Volodymyr Altukhov confers with his neighbour after losing his house to a recent Russian air strike in Pokrovsk, a strategic transit hub in Donetsk that is now only a few kilometres from the eastern front.Photography by Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
The five men leaned on their shovels, taking a break from digging trenches in the late summer sun in eastern Ukraine this week.
Their task would be unremarkable in wartime, except that the new fortifications they’re preparing are dozens of kilometres behind the front-line city of Pokrovsk, along the highway west toward Dnipro, a city of a million people that has thus far only seen the occasional missile attack – and which until now was considered a safe distance from the front lines.
Ukraine will fight for its lynchpin city of Pokrovsk, just as it put up a ferocious defence of Avdiivka and Bakhmut, two other cities in the country’s battle-scarred Donbas region (which Dnipro sits just outside of) that were levelled and then occupied by Russian forces earlier in this now 2½-year-old war. But there’s a sense among those fighting on the approaches to Pokrovsk that they already know how this will go.
“The Russian tactics never change. They completely destroy settlements and then there is nothing left to hold in the city and nothing to defend,” said Volodomyr Rehesha, the commander of a unit of far-right volunteers that took part in the years-long battle to defend Avdiivka before retreating in February after the city was essentially flattened. Mr. Rehesha’s unit has been pushed back some 35 kilometres since then, and now holds positions barely eight kilometres outside Pokrovsk.
The Globe and Mail saw the trench-digging toward the end of a week-long journey along various parts of the front line during what increasingly looks to be a pivotal moment in this grinding war. What The Globe saw and heard in the north, centre and east of Ukraine – in Sumy, Poltava, Pokrovsk, Dnipro and Kyiv – was a fatigued country increasingly anxious to see the fighting end, even if most are still unwilling to consider the kind of territory-for-peace formula that Russian President Vladimir Putin is sure to insist on.
There are also growing questions among the military rank-and-file over the decisions made by their commanding officers, and a rising unease over what comes next as U.S. elections approach. There’s perhaps no country in the world, outside of the U.S. itself, that has so much riding on whether it’s Donald Trump or Kamala Harris who succeeds Joe Biden in the White House.
Opinion polls show a rising number of Ukrainians think the country should enter peace talks – 57 per cent, according to one recent poll, up sharply from 29 per cent in January, 2023. But only a third are willing to accept peace terms that see Russia keeping the roughly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory it currently occupies. “People are tired, and fatigue is growing,” said Anton Grushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which carried out the polls. “But still, more than 70 per cent say they can suffer as long as needed for Ukraine to succeed in this war.”
Anton Grushetskyi is executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology
More suffering lies ahead. A senior Ukrainian security source told The Globe that the coming winter is lining up to be the worst the country has endured in its 33 years of independence, harder even than the winter of 2022-2023, when Ukraine’s electricity grid nearly collapsed amid a barrage of Russian attacks. The Globe is not naming the source because they were not authorized to publicly comment on the sensitive matter.
That targeting of civilian infrastructure later resulted in the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Russia’s chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov and then-defence minister Sergei Shoigu – the two men who oversaw the campaign – but, once again, Russia has not changed its tactics.
September actually began with optimism. Ukrainian troops had not only staged a stunning incursion into the Kursk region of Russia, they were holding onto the territory – at least until Russia began what appeared to be a substantive counteroffensive in Kursk this week. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had begun speaking of a “victory plan” that he plans to present to Mr. Biden on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly later this month. Mr. Zelensky’s government also negotiated a last-minute restructuring of US$20-billion in debt to avoid going into default.
This week yielded another important gain, as the United States and Britain moved closer to lifting some restrictions on how the Ukrainian military can use U.S.- and British-supplied long-range missile systems. If Mr. Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer sign off on the change after talks on Friday, Ukraine would now be free to use U.S.-made ATACMS tactical missile systems and British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike at military targets inside Russia, particularly the sites from which the Russian air force launches its nightly drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.
But while that’s good news for the Ukrainian military, it also speaks to the pummelling the country has been enduring, and the spike in attacks – and civilian casualties – in recent weeks. It’s also a belated response to the rising level of military assistance Russia has been receiving from its own allies in North Korea and Iran (and more quietly, China).
The missile and drone strikes have further damaged Ukraine’s power grid, which is now supplying only six hours of electricity a day to parts of Kyiv as summer turns to autumn. There’s even less in some cities closer to the front line.
The bad news doesn’t stop there. A Sept. 3 strike on a military telecommunications institute in the central city of Poltava killed 57 people, most of them cadets, while also dealing another blow to the reputation and morale of an army that is in the middle of a recruitment drive as it tries to shrink Russia’s manpower advantage and relieve troops who have been fighting since the first hours of the February, 2022, invasion.
In Poltava, The Globe met soldiers wounded in the attack – and the family members of other victims – who questioned why commanders had allowed so many troops to be concentrated at a poorly defended site that was well-known to the Russian military. The teenage son of one instructor who was injured in the strike said the episode made him less likely to do his own mandatory military service, adding that many of his friends had chosen to avoid conscription by leaving the country ahead of their 18th birthdays.
Ukrainians in Poltava lay flowers on Sept. 7 at the scene of a missile attack.
Similarly, some of those charged with holding the line in Donbas openly wonder at the logic of opening a new front in Kursk when Ukraine is already heavily outnumbered and outgunned alongside the 1,200-kilometre front line inside the country. Pokrovsk is a key logistics and transportation hub in the southeastern Donbas region. If it falls, it will clear the way for a Russian push toward the cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk – the last two major Donbas cities still under Ukrainian control – or even Dnipro.
“Of course, those guys should be here,” said Alexey Pechnikov, a 28-year-old soldier and a native of the Pokrovsk region, referring to the Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk. Private Pechnikov spoke to The Globe earlier this week as he was sending his wife and two young children out of Pokrovsk. Artillery boomed every few seconds as the family waited for their minibus to arrive.
The Kursk offensive has provided an important boost to Ukrainian morale and resulted in the capture of hundreds of Russian prisoners of war who Mr. Zelensky says will be bartered to free Ukrainian PoWs. But the campaign, which Ukraine hoped would force Russia to pull troops away from the Pokrovsk front, has instead left Ukraine holding a relatively insignificant chunk of Russian territory while Mr. Putin’s forces churn toward the far more significant prize of Pokrovsk.
People in Pokrovsk, still taking stock of recent damage from Russian missiles, are wary of more violence to come.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a key adviser to Mr. Zelensky, dismissed the idea that the Kursk offensive had weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend Pokrovsk. The Kursk operation, he argued in an interview, was important because it had demonstrated to Ukraine’s allies that there were no more Russian “red lines” – that the Kremlin had no more tools, other than its nuclear arsenal, for escalating the conflict.
“If somebody expected that a rather limited, by scale and scope, operation [in Kursk] would turn decisively tides of war in Ukrainian favour, then these people don’t understand war,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Kyiv-based National Institute for Strategic Studies, which prepares reports for the President’s office. But, he said, the offensive could be considered a success if it “laid the conditions for some major diplomatic push.”
That push will come when Mr. Zelensky travels to the U.S. to meet with Mr. Biden. The details of the “victory plan” aren’t yet publicly known, but Ukrainians are surely hoping that Mr. Biden, with an eye to his legacy, will be willing to give Kyiv even more support. Unspoken is the Ukrainian desire to get as much as they can from Washington now, before the unpredictable election.
Hanging over it all is the very real possibility that Mr. Trump will win back the White House in November. The Republican candidate – who has clashed with Mr. Zelensky in the past, and has boasted that he could end the war in 24 hours – was directly asked during Tuesday’s televised debate with Ms. Harris whether he wanted Ukraine to win. He dodged the question, replying instead “I want the war to stop.”
That’s rung alarm bells in Ukraine, where worries are high that Mr. Trump, who has spoken of his admiration for Mr. Putin, will try to force Kyiv to make peace by cutting off the flow of military aid. There are fears that halting the war on its current front lines will only give Mr. Putin time to replenish his military and launch a new attack.
Legislator Andrii Osadchuk says victory against Russia is still elusive with the help Ukraine has received so far.
Andrii Osadchuk, a parliamentarian from the opposition Golos party, said Ukrainians were grateful for the military help the country has received from the West so far. But he said the assistance had been designed to help Ukraine survive – but not to allow it to defeat Russia.
Mr. Osadchuk said the West needed to change that policy and further increase weapons deliveries before the situation on the front line became even grimmer for Ukraine. “Time is against us,” he said. “We still do not see an end to this nightmare, and Ukraine cannot fight forever.”
War in Ukraine: More from The Globe and Mail
Recently, The Globe visited a border crossing that Ukrainian forces captured during their incursion into Kursk, as well as the city of Pokrovsk, which remains at risk of of being razed by heavy artillery.
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Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, is pleading for the West to do more in a war that’s entered a devastating new phase. She spoke with The Globe’s Janice Dickson, who joined The Decibel to share highlights of their conversation. Subscribe for more episodes.