All that news you're seeing about new weapons coming to Ukraine? They're significant. But they're not the whole story. In Donbas, soldiers described an extremely different picture, one where some units had suffered 50% losses and were constantly running out of ammunition.
Many soldiers just back from the front told us they didn't have shells to fire back at the Russians units constantly bombarding them. They were just crouching in their trenches, taking heavy casualties.
Morale is seriously low, particularly in units that had to retreat from positions they spilled blood to hold because they didn't have enough weapons to fight back.
A commander told us that a month ago they were firing 150 shells a day at the Russians. Now they’re down to about ten a day, because resupplies are falling short. At times, they’ve had none.
“We were chased like rabbits by the Russian artillery,” he said.“We couldn’t do anything. For the last four days we were just hiding from Russian drones.”
Many others from different units told us similar stories. One soldier said: “We felt forgotten somehow. Forgotten there in this land with this constant shelling, these fires and rockets.”
Losses of 40-60%, going by conversations with these soldiers, is not uncommon. Half of the people in your unit, gone.
There is a lot of variation depending on the location of the unit, the commanders and the weapons deliveries. Conditions are better in some areas. But the stories we found weren't one-off anomalies. Almost everyone we talked to said the same thing.
Alex, who we met in Pokrovsk, said: “Our spirit was very high when we were recruited. We understood where we were going, and we were ready to be killed. But when we ran out of shells everyone became very depressed. It was terrible.”
Still, like the others, he was going back to the front. Read the full report here in @thetimes - pictures by @JM_Beck and additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir thetimes.co.uk/article/a-youn…
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