving precious lives. Yet even with robots, his platoon is significantly under strength, having just nine operators from what should be a complement of 26.
Outnumbered and outgunned, the Fifth Brigade has to draw on all its ingenuity and audacity to outfight their enemy. “Getting our timing right is absolutely vital,” said Major Habinet, recalling a tank battle in February where two of his tanks, an antiquated T-64 and a T-80, had seen off six Russian armoured fighting vehicles and three superior tanks.
The Russian vehicles had arrived on the outskirts of the village of Ivanivkse and dismounted infantry were about to storm the brigade’s strongpoints in the village. It was a cloudy day, providing some cover from drones, so there was a chance that, with their electronic jamming systems switched on, his tanks could get in before the Russians adjusted the frequencies on their video feeds and spotted them from the air. “They were there for 10 to 15 minutes at the most. Already when they arrived in the village, they were attacked by FPV drones but the jamming systems were working well,” the major recalled.
Using their own drone reconnaissance, he guided his tanks left and right, directing accurate fire against the Russian vehicles. The two Ukrainian tank crews destroyed three enemy tanks, two fighting vehicles and the houses in which the disembarked infantry were hiding. Then the Ukrainian tanks left before the Russians could recalibrate their blinded drones. “The commander who is riding in that tank may not see what is to the left, to the right, what is further in that city, what has changed in that settlement since a few minutes when he started participating in the operation. But from the air, we can give directions in real time and make corrections,” said Major Habinet. “This is a totally new war, it cannot be compared to any other. A tank or infantryman on the battlefield cannot hide from his enemies, day or night, neither in the forest nor in the city. He is always visible.”
Additional reporting by Marian Prysiazhniuk.
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.