A Hillside near Toretsk

It was impossible to get any closer. "One step over the crest of the hill and the Russians would consider it an attack," Edward, the laconic commander, had said earlier: "But everything is mined anyway." In the rising morning light, we walk from his command bunker toward the noise of distant impacts, past the mangled remains of cars, riddled with bullet holes. We trudge and crawl through narrow trenches up the earthen slope for a brief look at the Russian side, 150 or 200 meters away. Nobody can be seen.

"Bart," his call sign, thinks he has spotted movement in a destroyed house. The booming, dry roar of his heavy machine gun rattles your bones. But then the metal belt for the 12.7-millimeter ammunition jams. The Russians now know he's standing there, but he can't shoot. Cursing, rattling – an endless four minutes pass before he is able to fire of several more salvos. Even in the trench behind him, the air is barely breathable from the acrid smoke from the gunpowder. "Now it's burning over there," says Bart with grim satisfaction as he ducks back into the relative safety of the mud walls.

We're on the front lines. Ukrainian soldiers are defending their positions here, in the east of the country, against the advancing Russians – almost precisely two years after Putin launched his invasion on February 24, 2022.

The fact that we were able to get so close to the front line at all is due to the topography of this position near Toretsk, south of the endlessly embattled city of Bakhmut. An elongated hill rises up in front of a canal, with the Russians lying on the flat terrain on the other side. The hill was recaptured by Ukraine's 28th Brigade between March and July of last year. Four months of fighting for 200 meters of territory. But at least they're now marginally protected from sudden large-scale attacks. The adversaries are so close to each other here that neither side can use heavy artillery from a distance. The risk of hitting one's own soldiers is simply too great.

Buried deep in the loamy soil, the Ukrainians wait and hope. But at least they're still able to hold the line here. In Avdiivka, a small town 30 kilometers to the south, the Russians managed to drive a wedge through the last bastions of the defenders that morning, sealing their defeat after months of attacks. Four nights earlier, they had gained 600 meters of ground west of Bakhmut, overrunning the Ukrainian troops there.

Almost no Ukrainian units in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine are still allowing journalists close to the front lines, unsure as they are for how long they can be held. Previously scheduled visits have cancelled or postponed. A press officer is also responsible for writing casualty reports for his brigade. In a tired voice, he says apologetically over the phone that he doesn't have time for anything else.

No one here is talking about offensives anymore. The spectacular initial successes of 2022, when mobile Ukrainian units were able to drive the disoriented Russian army out of extensive swaths of territory on several occasions are over. For as long as the donor countries are not supplying anywhere near what they are consuming, the Ukrainians are having to ration their artillery shells.

Potential U.S. military aid of more than $50 billion has been stuck in Congress for months because the Republicans don't want to stand up to Donald Trump. And the Europeans haven't even come close to achieving the targets they set themselves for artillery ammunition production.

With forced mobilizations and a war economy that mass-produces shells, tanks and drones, "Russia simply has more of everything now," says Edward, the company commander. "And they have learned." Their anti-drone jammers have greater range, and their positions are heavily mined and so secure that the widely touted Ukrainian summer offensive in the south came to a standstill after just a few hard-won kilometers. Instead, the Russians are now advancing. Slowly, steadily.

In the meantime, the Ukrainians have dug themselves in. Whereas the emblematic word of the first months of the war was "Javelin," the modern American anti-tank missile used to blow up huge numbers of Russian tanks, today it is "blindazh," meaning bunker, shelter, foxhole. They are often covered with tree trunks and a meter of sand and debris - like the one here in the hill at Toretsk. There's a kitchen, tiny caves to sleep in, everything is cramped and claustrophobic.

The trenches are so narrow that often it is only possible to move sideways. In places where the ground is level, the muddy ground makes every step an ordeal, the muck tenaciously clinging to boots. When they lead up the slope, the floors of the trenches are lined with boards outfitted with tread strips, but the thin film of mud is as slippery as soap. And if you don't crouch while walking through some trench sections along the crest of the slope, you risk being hit by Russian snipers. "We do the same," Bart says with a shrug. Kill or be killed, day in, day out, and the mud seeps through every crack. "Lamborghini" is the name of the section of the hill covered by his platoon. Each sector is named after a car brand.

Under normal circumstances, the men would rotate out of this nightmarish situation after awhile. But there are no longer enough soldiers to make such rotations possible. Those who are here can't leave. "I wanted to go home," says Bart, to visit his pregnant wife near the city of Dnipro. "But there would be nobody here to replace me." Operating the huge machine gun, which is more than one and a half meters long and weighs over a hundred kilos, isn't easy. Plus, he says, the short visits home he has been able to make have made him sad. Of his old friends, "all but one are out of the country or fugitives." He actually uses the word fugitives. "I don't speak to them anymore." They're shirking their responsibility, he says, "while the rest of us are fighting here in the mud."

The Russians now fire back with an anti-tank missile that explodes in the sky 100 meters away. "They always do that," he says, looking up, "They can't see the far side of the hill. So, they shoot these things that are supposed to explode right above us."

They have decided to "stay here," says Bart, speaking about himself and his buddy with the call sign "Solist," whose apartment has been destroyed anyway and has no one waiting for him. Solist, he says, used to be a banker and studied at Kyiv's prestigious National University of Economics. But then the Russians occupied his home town of Balakliya, abducting him and beating him up in the process. So after Balakliya was liberated, he volunteered for the army, which no longer would have drafted him since he's in his mid-forties. He likes to sing as a way of warding off the fear, hence his call sign. "Because, of course, it is scary here. Only idiots aren't afraid. But if you're pessimistic, you'll lose your mind."

It's a sunny day, the first after several weeks of gray winter skies. Solist is sitting on a blown-up tree trunk on the far side of the hill, with Bart standing next to him, shaving the fuzz from his head to the left and right of his mohawk. A third person is keeping an ear on the situation at some distance from the whirring of the clippers – just in case a drone comes. If it sounds like a sewing machine, it's a camera drone and gives them time to get up and walk the few steps to the shelter. If the drone has a deeper sound, like a souped-up moped, it's time to dive for cover. Kamikaze drones, whose pilot has spotted a target, can chase a person or even a moving car at lightning speed, exploding on impact. That's why entrances to front-line trenches almost always have a bend at the entrance. The drones aren't yet able to fly around corners in the dark.

Within months, they have become a weapon of terror for both sides. To control these "first person view" (FPV) drones, the pilot wears goggles and can pilot the drone as if sitting in the cockpit. It's a demanding pastime in countries at peace, where they were developed. But in Ukraine, the drones carry explosive charges, transforming them into cheap precision weapons that have made it extremely dangerous to spend time out in the open during the day in many areas near the front lines.

Our journeys to the front lines also only take place at night, as do troop rotations and supply deliveries. The Ukrainians also rely on kamikaze drones. "We hardly have any artillery shells left," Commander Edward explained. "At the moment, FPV drones are our artillery."

Apart from the machine gun and a few Finnish mortars, he says, they haven't received any support from abroad. "We are one of the forgotten brigades, not famous, not newly established, but simply always there." He said he sometimes dreams of a giant jammer that would just knock all the enemy drones out of the sky.

Who builds the better kamikaze drones? "I have the feeling that they do. At least when I see what they've done to us. But we don't know their experiences. Presumably they are technically similar. Only the Russians have many more." Ukraine is also ramping up its production, but it can't keep up pace with Russia's mass production.

Tanks and guns worth millions are being destroyed by kamikaze drones that cost only a few hundred dollars. Those drones, in turn, are easiest to shoot down with shotguns of the kind used to hunt pheasants and ducks. This is what the war looks like in Ukraine in February 2024. An officer in Kramatorsk says he is reading an old Russian translation of Erwin Rommel's book about World War I, "Infantry Attacks," at the moment. Another is desperately seeking recruits with video game experience, because they make the best drone pilots.

The Front West of Bakhmut

One signature is still missing. Although the 214th Special Battalion west of Bakhmut had long since agreed to the visit, and DER SPIEGEL photographer Johanna Fritz had already been there a week earlier – but higher authorities were now insisting that they, too, must grant their permission. A one-day delay.

On the night before the day the visit was supposed to happen, it was foggy and snowing. By the time the Ukrainian soldiers defending their land saw what was rolling towards them, it was too late. Dozens of armored vehicles emerged out of the haze from two directions without prior artillery attack, followed by hundreds of Russian soldiers who opened fire 50 or 60 meters in front of the Ukrainian lines.

Days later, two snipers told DER SPIEGEL that they had tried to hold on to a narrow corridor of escape for as long as possible, but nothing more could have been saved. Ten or 12 Ukrainian soldiers died, dozens were injured and they lost 600 meters of ground in one fell swoop.

"The Russians tested us for a month," says "Tesla," the commander of a small mortar unit of the 214th Infantry Regiment, in the late afternoon after the attack. "They repeatedly sent a BMP," the standard Russian armored troop carrier, "forward to see: Would we fire on it? We didn't, of course, preferring to save ammunition instead." He says his unit fired 109 mortar shells last night. "I have no idea where our superiors found them." He's so angry that he asks the questions himself: "Did we expect an attack like this? Of course! Could we have prevented it? Of course, if we had enough artillery ammunition."

He says he still has a single mortar, the simplest form of a cannon made from a tube and a base plate. And a gun captured in the Kharkiv area in autumn 2022, when fleeing Russians left behind masses of tanks, guns and ammunition. "In principle, it's not a bad piece of equipment," but as a captured weapon from Russian stocks, it isn't registered in the Ukrainian army's inventory. Which in turn means that he would have to submit applications for repair costs and wait several months. Ultimately, he decided it would be easier to pay for it out of his own pocket. "After 7,000 rounds, the tubes need to be replaced. We were getting close to that point, and of course we didn't know how many times the Russians had already fired it. So, we replaced the base part of the pipe as a precaution. That's the first part to go bad."

Last winter, he says, they were still able to keep the Russians from advancing. He and his unite fired so many shells, he says, "that our gloves melted on the pipe when we touched it." War means attrition and consumption in enormous amounts, and for months, he says, they haven't even had enough simple 120-millimeter shells for their mortars. Not to mention ammunition for the Western guns and rocket launchers, such as the American HIMARS, M777 or the French Caesars. "These are the sharpshooters of the artillery," as the two snipers put it, "with long range and pinpoint accuracy. The Russians don't have that."

A Forest near Kreminna

Our arrival in Kreminna, in the north of the Donbas front, is also tragically too late. In early December, DER SPIEGEL photographer Fritz met the commander of a small unit of the Azov Brigade deep in the forest. Mishanya Zharkov was one of the legendary defenders of Azov Steel, the huge steelworks in the port city of Mariupol, which was encircled by the Russians early on in the war. They spent three months holed up in the bunkers there and only surrendered in mid-May. After 125 days in captivity, Zharkov was part of a prisoner exchange at the end of September 2022. He had hidden his wedding ring in the prosthetic leg of a fellow prisoner in the camp, along with his wife's telephone number and a note for her. After his release, he immediately reported back to the front. "If I have to die, I will die."

However, the bearded giant, who was involved in the riskiest commando operations, didn't quite fit the cliché of the fighter. As the commander, he didn't bark commands – he spoke quietly, looked after everyone, rode in the back of their pick-up so that others could sit inside.

His unit's position was in the forest near Kreminna, just in front of the Russian lines. They had been stuck here since the summer. It was okay, he wrote. We wanted to visit him again. From time to time, he would send voice messages, sounding hesitant, his vowels drawn out and words carefully considered. He said he could no longer imagine a civilian life after the war. "I wouldn't be able to take it anymore with all these little worries that I can't take seriously," he said. "It would no longer make sense to me. No, when it's over, I'll go somewhere else, to a security company abroad or something."

He was, he said, unable to go back.

And he didn't. One week after his last voice message, on the afternoon of January 22, a shell exploded in front of the car in which he and four others were traveling. The others survived, with some sustaining injuries, but he was killed instantly.

The others in his team are carrying on, nobody rotating in or out, and everyone is still in the shattered heart of the giant forest of Kreminna three weeks later. The front runs through the middle of the spooky forest, where shaved, splintered, broken trunks crisscross between the meter-high tree stumps, turning every passage into an obstacle course.

To get there, an odyssey of several hours begins at midnight from the edge of the area that is safe enough to drive with the lights on. The journey continues in a truck with flatbed benches on the sides, covered only by a sagging tarp. Equipment, bags full of ammunition magazines, rations, large rolls of insulating foil for the shelters are piled up in the middle, with soldiers and the DER SPIEGEL team in between, illuminated only by the green light of a headlamp. One of the soldiers has a birthday, there's a short serenade in the rumble, then someone asks the age of the others. 21. 20. 23. 21.

We switch vehicles again, this time into an armored troop carrier, until the red lights of the vehicle picking us up dance through the darkness at the meeting point. We feel our way through snow and over tree trunks scattered like a gigantic game of Mikado to the blindazh. The shelter is the warming nerve center of the troops, a cave in the ground with two tiny rooms and a few beams. Five sleeping compartments, which are occupied on a rotating basis, a gas stove and several screens for the duty officer, who follows the camera flight of the observation drones. If the drones fly, that is.

From here, they coordinate their infantry in the trenches and the rationed rounds of the mortar team. Their position is perfectly camouflaged, but deep, and the melt-water is knee-high. The men have installed boards so that they can sleep dry.

They were still able to fend off a Russian attack at the end of December. But they were unable to do so at the end of the January. "There were just too many of them," says "Leo," the current company commander, adding that they lost a few hundred meters of terrain. "It's a gray zone now." Neither the Russians nor they could move at all – it's neither victory nor defeat, as is often the case here. Still, the forest protects them, and "the Russians would only be able to advance on foot." Just that there are fewer and fewer trees.

Now, the goal is to hold the position and withstand the mortar shells and the kamikaze drones from the other side. Most of the time, there is a distant roar, sometimes the impacts are close, causing the ground to tremble and sand to trickle onto the silver insulating foil the soldiers have lined the two tiny rooms with. At least the mice that have made themselves at home in the gaps behind it will be quiet for a while.

The remaining core of Mishanya Zharkov's unit has been holed up here for 190 days now. How can they stand it?

"Gor," who usually keeps an eye on the monitors, is from Mariupol and was imprisoned with Zharkov, is fighting a second battle against his own personal opponent: "The fear. Mishanya never had any," he says, adding that he is constantly fighting with his own. "I don't respect fear," he states in the tone of a doctor making a diagnosis, "I had to come back. Otherwise, it would have been a defeat against fear." It turns out that every day is a victory, at least against the enemy within. He slept through the initial outbreak of war because he had a job at the time as a security guard in a strip club at night.

"Konoha," the field medic and youngest of the unequal trio of veterans, looks like he's ready to hit the town later. Whereas everyone around him is looking a little unkempt, he is perfectly coiffed and shaves every day. The former bartender from Odessa used to have stage fright before every job interview, "but here you risk your life just by taking a dump outside. The mortar fire comes, and you're not done yet. It's crazy that I used to be afraid of job interviews." He bears the situation with stoic optimism. A fan of Japanese manga comics, he chose his call sign from that world. "In the Naruto saga, Konoha is the central village that everyone fights for."

And then there's "Kosak," the one-eyed driver who is bothered by one thing in particular about the war in the forest: "I wanted so much to go mushroom picking. But it really is too dangerous here." Gor jokes that even during his training in the forest near Kyiv, he drove them crazy with his mushroom obsession. "He had strings of mushrooms hanging everywhere to dry, and at one point he even dragged a food dehydrator into the training camp. "But you always liked eating them!" Kosak counters with theatrical indignation.

The others in the shelter have pictures and videos of weapons, women and fellow comrades on their Instagram accounts. And what has Kosak posted? Mushrooms. Even videos of mushrooms, although they don't move much. The longer he gets stuck in this war, the happier the mushrooms make him. Perhaps they are his antidote to the troublesome melange of horror, fear, darkness and the uncertainty of how long it will all last.

He used to have a small store for building supplies in Vinnytsia, some 900 kilometers to the west. On the day of the invasion, he went to the recruiting office and enlisted in the Navy. "We mined the beaches." Snake Island, in the Black Sea, had been occupied by Russia in the first days of the invasion, and now the Ukrainians were attacking. Kosak recorded a video of himself on June 29 in the morning, one day before the liberation of the island. "I would have loved to have been there." But a couple of hours later, a shell exploded right in front of him. A splinter pierced his left eye and came out at the base of his neck.

He frequently re-watches that last video from back then, walking along the coast, breathlessly recounting the previous night's attack, "my first rocket attack," which everyone survived. In short scenes, he looks directly into the camera. He still has both eyes in the video.

With the left half of his skull now full of metal, he makes fun of himself as as "Robocop." "I was given a desk job," he says. "But after a month, I wanted to go back to the front." Just that no brigade wanted him, Robocop, the one-eyed man. For months, he applied over and over again, "I would have carried ammunition boxes, anything." In April 2023, he inquired with Azov. They were less interested in his medical records than in checking whether he could drive with one eye. Now, he's out and about at night on muddy paths through the ruined forest, mostly without light, only with night-vision goggles. Otherwise, he cooks for everyone.

Gor shouts something, and everyone looks at the screen. In the drone image, a single Russian is walking through the forest. He stands in front of a tree for half a minute, maybe peeing, and then keeps walking, not even in a hurry. He's 2.5 kilometers away. They want to know where he's going. But then their observation drone gets caught in the Russian interference field. The pilot manages to save it, but the Russian has disappeared from view. Then it starts to rain and the drones are brought in. Their electronics fails when they get wet.

It's no different for the Russians, says Commander Leo. "And without drones, they can still shoot with their artillery, but they can no longer aim." As long as it rains, things will remain calm.

The war has permanently changed the old image of the Azov Brigade from 2014 of being a hotbed of football hooligans and right-wing extremists. What has remained is the character of a highly professional elite unit, experienced commanders and volunteer fighters. It is apparently the ideologues who have yielded. The fact that they are still operating at all makes the Azov Brigade attractive, says Leo, whose most striking tattoo is a silhouette of Che Guevara. "If you just mobilize people at random and turn them into a unit, they will fall apart under pressure."

They and one or two other elite brigades are still in the fortunate position of being able to find applicants. The other units are forced to take those who have been drafted, willingly or not. But even that isn't enough to fill the gaps.

At a meeting in a café in Kramatorsk, "Roman," the head of the 80th Brigade's medical department, describes the situation in the entire operational area. "One of our new companies arrived in Bakhmut in January with 100 men. After two weeks, only 30 were left. Ten were killed, the rest were wounded, went mad or were paralyzed by fear." It wasn't artillery shells that hit most of them, as was the case a year ago, but "the shells with eyes," FPV drones. Ten new soldiers were then assigned to them. "Where we don't have enough weapons, we fill the gaps with people. But we don't have that many people." More importantly: Fewer and fewer of them want to go into the horror of the trenches.

Maintaining normality in the country at the beginning of the war was also a gesture of defiance, of not allowing oneself to be panicked. Today, though, it feeds the illusion that the fronts are stable, that the war is being adequately managed and doesn't require any personal involvement. But the country is slipping apart. In many cases, it is the same people who are patriotically demanding the reconquest of Crimea, the Donbas and the newly occupied south – who are at the same time doing everything they can to avoid being conscripted themselves. Meanwhile, life goes on. The bars and restaurants in Kyiv are packed. Even on the train to the front in Kramatorsk, the on-board video screens feature advertising for the army somewhere between videos for care products and new cars.