DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — It was the dead of night, and the Ukrainian infantryman was writhing in a tree line from serious injuries to his legs, shoulder and lung.
His unit had told him by radio that they could not send anyone to evacuate him. The road to their base in the nearby city of Kostiantynivka had become a kill zone. “There were too many drones flying around,” recalled the infantryman, Oleh Chausov, as he described the experience.
Instead, he was told, the brigade would try to get him out with a small, robot-like tracked vehicle remotely operated from miles away and less visible to Russian drones than an armored carrier.
When the vehicle arrived, Chausov dragged himself aboard, his wounded legs dangling. But within 20 minutes, the vehicle hit a mine and blew up, he said. Miraculously, Chausov survived, crawled out and took shelter in a nearby trench.
He was back to square one, still trapped on the battlefield.
The operation in May — detailed in separate accounts from Chausov and an officer from his unit, the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, and captured in drone footage shared with The New York Times — underscores the dire conditions Ukrainian troops face defending Kostiantynivka.
The city stands directly in the path of Russia’s summer offensive in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which has seen Moscow’s troops make some of their biggest monthly territorial gains since 2022. Russia now controls more than two-thirds of Donetsk. But to seize the rest of the region, it must take urban centers still under Ukraine’s control and vital to its army logistics.
That makes Kostiantynivka a prime target. The city is the southern gateway to a chain of cities that form Ukraine’s last major defensive belt in Donetsk. Should it fall, nearly all cities farther north would come within range of Russian drones. It would bring Moscow closer to its long-sought goal of seizing all of Donetsk.
Russian forces have carved out a 10-mile-deep pocket around the Ukrainian troops defending Kostiantynivka, partly surrounding them from the east, south and west. Practically every movement in that pocket is targeted by Russian drones around the clock, according to a half-dozen Ukrainian soldiers and officers fighting in the area. Troops are often stranded for weeks without rotation or the possibility of evacuating the wounded.
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