Russia is counting on overwhelming Ukraine’s army with waves of untrained infantry dispatched forward with slim hopes of survival. It is a costly approach: Russia is losing around 1,200 men dead or wounded every day. “Their commanders show them no pity whatsoever. There is no morale. Everyone is afraid,” But the mounting losses could cause them to run out of steam. Fewer in number, Ukrainian troops have to fight smarter. Equipped with night vision goggles, "Night is our big advantage."
The tactics Russia’s army used to seize the eastern town of Niu-York recalled Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. Soldiers advanced in groups of three, darting forward along a street guided by a drone. When Ukrainian defenders opened fire, the survivors would duck into a house. Then another trio would advance toward the position.
They kept coming in waves, taking heavy losses until a dozen or so Russian infantrymen had gathered in one spot. Then they would start the process again.
“Their commanders show them no pity whatsoever,” said a Ukrainian company commander, known as Vodoliy, who was leading troops fighting in the town.
In a high-tech war shaped by drones, precision weapons and electronic jammers, it is still boots on the ground that take and hold territory. Russia is counting on overwhelming Ukraine’s army with waves of untrained infantry dispatched forward with slim hopes of survival.
It is a costly approach: Russia is losing around 1,200 men dead or wounded every day, according to Western intelligence estimates. Russian forces are grinding forward on the eastern front, although Ukrainian officials and some analysts say the mounting losses could cause them to run out of steam.
Fewer in number, Ukrainian troops have to fight smarter. In one operation in Niu-York in August, Vodoliy’s well-equipped men countered the Russian onslaught with fast, decisive actions.Vodoliy’s unit, the 425th Separate Assault Battalion, is named for its leader: Skala, or the Rock, a hulking man with a taste for action. The Wall Street Journal has followed the ups and downs of Lt. Col. Yuriy Harkaviy’s men since the early days of the war, which they started as a small group renowned for their derring-do. Now they number several hundred, deployed by Ukrainian military command wherever it wants to punch back against the Russians.
They were called into action this summer after Russian forces advanced into Niu-York as part of their efforts to seize a strategic ridge to the northeast.
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Fire station
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Grain elevator
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It isn’t clear exactly how the town of some 10,000, founded by German Mennonites in the 19th century, got its quirky name. It was renamed under Stalin, but Ukraine returned its original name in 2021 as part of an effort to move past its Soviet legacy.
By August, the Russians had advanced steadily through the town and were using a grain elevator as a logistical hub. One Russian soldier, captured in neighboring Toretsk by Skala’s men on Aug. 29, described the kind of tactics they used, relying on mass over craft. The 31-year-old private had surrendered, he said in an interview the following day, after the other two in his assault group were killed, one by the Ukrainians and the second by his own hand.
“There is no morale. Everyone is afraid,” he said. “Commanders say: ‘Faster, faster, faster.’” The rifleman, who rarely worked and spent most of his adult life in jail for theft, enlisted in 2022 to get out of his latest prison term after recruiters offered him the equivalent of more than $2,000 a month and told him: “We’ll make that dirty story go away.” He said he was issued with only three magazines for his rifle when dispatched on the assault after returning to the front days earlier, with earlier shrapnel wounds still unhealed.
Under merciless pressure from behind, they advanced steadily. Several Russians were hunkered down in the basements of the fire station and a farm-chemicals supplier in Niu-York when Vodoliy’s men counterattacked. The 33-year-old from occupied Mariupol sent in a team of 12 soldiers equipped with night-vision goggles in a U.S.-supplied Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. They dismounted and then the lieutenant, watching a live feed from a drone with thermal vision, guided two teams of six down parallel streets.
“Night is our big advantage,” said Vodoliy.
They tossed smoke and fragmentation grenades into the basements and then burst inside, killing any Russians who hadn’t fled. By dawn, they had reached the crossroads just north of the grain elevator and helped another Ukrainian unit set up defensive positions in the buildings there. The next target was the elevator, a hulking structure with thick concrete walls, which the Russians were using as a staging post for further advances. The following night, Vodoliy sent in another team of a dozen soldiers, a mix of volunteers and conscripts that included a welder, a builder and a fitter. For about half the group, it was their first fight. But Skala’s team had given them extra training in addition to their mandatory basic military course. The Ukrainians swept around the back of the building, setting up defensive positions to block off any reinforcements. The main assault team of six tried to enter through a door on the eastern side, but it was barricaded shut from the inside. So they breached the main entrance on the western side but were beaten back by machine-gun fire.
The Ukrainians had expected to face a handful of Russians whom they had observed on drone feeds going into the elevator, but it became clear they were outnumbered. With one soldier injured by shrapnel, the team withdrew to a nearby building.
Throughout the following day, the Ukrainians hit the elevator with huge artillery shells and explosives dropped from a drone, but to little effect. At night, Vodoliy sent eight more men in support. They closed the loop around the elevator, sealing it off. Then they called in a tank to blast a hole in the eastern wall. As soon as the tank stopped firing, a dozen-strong Ukrainian assault team burst inside while the Russians were still in shock. Klyk, a 35-year-old welder who was on his second assault, was first in. He tripped on a wire attached to a booby trap, but there was no explosion. The Russian machine gun had been knocked out by the tank shelling and the air was full of dust. The Ukrainian team pushed inside, taking cover behind pillars in the cavernous space as shards of concrete cracked loose by rifle fire spat through the air. In close-quarters fighting, the Ukrainians drove forward. The remaining Russians retreated up a caged metal staircase on the inside of the southern wall that rose 17 floors.
By the early morning, there was a stalemate. The Russians had a height advantage, but they were trapped. The Ukrainian assault team seized a Russian radio and heard commanders telling their men in the building to hang on and wait for help.
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“Tell them they’re being lied to and there won’t be any help,” Vodoliy told the Ukrainian assault team’s commander.
Floor by floor, over several hours, they pressed the Russians to surrender, telling them there was no way out. The Russians begged for water and cigarettes.
Chorniy, a bearded 32-year-old from Dnipro who used to fit windows and doors, threw a Russian soldier some water and a pack of smokes. “Go to your guys and tell them that no one’s going to shoot and kill them,” he told the Russian. When injured Russians crawled out and surrendered, the Ukrainians treated them and had them tell their compatriots by radio that they could expect fair treatment. Injuries ranged from shrapnel wounds to torn-off limbs.
While evacuating one group of Russians in an armored vehicle, they heard a Russian commander shout over the radio: “Hit them! Hit them!” Mortar bombs landed near the Ukrainian evacuation vehicle, which sped away.Russian morale was falling. There was gunfire among the invading troops as they apparently argued over whether to cling on or give up.
After more than one day, the surviving Russians had all surrendered, a total of 16 in the elevator and surrounding buildings. The Ukrainians set up soldiers from another unit in the building and were evacuated.
As a reward, Skala gave them a few days off. Klyk went home to Kharkiv, a town in the northeast, to get married. But the triumph soon faded. Russia stepped up attacks in Niu-York with glide bombs, artillery and waves of infantry. The Ukrainian troops who replaced the Russians were forced out of the elevator under withering fire. A further counterattack in the town by another Ukrainian unit temporarily pushed the Russians back, but by the end of September, they had taken control.
Vodoliy’s men, meanwhile, had been rushed to another part of the front that was in grave danger of buckling. “Our morale is much higher,” said Vodoliy. “But there are more of them.”
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