After months of operational silence, the Ukrainian brigades involved have begun to reveal details of how they managed to turn a losing defensive fight against Russian forces into a successful offensive along parts of the front line. They allowed a team of New York Times reporters to embed with them for two weeks and see their work firsthand.
Ukrainian troops had been losing ground to the far more numerous Russian Army for the best part of two years. But the wider use of drones and remote-controlled vehicles, and changes in the command structure and culture within parts of the army, enabled Ukraine to shift gears.
Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky, the overall commander of the operation, claimed that the tactics were so successful that his troops had wiped out Russia’s 144th Motor Rifle Division in the fighting and reversed Russia’s gains of a whole year.
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Alongside several of his commanders, he had gathered members of the news media in an underground bunker to announce the end of Operation Vivaldi, the main thrust of which he said began in May, and to sum up its results.
In October, for the second consecutive month, Ukraine gained more territory than Russia, and Russian forces suffered their highest monthly casualty toll — more than 54,000 killed or seriously wounded — of the war, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Military analysts and Russian military bloggers have confirmed Ukrainian gains, as Russian forces lost a key salient north of the city of Lyman and an equal amount of territory on the Zaporizhzhia front line in southern Ukraine.
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Last year, the brigade, vastly outnumbered by Russian forces opposing them, was steadily losing ground, Mr. Horobets said. Their supply routes were under fire, preventing them from bringing in ammunition and evacuating the wounded.
Yet it was from that maelstrom, fed up with being destroyed by Russian firepower, that a few battalion commanders said they took things into their own hands. They seized critical Russian positions on high ground above a village from which Russian troops were directing the strikes against them.
Once they controlled the heights and knocked out Russian communications, they found they had an advantage. The Russian soldiers in the village did not know what had happened and could not replace equipment because the Ukrainian forces were bringing down the Russian supply drones and preventing vehicles getting through on the roads, several commanders involved in the operation said.
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As the Ukrainians began advancing, the value of their middle-range drone strikes became clear. The Third Army Corps was striking up to 50 Russian vehicles a day, sometimes as deep as 100 miles behind Russian lines, General Biletsky said.
“It became normal for the enemy to unload 40 to 50 kilometers from the front line and then continue on foot,” he said. Sometimes a soldier would carry a single artillery shell 20 miles, he said. “Their logistics have effectively been paralyzed.”
Russian soldiers were running short of fuel, ammunition and food. Some began holding up cardboard signs outside their positions, saying they were hungry and thirsty, several commanders said.
Critically, when Russian reinforcements were called in, Ukrainian drones struck them as they dismounted from vehicles miles before they could reach the front line, Mr. Horobets said.
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By now, ground robots are vital. In several underground command posts our team visited, Ukrainian soldiers watched livestream videos of tracks and undergrowth as the vehicles trundled through the kill zone carrying cargo. Sometimes they brought out the bodies of dead soldiers.
Many of the vehicles break down or get attacked by Russian drones, and their cameras showed the wrecks of other vehicles.
But many of them get through. General Biletsky said his brigades were delivering three times as much cargo to their soldiers on the front line as other brigades that recently came under his command.
“That means a soldier in the Third Army Corps has considerably more resources and capabilities available to them: food supplies, ammunition, equipment, power sources, batteries and so on, compared with a soldier elsewhere,” he said. They were even receiving diggers to help build underground bunkers, he said.
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