PicoBlog

The fate of a small town in eastern Ukraine hangs in the balance as Moscow throws wave after wave of assault troops at its defences. What happens to Avdiivka in the coming days, and the measures that Kyiv is willing to take to defend it, may tell us much about the future of this phase of the war. I last visited the town on a writing assignment for Magnum Photos.

At the last Ukrainian checkpoint, the soldiers were bored, but also nervous. The Russian artillery had been light in the past 24 hours but the position was nevertheless exposed. We waited for permission to move forward.

Vlod was my military minder. His cell phone chirped and word came through. My driver was unwilling to go any further, but Vlod, Ira, my translator, and I would make the short trip to the frontline.

The makeshift barrier in front of us opened and Vlod began to accelerate. As the car bounced over the pot-holes he crossed himself. The scenery around us blurred as we sped across a section with no cover.

A few minutes later, after a helter-skelter drive around tank traps and broken pieces of concrete, we came to a battered bridge.

Tucked under the bridge were four armoured personnel carriers, guns facing east, and a few soldiers milling around in dirty uniforms. We had reached the Ukrainian frontline position.

This was the unremarkable eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka the last time I visited it, back in 2017. In the intervening seven years the Russians have tried time and again to overrun it. It has somehow endured against the odds.

But as I write waves of Russian infantry are once again throwing themselves at Avdiivka’s battered and teetering defences.

Even more worryingly for Kyiv the Russians have managed to advance to the north and south of the town, threatening the supply routes that are keeping its defence alive.

The fate of Avdiivka is now hanging in the balance.

To casual observers of the Ukrainian war the fate of another little-known town with an unpronounceable name far out on the eastern marches of Europe may seem of little importance.

But, win or lose, what happens in Avdiivka will mark a milestone in Russia’s dogged attempt to subdue Ukraine.

Back in 2017 I was working on a six-week project with Thomas Dworzak, an old friend who was then president of Magnum Photos, the iconic picture agency founded by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others in 1947.

We had been commissioned to retrace the steps of Capa and John Steinbeck, the American writer, who had visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of Joseph Stalin that same year.

Capa and Steinbeck wrote up their travels in a small book, A Russian Journal. Their account was popular at the time – Capa was paid nearly half a million dollars in today’s money for his photos by Ladies Home Journal.

Reflecting the changing times Thomas and I would be displaying our findings on the Magnum website and at small exhibitions and talks in New York and London.

Avdiivka should not, strictly speaking, have been on our itinerary.

The closest Steinbeck and Capa had come to it was the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and a few surrounding villages, several hours to the west, where they wrote about Soviet peasant life and the huge meals they both ate (even as much of Ukraine was starving).

But with it’s proximity to Donetsk, capital of the Donbas – from the tallest buildings I could see the runways of Donetsk airport – Avdiivka gave for a bird’s eye view over the frontline and a flavour of the ongoing war.

I had not been to a conflict zone for five years by then. After leaving frontline journalism my life mostly revolved around grizzly bears and the small wilderness business I was running in the wilds of western Canada.

So, I am a little ashamed to admit, it was with a certain hunger that I took in the once-familiar aesthetic of war - the apartment blocks with the blown-out windows, the satellite dishes with shrapnel holes in them, the buckled balconies.

On one wall there was a large and unusual mural of an old woman’s face. On another graffiti. “Lover.ru.” it read. “Don't pay for sex.”

Some of the checkpoints were constructed of empty ammunition boxes. On one a photo of a puppy had been stapled.

I talked to Tatyana, 52. She was wearing silver shoes, a purple T-shirt and a little make-up. She said there used to be 300 families living in the pock-marked housing block she still called home. But almost all had left.

“I've been living in this building for two decades and I'm not leaving now,” she said. “These people are mine.”

Tatyana and her husband both worked at a huge coke plant owned by an oligarch that dominated the town. She had met her husband at the plant years earlier and they later had three children.

“You could say it was love at first sight,” she said. “Though we were both married to others at the time,” she added with a sideways smile.

Today the coke plant has long since ceased production. The Ukrainian defenders of Avdiivka have used its massive concrete structures to create hardened positions to fight off the Russian advances.

Then last October the Russians began a renewed effort to seize the town, pounding it with artillery and hitting it with air strikes. Armoured columns advanced towards it.

The Ukrainians fought back but the onslaught kept coming.

In an echo of the tactics the Russians used to finally overwhelm Bakhmut, Avdiivka’s better-known cousin to the north, they began to throw wave after wave of light infantry at the Ukrainian positions.

The attack ebbed and flowed but in the last several days the situation in Avdiivka has become critical for its defenders. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Russians have died but still they keep coming.

The assault comes at a perilous time for Ukraine.

Just as it prepares to mark the second anniversary of Moscow’s all-out attempt to seize the country, Kyiv is struggling with diminishing military manpower, psychological exhaustion and internal division.

The army has requested an additional half a million conscripts to shore up the nearly one million soldiers that are already deployed. But President Volodymr Zelensky has hesitated, knowing the move will be deeply unpopular and may prompt outright dissent.

Meanwhile in Washington military aid to Ukraine has become hostage to squabbling between Democrats and Republicans and a promised $60 billion military aid package is being held up.

Donald Trump, who will almost certainly be the Republican nominee in the presidential elections in November, has made it known he is dead set against providing Ukraine with more help.

As a result the flow of weapons and ammunition to the frontline has begun to splutter. In Avdiivka Ukrainian soldiers tell of having to hold their fire even as the Russians advance for fear of running out of bullets.

To complicate matters further Zelensky last week fired Valery Zaluzhny, his military chief, and replaced him with Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine's ground forces.

While Zaluzhny was popular with his men and had made force preservation a top priority, Syrsky has a reputation for being uncaring, hard-headed and willing to make huge sacrifices of men and materiel.

The decision of whether to reinforce or abandon the defence of Avdiivka, which even some Ukrainian analysts now say is doomed, will be his first major test.

However the battle of Avdiivka plays out – and it’s hard not to think of the thousands of men being killed and maimed in the mud and the cold – 2024 is set to be a tough year for Ukraine.

After two years in the trenches its frontline troops are beyond exhausted. Meanwhile the will to support the country in the west is flagging.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has put his country’s economy on a war footing and, even though its military losses run into the hundreds of thousands, Russia is renewing its fighting capability far more quickly than Ukraine can.

With even hawkish Ukrainian accepting that 2024 will have to be a year when the country defends and tries to rebuild its military forces ahead of a possible fresh offensive in 2025, the only real dispute is over tactics.

Some propose that Kyiv continue to launch small probing attacks against Russian positions to try and keep its enemy on the back foot. Others say its forces can not afford the losses and must retreat to hardened positions it can hope to defend.

When Bakhmut, by then reduced to ruins, finally fell to the Russians this time last year, it made headline news around the world.

Avdiivka is unlikely to command the same attention. But its fate, and the extent to which the Ukrainian military and its new boss is willing to sacrifice men to hold it, will tell us much about the Kyiv’s new direction.

When history is finally written, the battle for this small unlovely town in the Donbas may even be seen as a turning point in the war, a modern-day Stalingrad that becomes a harbinger of the future.

NEWS & LINKS

+ I am now back in Budapest teaching. Over the coming months I plan to travel to Kosovo to continue work on a documentary (more soon on that), as well as to Ukraine and Georgia.

+ To see the original report Thomas and I compiled for Magnum Photos, including his wonderful photos, click here.

+ If you would like to follow our adventures in the BC wilderness with the bears you can also sign up to the Grizzly Bear Diaries. Or you can follow Wild Bear Lodge on Instagram or Facebook.

+ We are still waiting for visas for participants in our Wild Bear Vets programme, a charity initiative we are running for Ukrainian combat medics and other veterans at the lodge in Canada. (More soon on that too.)

ncG1vNJzZmiakZi4tbvToZyfqp%2BjwW%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xop2ismJp6o63TraOeZZakv26t1Z2goq6blg%3D%3D