CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — Much of the world’s attention in recent months has been focused on Ukraine’s desperate battle to hold off a new Russian offensive eyeing Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city after the capital of Kyiv.

But the case can be made that as momentous a strategic battle is being fought in this devastated, obscure city on the front lines some 200 miles away from Kharkiv, where outgunned Ukrainian forces have managed to hold their lines just as U.S. and Western aid and ammunition are finally starting to make their presence felt in the fight.

In the wee hours of a Monday morning late last month, a British-made “Spartan” armored personnel carrier roared down a dusty country road here in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

With their eyes glazed over or heavy with sleep, the soldiers of Ukraine’s 28th Mechanized Brigade aboard remained silent. The rumble of the vehicle’s engine and the clatter of its treads rhythmically slapping the ground were deafening, rendering conversation nigh impossible.

Not that the men are in the mood for a chat: They had climbed aboard the Spartan at around 2 a.m., and a couple of them are now hoping to catch up on some sleep. Every five minutes, Andrii, 30, silently shifts his weight from left to right, hoping to find a more comfortable position between his armor-clad comrades and the boxes of ammunition and packs of bottled water. To no avail.

After an uneventful 30-minute drive, the Spartan eventually comes to a halt.

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“Dismount!” shouts Andrii without missing a beat. One by one, the soldiers awkwardly exit the cramped vehicle, gun in hand, into a moonlit clearing where they are greeted by a soft, cool breeze.

And, more ominously, by the acrid smell of smoke.

“That’s Chasiv Yar burning,” Evguenii, the press officer of the brigade, had said earlier. For security reasons, troops on the front lines are identified in print only by their first names.

A small industrial town of 12,000 people before the invasion, Chasiv Yar acquired key strategic significance following Russia’s capture of neighboring Bakhmut in May of last year. Now besieged by Russian forces eager to press on their advantage in the east, most of Chasiv Yar has been leveled to the ground by relentless artillery fire and glide bombs.

Despite widespread fears of a Russian military breakout this spring, however, the city has not fallen.

As the unit drove toward the frontline that morning, diffuse smoke covered the road like mist on a cold winter morning, and the orange glow of a rocket briefly lit up the cloudy night sky. Whether it was Ukrainian or Russian was impossible to tell.

There is little time for Andrii and his comrades to enjoy the cool summer night, however, as Russian drones constantly fly overhead. Under the red glow of their helmet-mounted LED flashlights, the men unload the Spartan quickly, picking up boxes of ammunition, water and sleeping bags before heading out of the clearing.

“Five meters” orders one of them. That’s the safety distance to be kept between each soldier to minimize casualties if they were to be shelled, or, more likely, to be hit by a drone.

After a 10-minute walk punctuated by the distant rumble of artillery, the Ukrainian soldiers finally reach their home for the next five days, much to the delight of two ratty stray dogs. Located in a leafy undergrowth nestled between the road and gently rolling hills, the position sits in the middle of a two-way artillery range, with the Russians posted only a couple of hundred yards away.

A decade of war

As the rest of the unit splits up, Andrii slumps down under a tree, an energy drink in hand and an electronic cigarette in the other. In between long drags of his vape, he recounts how he had volunteered to join Ukraine’s “Aidar” battalion after the outbreak of war in the easternmost Donbas region, in 2014. He was only 20 at the time.

“I’ve been fighting for 10 years now,” he said with a weary smile. “Nobody has asked or ordered me to join the army, I understood by myself that I had to defend my country from the Russian swines.”

Since 2014, the year Russia unilaterally annexed Crimea, Andrii had fought in Schastya, in the Luhansk region, then Kurdiumivka and, now, Chasiv Yar.

In recent months, the town’s defenders had found themselves in an increasingly precarious position as they contended with shortages of men and artillery shells while facing relentless Russian assaults.

Despite their overwhelming fire superiority, Russian forces have so far been unable to capture the town, leading some observers to believe that the Kremlin’s window of opportunity in the east is now closing as foreign military aid slowly trickles down to the frontline, shoring up Ukrainian defenses.

“Don’t think we have no shells here, we do have them,” Semyon, 26, the commander of an artillery unit of the Lyut (“Fury”) brigade of Ukraine’s National Police remarked late last month. “Had you arrived here a couple of hours earlier, everything would have been full,” he said as he gestured toward rows of neatly aligned 122 mm shells stored in a dugout.

“As for the countries that provided them, it’s mostly European countries and the United States, though we do also have older Soviet ammunition.”

Andrii and his comrades also feel an improved supply situation.

“It doesn’t seem to me that there are any major shortages of ammunition here,” said Oleksandr, a native of Ukraine’s western region of Ternopil. “As you can hear, their artillery is working, and so is ours.”

Even as he speaks, the muffled crack of an outgoing mortar round echoes in the distance, followed by the whistle of the shell rising through the clouds.

Yet, the main threat now looming over the battlefield doesn’t come from a whistle but from an ominous buzzing sound.

“Mavic!” shouted Denys suddenly, furrowing his brow. The men freeze, their lit cigarettes slowly burning between their still fingers. Above our heads, the buzzing grows louder, stops for a moment, and finally vanishes in the distance, like a monstrous insect that has lost trace of its prey.

Both sides use commercially available Mavic drones to spy on the enemy and transmit coordinates to the artillery, and not an hour goes by without one buzzing over the undergrowth.

“Our drones generally fly lower than theirs,” explained Andrii. “If you can hear them well, most of the time, they’re ours.”

Mere seconds after the threat had receded, a muffled voice came out over the radio ordering the soldiers to assemble the pieces of the 12.7mm Browning M2 lying about the dugout. The gun was already set up; it just had to be adjusted with the coordinates given by HQ.

After a 15-minute wait and a last cigarette, they receive the order to fire. Between each deafening roar of the gun, Oleksandr corrected the coordinates and adjusted the Browning.

“On average, we fire around a thousand bullets a day,” he explains afterward, swatting away the swarms of mosquitoes hovering over the trench, “mainly when the Russians rotate between positions.”

Contemporaries described the industrial carnage of World War I as “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” In that respect, there is little difference between the trenches of northern France and those that now scar the black Donbas earth.

Between two missions, Andrii and his comrades spend most of their time idly talking, chain-smoking and thinking about the next meal or rotation at the rear. Lying on a yoga mat beneath a tree, his eyes half-closed, Semyon is spending his eighth day at the position, and he has grown accustomed to the background concert of rumbling artillery in the distance.

He doesn’t even flinch when a Russian helicopter flies overhead before firing its missiles at a Ukrainian position further up the road.

“They’re quite active here, both theirs and ours,” explained Evguenii.

At the end of this fairly routine day punctuated by naps, mosquito bites and ribald jokes, Semyon is due to be evacuated, but Russian fire is blocking the road to the rear position.

After a few hours of restless sleep in a rudimentary shelter underground, the young man makes his way back to the clearing, lighting a last cigarette as the breaking dawn’s orange hue appears on the horizon.

Exhausted but unscathed, Semyon will get to enjoy a short rest away from the front before his next rotation.

Not everyone here has been so lucky: Using a blanket as stretcher, Oleksandr, Denys and two others carefully lift a wounded soldier aboard the Spartan. The short man looks dazed, his arms and legs badly burned by a Russian shell and his uniform reduced to charred, tattered rags.

“Good luck,” say Oleksandr and Denys in parting, before heading back to the position and its dull – and occasionally, deadly – routine.

• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.