Behind Ukraine’s front lines, a battle to manage expectations

Yvan Daniv has parked his white delivery van filled with donated medical supplies at a closed gas station in Ukrainian-held Donetsk, about 15 miles from the Russian-occupied part of the region.

His goal: deliver his bounty to the soldiers engaged in the initial stages of Ukraine’s much-discussed summer counteroffensive, which aims to take back as much as possible of the 20% of Ukrainian territory held by Russia.

“Right now I think our forces are mostly testing the occupiers to see where they might be weakest,” says Mr. Daniv, who beginning even before Russia’s full-scale invasion 16 months ago has made a weekly drive from Lviv in western Ukraine to the front lines with first-aid items and medications for wounded troops.

“But,” he adds, “I’m expecting big advances soon.”

Mr. Daniv may be but a civilian volunteer, but his observations about the counteroffensive track closely with that of military analysts, and with the scant information that military and government officials, as well as soldiers engaged in the fighting, have been willing to disclose.

Ukrainian forces have retaken a half-dozen villages and perhaps 100 square miles of territory this month in the initial days of the assault.

Advances have generally been reported in meters rather than in kilometers, as Ukrainian forces take on Russian adversaries who have had many months to fortify their defenses and are backed by anti-tank weapons, mortar and artillery fire, warplanes, and attack helicopters.

A noticeable calming of operations over recent days suggests to some analysts that the Ukrainians have at least partially paused their initial counteroffensive forays to assess performance and reevaluate tactics.

Russian forces not idle

In the meantime, Russian forces have not simply hunkered down, but have launched their own counterstrikes. Last week Moscow announced it will pay soldiers a bonus for destroying any of the much-ballyhooed advanced weaponry the West has sent Ukraine: the Leopard tanks, the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, the HIMARS missile launchers.

Moreover, the Russians over the past two weeks have stepped up missile strikes, drone attacks, and shelling of civilian infrastructure – in large cities like Odesa and Kyiv, but also on the well-kept villages along the southeastern front.

Indeed, it’s the huge boom and ensuing black smoke of a Grad rocket attack on a power plant in the Donetsk village of Kurakhove that has Mr. Daniv running for his truck, yelling, “I want to go in that direction!”

His plans are foiled, however, by an olive-drab vehicle carrying three soldiers from Ukraine’s 79th Airborne Division, who pull up and prohibit the man they affectionately call “Mr. Yes” from approaching the danger.

Instead, they entice Mr. Daniv away to greater safety with the promise of an impressive artifact for the war memorabilia museum he is assembling.

Once in the adjacent village of Dachne, the men proudly present their “Mr. Yes” (for his ability to deliver supplies they request) with the wing of a Russian attack drone they recently shot down. Hugs and, for Mr. Daniv, tears ensue.

Then the broad smiles and backslapping turn serious as the soldiers discuss the counteroffensive underway.

“From what we see, this is not the main thrust of the counteroffensive,” says Sergei, call sign Casper, a contractor with the 79th Airborne. “We’re still probing and pushing forward at different points of the front lines to figure out what strengths and weaknesses they have.”

His colleague Dmitry, call sign Fox, offers what he sees as the bigger picture.

“The scale of operations and deployment of weaponry that we are seeing here can only be compared to the big battles of the Second World War,” he says. “So much is depending on this; they [commanders] have to know it’s the best possible moment, and then they will launch the breakthrough.”

The men say they know expectations for impressive gains are high. That’s true among the Western powers that have supplied much of the advanced weaponry and training that the Ukrainians are expected to deploy, they say. But they also sense it among civilians who in large numbers describe “success” in the counteroffensive as a return to Ukrainian sovereignty of much if not all of the territory that Russia has occupied since 2014.

“We know the expectations of the country are huge, but the reality is that it’s not going to be like last year. It’s going to be much harder, because this time our adversary is better organized and better prepared,” says Sergei. He’s referring to last fall, when the military impressed Ukrainians and the world with lightning-strike offensives that took back the occupied territories of Kharkiv region and Kherson city.

Most military analysts are also careful not to encourage the public’s hopes for unrealistic successes in this counteroffensive, mindful of the prospects for what some senior Ukrainian officials have warned could be an “emotional letdown.”

“We will have big territorial gains with this counteroffensive, I am confident, but it will not be this year that Ukraine will take back all of the territories occupied since 2014,” says Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military and political analyst with the Informational Resistance Group, a Kyiv-based think tank.

“Liberation of all the territories occupied since 2014,” he adds – meaning all of the Donbas and the Crimean Peninsula – “will not occur until 2024.”

In market town, snapping up junk

Traffic on the two-lane country highway that links the villages stretched out on the Ukrainian-held side of the front is a strange mix of military vehicles and John Deere-green tractors and combines – the latter indicating that the Donetsk region’s early wheat harvest is about to commence, war or no war.

In the buzzing market town of Pokrovske, soldiers with an afternoon of R&R consume pizzas with names like “PATRIOT” and “HIMARS” and load up on the junk foods that they crave but are not available in their camps.

“We like chips!” says Vlad Shevchenko, part of the air reconnaissance unit of an artillery brigade, who has just purchased two bags of his favorite bacon-flavored chips.

As for the counteroffensive, he says he too worries that Ukrainians will anticipate a repeat of the quick successes of the fall lightning strikes in Kharkiv and Kherson.

“A lot of hard work went into preparing that counteroffensive, but people didn’t see that part,” he says. “They remember the successes, and they expect the same now.”

If not on a junk-food run, the soldiers take their free hours to repair the personal vehicles they’ve brought with them to war.

It’s the case for Vadym Khokhol, who is supervising buddy Serhii as he replaces the burned-out generator in the vehicle that the two use to get to their battle positions.

“We’ve pushed the Russians back about a kilometer over the past month, and this is not yet the big counteroffensive,” crows Mr. Khokhol, who along with Serhii is part of an “assault brigade” of a Dnipro regional Territorial Defense unit that was integrated into the Ukrainian army.

The two say they can see the buildup of vehicles and weaponry on the other side of the lines. But if that worries them, they don’t show it.

When the “big counteroffensive” is launched, Mr. Khokhol says he expects the objective in this area to be ambitious: “the complete liberation of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and to get as close to Crimea as possible.”

Rose gardens and covered windows

All along the front-line highway, the one-story, corrugated-steel-roofed farmhouses typical to the area sport neat vegetable gardens, fruit-laden cherry trees, and palace-worthy rose gardens. The only obvious indications of a nearby war and nearly daily rocket attacks are the plywood coverings over windows.

“Donbas is always with roses; it’s not a garden without them,” says Tetiana, who is proud to show passersby outside her Dachne home her 50 rosebushes, all of them in riotous bloom.

She is more reticent about the war, which last year left an unexploded shell in her back garden, and which has sent her three grandchildren and their parents to Switzerland for refuge.

“We just want the war to end as soon as possible; we just want peace,” she says carefully.

But when she is pressed on her expectations for the counteroffensive, her tone hardens slightly. “Ukraine is Ukraine,” she says. “It can’t be any other way.”

A similar initial reticence marks a conversation with Valentyna Kotolovets, one of three volunteers who keep Dachne’s 48-shelf public library operating.

At first she offers little of her opinion on the war. “People like to read as a distraction,” she says. “I will say that books in Ukrainian are becoming more popular,” she adds.

But after a tour of the once-glorious community center where now only the modest library hangs on, Ms. Kotolovets opens up.

“The two most important men in my life, my husband and my son-in-law, are fighting in this war,” she says. Both are in difficult places where fighting rages, her husband near the Russian-held city of Bakhmut, her son-in-law outside the Donetsk regional city of Kramatorsk.

“We sit here and we wait for our boys to come back with the victory,” she says with pride. “And we have told them, ‘When you do come home, we will greet you with our flag of Ukraine!’”

Reporting for this story was supported by Oleksandr Naselenko.