Free Republic

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in Bakhmut to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners, who are perishing by the thousands in the longest battle of the war, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday. The claim suggested that Ukraine sees an opportunity, despite the heavy casualties it has suffered in the eastern city, to exhaust Wagner’s nearly suicidal prisoner assaults, which Ukraine’s commanders regard as one of Russia’s most effective tactics. “This is their last stand,” Col. Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern group of forces, told...

Peering through an infrared scope, a Ukrainian soldier noticed some heads poking over a trench a few dozen yards away. “‘Are there any of our guys in front of us?’” he asked, according to an account of the ensuing firefight by fellow Ukrainian soldiers. There were not. Two Ukrainians crept forward into the muddy wasteland of artillery craters between the two trench lines outside the eastern city of Lyman, eventually reaching the wreckage of an armored personnel carrier. Using it as cover to shoot from an unexpected angle, they forced the Russians to retreat. When it was over, they found...

Creeping forward along a tree line late at night toward an entrenched Ukrainian position, the Russian soldier watched in horror as his comrades were mowed down by enemy fire. His squad of 10 ex-convicts advanced only a few dozen yards before being decimated. “We were hit by machine-gun fire,” said the soldier, a private named Sergei. One soldier was wounded and screamed, “Help me! Help me, please!,” the private said, although no help arrived. Eight soldiers were killed, one escaped back to Russian lines and Sergei was captured by Ukrainians.

On the screen of a thermal imaging camera, the Russian armored personnel carrier disappeared in a silent puff of smoke. “What a beautiful explosion,” said First Lt. Serhiy, a Ukrainian drone pilot who watched as his weapon buzzed into a Russian-controlled village and picked off the armored vehicle, a blast that was audible seconds later at his position about four miles away. “We used to cheer, we used to shout, ‘Hurray!’ but we’re used to it now,” he said. The war in Ukraine has been fought primarily through the air, with artillery, rockets, missiles and drones. And for months, Russia...

Even as it engages in fierce fighting with Russia on the battlefield, Ukraine is also waging war on a different, more shadowy front: rooting out spies and collaborators in government and society who are providing crucial help to the invading forces. While Ukrainian society as a whole has rallied to the country’s defense, Russian sympathizers are reporting the locations of Ukrainian targets like garrisons or ammunition depots, Ukraine’s officials say. Priests have sheltered Russian officers and informed on Ukrainian activists in Russian-occupied areas. One official said collaborators had removed explosives from bridges, allowing Russian troops to cross. The issue was...

Russian forces appeared poised to tighten the noose around thousands of Ukrainian troops near two strategically important cities in the fiercely contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine on Sunday, mounting an assault on Ukrainian front lines that forced Ukraine to rush reinforcements to the area. On a day of fighting that put even territory thought to be securely in Ukrainian hands in play, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, warned that the war could grind on for years. They urged Ukraine’s Western allies to settle in for the long haul as Russia moved...

POKROVSK, Ukraine — Camouflaged in a heap of branches cut from nearby trees, the weapon that Ukraine hopes will make a critical difference in its war with Russia is all but invisible from more than a few feet away. Soon, a single round shoots out with a boom and a howling, metallic shriek as it sails toward Russian positions. It is the American-made M777 howitzer. It shoots farther, moves faster and is hidden more easily, and it’s what the Ukrainian military has been waiting for. Three months into the war in Ukraine, the first M777s — the most lethal weapons...

The solicitation to commit treason came to Oleksandr Vilkul on the second day of the war, in a phone call from an old colleague. Mr. Vilkul, the scion of a powerful political family in southeastern Ukraine that was long seen as harboring pro-Russian views, took the call as Russian troops were advancing to within a few miles of his hometown, Kryvyi Rih. “He said, ‘Oleksandr Yurivich, you are looking at the map, you see the situation is predetermined,’” Mr. Vilkul said, recalling the conversation with a fellow minister in a former, pro-Russian Ukrainian government. “Sign an agreement of friendship, cooperation...

The anxiety remains, but in Ukraine’s capital, large lines of cars are now forming on highways into the city and businesses are reopening. On Feb. 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kolya Rybytva gathered his grandmother and younger sister and left Kyiv “quickly and without unnecessary sentiments,” he said, heading west. His parents and brother stayed behind to help in the war effort.“The decision was made in minutes,” he said, “and it was one of the most difficult in life, but we all understood that war does not provide comfortable solutions.”At the time, Mr. Rybytva, 24, understood that he...

When he shoots down a Russian jet, “I am happy that this plane will no longer bomb my peaceful towns. And as we see in practice, that is exactly what Russian jets do.” “I had situations when I was approaching a Russian plane to a close enough distance to target and fire,” he said. “I could already detect it but was waiting for my missile to lock on while at the same time from the ground they tell me that a missile was fired at me already.” He said he maneuvered his jet through a series of extreme banks, dives...

A collection of photographs that Ukraine says shows the presence of Russian forces in the eastern part of the country, and which the United States cited as evidence of Russian involvement, has come under scrutiny. The photographs were submitted by Ukraine last week to the Organization for Security and Cooperation, an organization in Vienna that has been monitoring the situation in Ukraine. Some of the photographs were also provided by American officials to Secretary of State John Kerry so he could show them when he met in Geneva last Thursday with his counterparts from the European Union, Russia, and Ukraine....