Inside Ukraine's effort to fortify hundreds of miles of defensive lines

Mint

2 days ago

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine—A line of antitank ditches and barbed wire cuts through the sunflower fields all the way to the horizon here in Ukraine's battle-scarred east, fortifications the country bets it can lay fast and far enough to halt Russia's summer offensive. But the defensive gamble is facing increasingly long odds.
Kyiv is in the midst of its most ambitious defensive construction effort to date, erecting obstacles and carving up the earth to thwart manned and unmanned assaults. While riflemen scan the sky for enemy robots, Ukraine's own drone operators sit below them in an extensive network of subterranean dugouts.
'The army that digs deeper is the army that survives," said Col. Oleh Rezunenko, a military engineer overseeing a nearly 200-mile section of the mammoth project.
Well into its second year, the wider front-line program has been beset by delays, attacks and arrests for alleged corruption. It now faces being overrun by the enemy it is trying to repel.
Rezunenko's entrenchments, including miles of waist-high concrete pyramids, start from the Kharkiv region in the north and reach as far south as Zaporizhzhia. 'Our main task is to dig as quickly and as deeply as we can."
The challenge is to hold back a Russian army bolstered by thousands of fresh recruits whom Moscow is throwing into battle for only small or symbolic gains. Ukraine's understaffed units are struggling to defend against the onslaught as Russia shifts tactics daily and slowly chews through territory.
Over the past 18 months, Moscow's troops have pierced several weak spots on the Ukrainian line, and taken advantage of slacker defenses in the north to begin a new push involving some 50,000 soldiers.
Ukraine is now hoping that installing a triple row of fortifications will prevent similar breakthroughs in the east, where Russia is pushing to capture the key cities of Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka. But gaps in the entrenchments have prompted some soldiers to warn that a patchy defensive belt could end up like the Maginot Line, the ambitious French fortifications that were bypassed by the Germans in World War II.
Rezunenko's regiment has come under relentless Russian drone attacks, which also target their pickups and excavators. They have lost industrial equipment to strikes over the past three months and several dozen soldiers have been injured, Rezunenko says. The Wall Street Journal accompanied the regiment on a recent excursion to inspect fortifications being built in the Donetsk region, a part of the front along which Russia is actively pressing its offensive.
The first line of defense is built by front-line troops, while teams like Rezunenko's dig the next line back. Regional civilian administrations are responsible for the third entrenchment, ringing key cities and reinforcing the borders of some regions. Each layer is designed to stop Russian troops in their tracks.
The government says it allocated more than 46 billion hryvnia, equivalent to $1.1 billion, for defensive construction in 2024, close to 2% of Ukraine's military spending for the year. Officials say this year's amount is far greater but haven't disclosed the figure.
'We're using all the resources at our disposal," said Ivan Fedorov, the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, where Russian artillery and glide bombs have slammed into defensive construction sites. 'We still have a lot of work to do."
The speed of innovation on the battlefield means elements of the entrenchments could be obsolete by the time any Russians reach the second or third line of defense.
At the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, soldiers fought in long trench lines designed to protect company-size units from artillery. Today, small explosive drones are so ubiquitous and can penetrate such small gaps in defenses that protecting soldiers from them is the priority.
That means Ukraine's trenches must now be built deeper underground, with dugouts for small groups of troops and command posts for drone pilots with antidrone nets and metal grids. Battlefield features in military textbooks—observation posts overlooking miles of spacious trenches—are becoming outdated.
'Fortifications remain important, but less so than over the past two years," said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst who recently toured parts of Ukraine's front line.
Rezunenko, a 55-year-old veteran of the Soviet and Ukrainian armed forces, says the 1,000 workers he oversees build smaller trench lines than in the past but more of them, and twice as fast. A dozen of them now take just three weeks to build a section of trench equipped with foxholes and sleeping quarters for a squad of soldiers.
Because Russia's armored-vehicle stocks are running low, its troops are often dispatched in small groups on motorbikes and buggies. Rezunenko's teams counter this with a dense layer of hard-to-see thin metal coils, designed to entangle advancing troops and vehicles and turn them into drone targets.
Col. Oleh Rezunenko, a military engineer overseeing a nearly 200-mile section of the project, climbs up a mound of earth.Obstacles known as dragon's teeth serve as protection against tanks.
Still, Ukraine's military command continues to value more traditional defenses, such as antitank ditches, because Russia deploys combined-arms warfare that draws on old and new battle techniques.
'We study what the enemy is doing, and we adapt the defenses we build," said Serhiy Aborin, the chief of staff of Rezunenko's unit, the 23rd Engineering-Positional Regiment of Ukraine's Support Forces, on a tour of positions this month.
For every worker constructing defenses, Rezunenko has two others with rifles on watch for drones. 'As soon as you relax," said one worker who was toiling in 100-degree heat. 'Expect instant comeuppance."
Ukraine knows all about being bogged down by enemy defenses. Its troops and their Western-supplied arms got caught in Russia's own multilayered trench lines and antitank ditches during Kyiv's major counteroffensive in the summer of 2023.
The setback spurred Ukraine's current fortification effort. At the time, President Volodymyr Zelensky called for accelerated construction, and urged private companies and donors to get involved.
But it wasn't sufficient to hold back Russian forces whose tanks and troops poured across a badly defended stretch of Ukraine's northern border near Kharkiv the following spring. Ukraine's antitank obstacles—often called dragon's teeth—were overturned, littering the landscape, according to images posted online by local journalists. Soldiers criticized Ukraine's military command for a lack of adequate preparation.
Local authorities in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, were left to dig trenches while gas-station owners fortified refuel pumps with sandbags. The Russians never reached the city. Earlier this month, a court arrested Kharkiv's former deputy mayor on allegations of embezzling government funds allocated for fortifications.
Now, the Russians are just 12 miles from Sumy, a regional capital in northern Ukraine, and soldiers there warn of a similar lack of proper defenses. One infantryman said that when Ukraine was in Russia's Kursk region, across the border from Sumy, it should have used the time to prepare strong entrenchments at home.
'We had an opportunity to strengthen the northern part of the front," but failed to do so, he said in a phone interview.
On retreat from Kursk earlier this year, the soldier said his unit found outdated trenches with no overhead cover from Russian drones. Ukraine has since taken back three villages from the Russians and is establishing stronger defensive positions near Sumy.
Back in the east, Rezunenko's regiment is around two-thirds of the way to completing its line, which will be mined should the Russians come close.
The colonel, whose two sons have been wounded in the fighting, says Ukraine should live by the Roman adage: If you want peace, prepare for war.
'Our regiment will continue building," even after the conflict is over, he said. 'I failed to protect my children from war. At least I'll protect my grandkids."
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at [e-mail]