Columns of black smoke can be seen from many kilometers away, just as the artillery, the true thunder of war, can be heard from far away. Pokrovsk, in the distance, looks like a funeral pyre. Around this new martyr city, besieged like Bajmut, Mariupol, and so many others, the lush vegetation of Ukraine serves to camouflage entire brigades of armored vehicles, cannons, and other war elephants.
The Russian summer offensive, in which Vladimir Putin wants "everything," as the Russian autocrat told Donald Trump in a phone call, has a 50-day deadline, granted by the U.S. president, to try to capture as much territory as possible, as the invasion has already reached three and a half years without Russia achieving its objective. "Putin will not negotiate the end of the war if he does not believe he can gain territorial profits," says George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. Trump threatens him with harsh sanctions.
Medical convoys with wounded, fuel tankers, and trucks full of soldiers clog the roads throughout the southern area of the Donetsk region. We have to take a secondary road to reach a farm. Dozens of armored vehicles, many of them Leopard 1 models that were in service in European armies in the distant 60s, but are still useful in this war of attrition, rest in the shade of the trees. Next to one of them ("my tank," as she says), Margaryta, a 19-year-old volunteer from Lviv, awaits us to fight in this phase of the war.
- At 19, what experience do you have as a tank crew member?
- I have already been on four missions. Each time I gain more confidence and greater knowledge of my tank.
- What scares you the most?
- The Russian drones [Margaryta points out several shrapnel holes in the armor of her tank, of which she is a gunner].
Margaryta's adolescent smile contrasts with the toughness of her comrades-in-arms, war dogs over 40 years old, all seasoned on the battlefronts, who treat her as if she were their daughter: "The commander had me prepare meals as soon as I arrived, but I refused. I did not leave my family's farm to serve soup. I asked to fight, and that's what I'm going to do." Although it is not common to see women in attack brigades, her mindset is shared by the rest of the soldiers: "Ukraine will not surrender," she says.
It has been a year since the Kremlin began operations to take the city of Pokrovsk, but so far, the limited advances of the Z troops have resulted in huge casualties. Today, only smoking ruins remain of it and its neighbor Myrnograd. The Russians, unable to take it frontally, try to follow the same strategy as in Bajmut, surrounding it from the flanks to cut off supply routes and provoke its fall. For now, the invader extends its jaws on the map, but there may still be many casualties ahead as they try to close them.
About 70 kilometers further east, in the city of Konstantinivka, history repeats itself, but again Russia is far from being able to claim the city as conquered. Even if these towns fall into Moscow's hands, there are still strongholds ahead such as Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, or Liman, so the Kremlin's secondary objective (to take all of Donbass) could take years.
For any government, prolonging the war would no longer make military sense long ago because the cost of advances to conquer destroyed populations with thousands of deaths per week is unsustainable. However, Putin does not answer to anyone and can sustain intolerable casualties for any other army without it being a political burden. Russia remains trapped in a failed gamble, but the Kremlin will continue to fight to achieve something it can call victory at any cost.
On other fronts, the Kiev army has halted the attempts to advance. For example, in the border region of Sumy, where it was supposed that 50,000 Russians would unleash a major offensive towards the regional capital, it was exhausted in a couple of months with modest gains and many casualties. The same happened in the area of Kupiansk (Kharkiv) or in Kamianske (Zaporizhia).
The reality is that both armies are exhausted after such a titanic and bloody military effort. The Washington Post reveals that, in the same conversation in which Trump asked Zelensky if he could attack Moscow, the U.S. president commented to the Ukrainian on the need for Kiev to try a surprise counteroffensive to convince Putin of the futility of continuing the war. But it is complicated if they do not receive new deliveries of armaments from Ukraine's allies, especially those long-range missiles that could punish Russian logistics from afar and new shipments of armored vehicles.
Russia boasts of being able to recruit about 30,000 volunteers per month, each time for a larger amount, to sustain the effort on the front, but this strategy hides a terrible reality: more Russian soldiers die each month, and that is why, despite this continuous recruitment, the Russian army does not grow. The figures of over a million casualties (dead, wounded, and missing), offered by the most reliable analysts, are consistent with the course of the invasion.
Ukraine, with about 550,000 casualties, has specialized in drone guerrilla warfare as a strategy to survive and, despite having lost part of the equipment provided by its partners in 2023, condemns the Z troops to a painful offensive in which Russian soldiers must cross the battlefield on motorcycles or golf carts to avoid the hateful surveillance of drones. Moscow also uses drones on the battlefield, but by forcing themselves to assault Ukrainian defensive positions, their loss figures are higher.
If this continues, frontline soldiers will hardly be able to leave their positions for weeks. Now, to be able to rotate, they must move only at night, as most drones do not have night vision, but even so, the risk of being wounded or killed is enormous. More and more ground drones travel several kilometers through the field and enter enemy trenches to detonate their explosives from a distance. The most famous drone units, such as Peaky Blinders or the Magyar Birds, compete among themselves in a gamification that awards points for enemy kills, destroyed armored vehicles, and blown-up rocket launchers.
While Russia increasingly recruits volunteers from the poorest countries in Africa, Ukraine does the same with thousands of Colombians, currently the largest members of the Foreign Legion of Ukraine.
Among the newcomers stands out the Iranian volunteer Kourosh Sehati. He is 46 years old and worked as a journalist in exile, having spent time in prison as one of the opponents of the ayatollah regime. He is the only member from this country to wear the Ukrainian uniform. His Middle Eastern features contrast with the new Colombian volunteers.
"I have a connection with Ukraine because my wife is Ukrainian, and our children are half Ukrainian," Sehati says. "I am trying to make Ukrainians see Iranians as people separate from the actions of the Islamic Republic. Iranians hate the regime, which only survives through repression." Sehati has not killed anyone, but he is willing to do so. "I will fight against the criminal Putin and his supporters," he concludes.