Along the 1,000-kilometer front line, winter has come. The cold is biting, snow and mud cover everything and the wind cuts into bodies. Twenty-two months after the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukraine has settled in for a long war. This autumn, Le Monde went to interview officers and soldiers belonging to combat units. Meeting several times over the course of the war, they spoke freely, without any oversight from their commanders. Some have had to remain anonymous.

"WarWar," a soldier in a special military intelligence unit, has been fighting on the Zaporizhzhia front, where the Ukrainian army hoped to make its main breakthrough to the south in June, so far without success. "The situation is more intense than last year, because of the Russian suicide drones. It's difficult because we can no longer drive freely. Now we have to walk for miles." While he found this "hard to admit," "WarWar" confided that "the Russians are improving faster than [us], and have more capabilities than before."

Staff Sergeant Sergiy Vengerskiy, aka "Zakhar," a soldier in the 518^th Infantry Battalion of the 1^st Special Brigade, back in Kyiv after 18 months of very tough fighting on all fronts of the war in Ukraine, also admitted that "the summer was very difficult" – especially in the Lyman region, in the east of the country, where he was last deployed. "We don't have enough soldiers, nor enough artillery. At the end of the summer, there were only 14 of us, compared with around 150 Russian soldiers. Their fire leveled the forest; there wasn't a single tree left standing." "Zakhar" described "waves of Russian assaults surging" against the Ukrainian lines. "Without more artillery to kill them all," he said, "we won't make it."

This was an observation shared by Sergeant "Dizel," a soldier in the 49^th Infantry Battalion, "Carpathian Sich": "The Russians are sending so many men to assault, it's crazy. And despite our artillery fire, those who survive keep going. I don't quite understand why. I think they must be high [on drugs]."

Colonel Oleh Uminskiy, commander of the 1^st Special Brigade – which is now deployed on the Bakhmut front (eastern Ukraine) – also described the difficulties encountered. "The fighting is very tough, with neither side being able to be superior to the other. One day they [the Russians] are advancing, the next we are. The front is like in All Quiet on the Western Front [a 1929 German novel], like during the First World War. Except that instead of deep trenches, we live and fight in foxholes. And we can't have electricity, fire or heating because we'd be spotted by the enemy's thermal vision drones. We have to go 5 to 10 kilometers to the rear to warm up and eat a hot meal."

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