In some villages along the front, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers stand face to face in close quarters, sometimes within sight.
The impact of a tank shell shattered the bunker’s plaster roof and allowed uniformed men to climb inside. Protective vests and helmets were put on and automatic weapons were cocked. Amid a crescendo of machine gun fire, a tall soldier slung an anti-tank missile launcher over his shoulder and slowly dragged on his cigarette.
The Russians were near.
The fighting in eastern Ukraine was mostly remote, with Ukrainian and Russian forces firing artillery shells at each other, sometimes from tens of kilometers away. But at some points along the zigzagging eastern front, combat becomes a vicious and intimate dance, granting enemy forces glimpses of one another as they fight for control of hills and makeshift redoubts in towns and villages ravaged by shelling .
One such dance was played on Wednesday when a Russian unit of about 10 men entered the village where soldiers from a Ukrainian contingent, the Carpathian Sich Battalion, were dug in. In all likelihood, the Russian troops were there to identify targets for incoming tank fire, including the round that sent the Ukrainian soldiers into action. Ukrainian forces spotted the Russian soldiers, opened fire and pushed them back.
“It was a sabotage group, Secret Service,” said a 30-year-old fighter with the callsign “Warsaw,” panting after the brief firefight. “Our boys did not sleep and reacted quickly, forcing the enemy to flee.”
So it goes every day, every hour for the fighters of the Carpathian Sich Battalion, a volunteer unit named after the army of a short-lived independent Ukrainian state formed just before World War II. The battalion, attached to the Ukrainian Army’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade, is deployed along a number of villages and farmlands in the Kharkiv region and is tasked with holding back Russian forces pushing back from their stronghold in the occupied Ukrainian city of Izium.
The battalion gave permission to a reporter and a photographer with the New York Times to visit a front line position, on the condition that the exact location of their base would not be disclosed. Most soldiers agreed to identify themselves by their call signs only.
You have not put up an easy fight.
The Russian military has deployed an enormous force on this front in eastern Ukraine and has demonstrated overwhelming superiority in tanks, fighter jets, helicopters and heavy artillery.
The war machines rarely stay still for long. Tanks in particular have become a serious threat, fighters said, often getting within a mile of battalion positions and wreaking havoc. Already this month, 13 soldiers from the battalion were killed and more than 60 wounded.
“It’s a completely different war than I’ve seen in places like Afghanistan or Iraq,” said a colonel who called himself Mikhailo. “It’s a tough fight. Nobody cares about martial law. They shell small towns, use forbidden artillery.”
Many of the battalion’s soldiers had experience in the eight-year war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and had seen combat in some of the conflict’s most intense battles. But most had been settled in civilian life for years.
A tall, bearded soldier with the call sign Rusin owns a shop selling bathtubs in the mountainous Zakarpattia region of western Ukraine. But when Russia invaded on February 24, he quickly married his girlfriend — he said he wanted someone at home waiting for him — and went to war with a missionary spirit.
“We understand that this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia,” he said. “This is a war of the pure and the light that exists on this earth and the darkness. Either we stop this horde and the world will be a better place, or the world will be filled with the anarchy that ensues wherever there is war.”
Battalion fighters have temporarily taken up residence in an underground pen under a building now riddled with artillery shells. The guns and ammo boxes stacked in the corners are covered in plaster dust that rains down whenever a grenade hits nearby.
Aside from soldiers, the bunker is inhabited by a menagerie of animals that have also taken shelter from the bombs – several small dogs and a black goat that likes to mess up the kitchen area. On Wednesday, Chevron, a very large German shepherd, slept in front of a stack of American Javelin rocket launchers already removed from their cases and ready to fire.
The whole region rumbles with war. Low-flying Mi-8 attack helicopters share the skies with fighter jets that speed across the countryside, occasionally lighting bonfires in the farm’s fields as they fire flares to distract heat-seeking missiles.
The unit’s drone operator is Oleksandr Kovalenko, one of the few without a gun. While his job is to help his comrades aim their artillery at Russian positions, he approaches his work like an artist, snapping and saving photos occasionally when he likes the balance of light and shadow in the frame.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
On the floor. A Ukrainian counter-offensive near Kharkiv seems to have helped Russian shelling in the eastern city fall sharply. But Moscow’s forces are making advances on other parts of the front line.
He shows an overhead shot of the surrounding farmland. It is green with spring growth, but pockmarked like the moon from artillery strikes. As he scans the countryside, a stand of trees where Russian troops are stationed suddenly explodes in a fireball that dissipates in a mushroom cloud.
The battalion is a hodgepodge, with fighters from across Ukraine and around the world. There’s Matej Prokes, a slight 18-year-old from the Czech Republic, who scrawled “Born to Kill Russians” on the side of his helmet but timidly admitted he’d never shot. Elman Imanov, 41, from Azerbaijan, was drawn to fight against Russia after seeing atrocities being committed against non-combatants in Ukraine.
“I pulled a four-month-old out of a nine-story apartment with my own hands,” he said, while a frame of gold teeth glittered in the harsh neon lights. “I will never forget that and will never be able to forgive. He had never seen anything. What is he guilty of?”
And then there is a 47-year-old soldier with the call sign Prapor, who is exotic even by battalion standards. Born in Siberia, Prapor had a full career in the Russian military before retiring in the early 2000s, though he would not say where he fought. He joined the Ukrainian forces when Russian troops began shelling Kyiv.
“What can I say, they learned well,” he said. “But the fact that they have started killing, looting, peaceful civilians, that’s indecent.”
Battalion commander Oleg Kutsin said this diversity is part of his contingent’s ethos. When the original Carpathian Sich was formed in the 1930s, it welcomed anyone willing to fight and die under the blue and gold banner of an independent Ukraine, he said.
Not only is virtually any troop welcome, but so is equipment, he said. In addition to the spears, troops fighting in the area have recently received another gift that will help them even on the field: American-made M777 howitzers, a long-range artillery piece that Ukrainians are keen to use.
“We wanted to revive this military tradition of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” he said from his unit’s command center, where a desk was covered with maps of the region and a flat-screen TV showed live footage of the smoky battlefield.
“They come,” he said, “we give them weapons and point them at the enemy.”
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