12 Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
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The soldiers could do little but huddle
in their bunkers and endure as the
ground along their trench line lurched
to the tune of Russian artillery. By-
standers in a battle they had yet to join,
their fate lay in the hands of an enemy
working distant war machines far be-
yond the range of their rifles.
It was Tuesday morning. The bom-
bardment of the area around Pisky vil-
lage began soon after 6am and was in
full flow for five hours. A Russian jet
made two bombing runs early in the
attack. Russian tanks moved to a tree
line 750 metres across the open fields of
no man’s land and fired, sending blasts
of white-hot metal into the Ukrainian
trenches. Mortars thumped along the
line, and Grad rockets cratered the
Donbas fields and pitted the roads.
Something caught fire and thick
black smoke billowed upwards. Then
suddenly it was over. The wave of noise
lifted and moved elsewhere. Ukrainian
soldiers emerged from their bunkers in-
to the sunlight and at least three
wounded were rushed away in field am-
bulances. None had fired a bullet.
Last week two others from the unit
were killed in a similar barrage. The
platoon had been briefed not to discuss
casualties but when I asked about the
only soldier I knew there from a previ-
ous visit, a marine NCO with a broken
heart, they told me he was already dead.
“It’s shit to have to wait these attacks
out like this, in shelter, unable to fight
back as we would like,” a 26-year-old
senior sergeant known by the nom-de-
guerre Prapor said as he stared out to
the tree line. “We know we’ll get our
chance to fight, but right now it’s an ar-
tillery war. The guys in the trenches
don’t have much to do except hold the
line and suck it up until the day comes.”
He shrugged as his soldiers peered
over the trench lip. They all smelt the
same; a tomcat mix of soil, stale sweat,
gun oil and cigarettes. A cat prowled
along the duckboards in search of rats;
spring flowers grew among blast-burnt
bushes; there were even some larks in
the sky, trilling carelessly, though the
sound of the guns continued elsewhere.
“We look forward to the day of the
battle for Donbas when we will actually
see our enemy face to face, so we can
make them all ‘good Russians’,” said
again if it wishes to pursue the war to its
strategic advantage. Neither can
Ukraine absorb the annihilation of its
best and most experienced forces if it is
to win back lost territory.
“Donbas is decisive in that a compre-
hensive Russian victory there wouldn’t
give them any need to stop. If the price
of that victory was low, they may think
they could take Odesa too, or even push
on to Transnistria to cut Ukraine off
from the Black Sea, which would be a
huge price for Ukraine to pay,” said Gen-
eral Sir Richard Barrons, the former
head of the UK’s Joint Forces Com-
mand. “Donbas could put the Russiansback on a successful footing or bring
them to what is essentially a defeat.”a war redefined
As much as a clash of armies, the start
of battle for Donbas has also allowed
Putin to redefine the war. The Russian
president has moved the narrative of
“denazification” to a conflict pitched as
an existential defence of Russia against
the West; a long-term armed struggle
likely to last months and possibly years.
The US has redefined its aims too. It
now wants to help Ukraine retake terri-
tory lost in 2014 and has broadened the
US strategy to make Russia “so weaken-ed”, as Lloyd Austin, the secretary of de-
fence, said in Poland on Monday, that it
was incapable of further aggression. Liz
Truss, the foreign secretary, echoed this
on Wednesday, calling for a “doubling
down” of military support for Ukraine
to help it push Russia out of the country,
including Crimea, annexed in 2014.
With negotiations between the two
sides effectively dead as the Donbas
battle intensifies, the lifespan of the war
has been dramatically extended too. As
the attritional fight for territory takes
shape in the east, the notion that Russia
could somehow achieve a quick, sym-
bolic win in time for its May 9 VictoryDefence officials fear the cost of Boris
Johnson’s £250 million national
flagship is delaying plans for a surveil-
lance vessel to guard critical
infrastructure from Russia.
The Ministry of Defence announced
that it would build the multi-role ocean
surveillance ship, to be in service by
2024, as part of the defence review last
year.
A source said MoD officials had
warned in private that there was not
enough money for both vessels. The
flagship, to come from the MoD budget,
is seen as a replacement for the Royal
Yacht Britannia, and will act as a “work-
ing trade ship”.
The plan for the surveillance vessel
was published a year ago but there is no
Promotion for Briton who led
intelligence on Russian plans
Larisa Brown, Michael EvansJohnson flagship ‘delays navy vessel’
longer an in-service date. The vessel,
which forms part of the MoD’s Arctic
Strategy, is expected to be built event-
ually, but behind schedule. A source
said: “We’re buying a bauble to promote
trade over a vital piece of equipment
that protects our trade from the threat
of Russian aggression.”
Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of the
defence select committee, said: “This is
another example of how pressure on
the defence budget is resulting in the
loss or delay of key capabilities being
introduced. As threat levels increase it’s
clear our entire navy is already too
small to match current taskings.”
Tom Sharpe, a former Royal Navy
commander, said the fact the MoD had
to choose between the two assets in the
short term showed the “parlous state”
of defence spending.The surveillance vessel is designed to
protect underwater communications
infrastructure in the Atlantic, reflecting
growing concerns over the threat of
sabotage by Russian submarines.
In March last year, the government
said the vessel, with a crew of 15, would
come into service by 2024.
In November, Jeremy Quin, the pro-
curement minister, said options for the
procurement strategy and the project
were “under development, but no firm
decisions have yet been made”.
“No precise date has yet been set for
the entry into service of the multi-role
ocean surveillance ship,” he said.
The MoD denied that funding for the
surveillance vessel had been held back.
It added: “The programme, which is in
its concept phase, progresses as
planned.”Larisa Brown Defence Editor
The British officer who led a unit that
provided crucial intelligence on
Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine has
been promoted to one of the most
senior positions in the military.
Lieutenant General Sir Jim Hocken-
hull, chief of defence intelligence, will
become the UK’s commander of strate-
gic command, which oversees special
forces operations, cyber-operations
and space. He will take over from Gen-
eral Sir Patrick Sanders, who will be-
come the next head of the army.
Hockenhull, 57, who is well liked by
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, was
widely expected to get the post. Histeam of 5,000 military personnel and
civilians provided intelligence and ana-
lysis on President Putin’s battle plan
and with allies and other government
partners predicted his next moves. In
an unprecedented step, they also
worked with the Americans to declassi-
fy much of the intelligence to expose
the Kremlin’s real aims.
Hockenhull joined the Intelligence
Corps in 1986 and as a junior officer
spent his early years focused on Russia.
Wallace said: “General Jim has had
an extraordinary impact on defence,
including vital work most recently in
supporting the crisis in Ukraine.”
Hockenhull said that he was “deeply
honoured” to be given the position.News War in Ukraine
Scars of shelling are everywhere
The might of Russian
artillery is proving hard
to withstand,
Anthony
Loyd writes
in Pisky
Prapor, smiling at the popular soldier’s
euphemism. “But until that day comes
it goes like this, an artillery war, the
infantryman’s waiting game.”the donbas battle
The new battle for the Donbas began
ten days ago when Russia, having shift-
ed most of the 190,000 troops it had
committed to the war eastwards, began
its assault along a heavily defended
300-mile front with an intensifying
barrage of artillery and missile strikes.
The front line is in perpetual action.
Daily bombardments of areas such as
Pisky, a suburb of Donetsk, are de-
signed to probe the Ukrainian line for
weaknesses, kill soldiers and erode de-
fences. In other areas of the Donbas,
such as the fronts south of Izyum and
west of Popasna, ferocious shelling has
supported Russian tank advances. Less
well-equipped Ukrainian forces have
been pushed back along exposed flat-
lands from eastern towns and villages.
Their retreats along open ground have
taken a heavy toll of dead and wounded,
exacted by long-range Russian artillery.
Each side has played down its casual-
ties and exaggerated enemy losses but
Ukrainian military officials speaking
on condition of anonymity told The
Times that two brigades had been rav-
aged by Russian bombardment in Don-
bas in just over a week. They stressed
that Russian losses were even higher.
After accompanying a Ukrainian
team of military paramedics as they
picked up a soldier wounded in the back
by shrapnel, one soldier referred to a
single incident in which dozens of his
comrades had been killed when the vil-
lage they were in was hit. They showed
me pictures of rows of bodybags in a
field waiting to be collected. “One
village, in one day,” the soldier said.
Far to the rear, Russian missiles have
struck at Ukrainian logistical hubs,
transport routes and fuel depots.
Predicted by western and Ukrainian
officers to last months rather than
weeks, the battle is setting the shape of
the war. Russia aims to capture the
whole of two administrative areas, the
oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, which
comprise Donbas. Part of the region
has been held by pro-Russian separa-
tists since 2014. In doing so, the Rus-
sians also hope to encircle and destroy
the 40,000 troops of the Joint Forces
Operation, the cream of the Ukrainian
forces who have been defending the
area since the conflict began.
If Russia captures the whole Donbas,
along with their earlier seizure of the
southeastern coastline, it would hail it
as a key victory. Defeat could have cata-
strophic consequences for either side.
The Kremlin, having decisively lost the
battle for Kyiv, cannot afford to loseUKRAINERUSSIALuhansk50 milesDonetskLuhanskskDonetskPiskyRussian-held
territoryIzyumPopasnaLUHLUHHHHANSAAAANSA KKDONDONNETSETSETKK
Donbas
region
border