Grinding battle for a city that no one can win

Both sides are exhausted in Severodonetsk. Even the password allowing reinforcements in sounds like a bad omen.

A missile is lodged in the pavement of a street in Lysychansk, Ukraine. Few residents remain in the city as it undergoes frequent shelling from Russian troops who are in a fierce battle for Severodonetsk, which sits across the river. Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Even the password allowing reinforcements into Severodonetsk sounded like a bad omen. “Valhalla,” said Vortex, the commander of a rapid reaction infantry battalion. The name of the warrior afterlife of Norse legend “set off all my superstitions”, he said. “I thought, what a stupid choice — now we will not come back, even though it would be a heroic defence.”

Days later, with his forces depleted by the constant artillery barrage, the order came from Kyiv to withdraw. Under cover of night they retreated to the river, crossing at dawn in rubber dinghies to the Ukrainian-held bank on the other side.

“The losses we took were massive – thousands,” said Vitaly, a veteran sniper who fought on the Severodonetsk front lines for the whole two months the battle lasted. His battalion alone lost half its men.

Severodonetsk was, depending on your view, either a brilliant military manoeuvre, tying down thousands of Russian troops and exacting from them a heavy cost for every metre of Ukrainian territory they stole. It may, as Vortex believes, have saved another more strategically critical front in the south, where at least 19 people were killed in Russian missile strikes on Friday. Or it was a reckless expenditure of Ukrainian lives for territory indefensible against massive Russian firepower.

The eastern Donbas region is where Moscow set its sights after its failure to seize Kyiv, retreating in April to concentrate its forces on what the Kremlin called the war’s “absolute priority”.

Russian artillery battalions moved along with their separatist proxies to conquer the remaining Ukrainian-held parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, which President Putin declared as independent republics before the invasion.

Severodonetsk, from where Ukraine administered what was left in their hands of Luhansk, would always have carried totemic significance, even before President Zelensky tied its fate to the entire Donbas region, saying its future would be decided there.

Smoke and dirt rise from the city of Severodonetsk in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. Picture: Aris Messinis/AFP

The heroic battle of a small number of outgunned troops to hold it was, Zelensky argued, evidence of Ukraine’s fighting spirit and of its desperate need for more sophisticated western rocket-launch systems capable of taking out Russian artillery. As the first of those, American-supplied Himars (high mobility artillery rocket system), arrived in Donbas last week, the order came to abandon Severodonetsk and retreat to the high ground of its twin city of Lysychansk, Ukraine’s last toehold in Luhansk. Vortex believes the city could have been saved if the weapons had arrived before. “Just three days earlier and we could have held Severodonetsk,” he said. By the time he arrived “it was a wasteland. The Russians destroyed Severodonetsk, there was no city there any more.”

Vitaly believes the battle was a costly effort. “It was a political point to hold it, it was no longer defensible,” he said. Fighting there, he argued, wasted time better spent digging defensive positions in Lysychansk, where the Ukrainians benefit from higher ground. By the time they got there, the Russians had already started to encircle Lysychansk, threatening to engulf the last corner of Luhansk and bolster their assault on the rest of Donetsk.

The situation in Lysychansk is “absolute hell”, Vitaly said. “For every shell we fire, the Russians fire 20.” The only civilians that remain are those too old, sick or poor to leave, despite the exhortations of rescuers. In Kramatorsk, from where what remains of Luhansk and Donetsk are administered, civilians wounded by shelling arrived daily.

An elderly woman sits at the entrance of an apartment building in the city of Lysychansk. Picture: Aris Messinis/AFP

Tetiana Ignatchenko, a war correspondent who covered most of the eight-year separatist conflict in the Donbas, now works for the administration here, helping people to evacuate She doubts Lysychansk, and thus Luhansk, can be saved, leaving the Russians to move on to Donetsk. “We’ve nearly lost all of Luhansk. Everything depends on what weapons now arrive from the West,” she said.

Vortex, resting in Dnipro preparing for deployment to the next front line, does not regret the doomed defence of Severodonetsk. “We engaged a huge number of Russian forces and it meant they could not be used in another place like the south,” he said.

Ukraine’s conflict is a tale of two fronts: the grinding war in the east and the counteroffensive in the south where Ukrainian forces are starting to push back the occupying forces, seeking to break the corridor Russia has established along the Black Sea coast.

Vitaly is more circumspect about what lies ahead. “We are already retreating our positions within Lysychansk,” he said. “I do not know if we can hold it.” Himars could help to turn the tide if they can take out enough Russian artillery positions but it is still a race against time, he said.

THE TIMES