200 Clashes a Day as Russia Races to Break Ukrainian Strongholds

After months of constant pressure and grinding, bloody advances, Russian forces are pressing up against multiple strongholds along more than 100 miles of the jagged front in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine. For Ukraine, losing any of those important defensive positions could significantly alter the contours of the fight for control of the region, long coveted by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Despite staggering casualties, Russian forces are mounting armored assaults and sending waves of infantry on foot, motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles to attack Ukrainian positions from Chasiv Yar in the north to the southern stronghold of Vuhledar, which is at risk of being encircled, according to Ukrainian soldiers and combat footage.

With attacks across cratered fields, the Russians are racing to seize territory before the fall strips the foliage they use for cover and the rains turn fertile farmland into bog.

Even with both armies exhausted, the battles across the east remain as deadly as at any point in the war, according to Ukrainian soldiers and Western officials.

On each of two days last week, the Ukrainian military reported more than 200 clashes between the two sides — the highest such numbers in many months, according to DeepState, a group of analysts that maps the battlefield.

At a location near the front where injured soldiers are treated, the steady influx of the wounded last weekend testified to the intensity of the fight. In just 24 hours, small crews of medics treated more than 70 soldiers.

Sergeant Valeria, a 23-year-old combat medic, ticked off a list of the traumatic injuries the wounded have sustained, including severe head injuries and burns covering more than 20 percent of their bodies.

As bleary-eyed fighters slumped against a wall listening to the screams of a soldier injured in fighting around Vuhledar, she said that in the grim calculus of her vocation, screams were a positive sign.

“The most important thing about someone who’s screaming is that they’re breathing,” she said.

Sergeant Valeria, like other soldiers interviewed on the front, asked only to be identified by a first name or call sign in accordance with military protocol. The New York Times was given access to medics and soldiers at the facility under the condition that its location not be disclosed.

As the battles rage at home, President Volodymyr Zelensky is in the United States this week on a diplomatic mission that he portrays as no less urgent.

He spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday and was scheduled to meet with President Biden on Thursday, where he was expected to plead, again, for the ability to strike deeper into Russian territory using Western-supplied missiles. Without that, he says, it will be harder to continue to bring the war home to Russia — the only way, he believes, that Moscow can be brought to the negotiating table.

Mr. Biden has been reluctant to approve such deep strikes, fearing confrontation with Russia. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin said that he planned to lower the threshold for his country’s use of nuclear weapons, an escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts to deter the United States from expanding its military aid to Ukraine.

Along the eastern front line, the Ukrainian soldiers interviewed this month spoke of exhaustion and of securing one area only to see another come under threat. The territory that they are protecting, the remaining unoccupied sections of Donetsk, is part of the Donbas region, what was once the industrial heartland of Ukraine.

The cities and towns under assault are of strategic importance for different reasons, including their use as hubs to move soldiers and supplies, and their elevated positions. It is unclear how robust Ukraine’s next line of defense is beyond those places.

The Russians have, however, failed to turn some past advances into rapid breakthroughs. They are also paying a steep price in troops and equipment for every mile they gain.

The Ukrainians have held the Russians at bay for months outside the ruined hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, but just 20 miles to the south, the Russians are advancing in bloody urban battles now raging inside Toretsk.

Just south of there, the Russian advance toward the city of Pokrovsk over the past seven months has created a bulge some 22 miles deep and 15 miles wide, altering the geometry of the front in complicated ways.

Pokrovsk, a critical rail and road hub, is the last major city before the wide-open plains leading to the Dnipro region, home to the third-largest city in Ukraine and vital to its economic health.

Ukrainian soldiers have halted the direct advance on Pokrovsk, for the moment, but the Russians are close, fortifying their positions about five miles to the east.

The city itself is under daily bombardment. All the highway overpasses have been destroyed, so the authorities are urging the 15,000 people who remain to use winding dirt roads to leave while they can.

“It’s very scary,” Kateryna Kandybko, a 34-year-old mother of two children, said in an interview on the outskirts. Her family is packed and ready to run, but is holding on for now. “We don’t really want to leave at all. But we definitely don’t want to live under the Russian flag.”

In the surrounding farmland, the burning of unharvested fields of sunflowers, set alight by shelling, illuminates the night sky.

“Take a look around,” said Serhii, a 45-year-old trucker, as he raced to haul thousands of pigs from a large farm under bombardment in the border area. “Despite this being a rural area, there are no birds, no animals — not even stray dogs or cats. Everyone’s stressed, people and animals alike.” He asked that his family name not be used for their safety.

Ginseng, the call-sign of a 44-year-old master sergeant in charge of an artillery unit with the 68th Jaeger Brigade protecting Pokrovsk’s southern flank, said that Ukrainian forces had stabilized the line but that the fight remained a “nightmare.”

He pointed to a shotgun near the entrance of his bunker, which he said was the best defense against small Russian attack drones when electronic jamming equipment fails.

“They fly in waves: One shows up, then 15-20 minutes later, another,” he said.

His small band of soldiers manning a Soviet-designed howitzer emerge from the bunker only when they have a target sent in by their own surveillance drone operators.

Even if they can hold their lines, Ginseng fears Pokrovsk is doomed.

“They’ll level it,” he said. “I’ve seen so many cities wiped out — it’s overwhelming.”

The area directly south of Pokrovsk is perhaps the most volatile part of the front at the moment. The front line there has become an increasingly jagged arc as the Russians push the Ukrainians back in pockets.

About halfway to Vuhledar, 60 miles to the south, the towering smokestacks of a battered power plant in Kurakhove stand idle over another smashed town that used to be home to some 20,000 people. But black smoke rising over nearby villages is clearly visible across the flat plains, marking the Russian advance.

The Ukrainian 46th Air Mobile Brigade, which is responsible for part of the defense of the area around Kurakhove, said in public statements that two recent attacks featured nearly 100 tanks, armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles.

The Russian attacks were met with a blizzard of Ukrainian drones and artillery fire and the soldiers of the 46th said they managed to repel both assaults. But they do not expect the Russians to let up.

And in Vuhledar — a former mining town strategically located at the intersection of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions — the Russians are also gaining ground, advancing around the city from the northeast. They recently drove the Ukrainians from two mines that had served as key bases, soldiers said, raising the risk that a city that had been the site of some of Russia’s most devastating losses in this war could now fall.

“They still haven’t taken Vuhledar to this day,” said Dmytro, a 41-year-old senior lieutenant with the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which has led the defense of the city for two years without a break. But he is worried.

“If they manage to get past the mines,” he said, “they’ll surround Vuhledar.” For now, he said, the soldiers in the city “are just hanging on.”

Liubov Sholudko and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from eastern Ukraine.