The impact of a tank round broke the plaster roof of the bunker and caused uniformed men to scramble. Flak jackets and helmets were thrown up and automatic weapons cocked. Amid a crescendo of machine-gun fire, a tall soldier slung an anti-tank missile launcher over his shoulder and took a slow drag on his cigarette.
The Russians were close.
Battles in the East Ukraine has usually occurred at a distance, with Ukrainian and Russian troops artillery lurk at each other, sometimes from tens of kilometers away. But at some points along the zigzagging Eastern Front, the fight becomes a vicious and intimate dance, with enemies getting glimpses of each other as they battle for command of hills and makeshift redoubts in towns and villages shattered by shells.
A soldier known by the call sign Rusin stood at the front in the Kharkiv region on Wednesday. “This is a war of the pure and the light that exists on this earth, and darkness,” he said. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
One such dance took place on Wednesday when a Russian unit of about 10 men entered the village where soldiers of a Ukrainian contingent, the Carpathian Sich Battalion, had dug in. In all likelihood, the Russian forces were there to identify targets for incoming tank fire, including the round that sent the Ukrainian soldiers into action. Ukrainian troops saw the Russian soldiers and opened fire and pushed them back.
“It was a sabotage group, intelligence agency,” a 30-year-old fighter known as Warsaw said, panting after the brief firefight. “Our boys did not sleep and reacted quickly, forcing the enemy to flee.”
So it goes every day, every hour, for the fighters of the Carpathian Sich Battalion, a volunteer unit named after the army of a short-lived independent Ukrainian state that was founded just before World War II. Attached to the Ukrainian Army’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade, the battalion is deployed through a row of villages and dug farmland in the Kharkiv region, with the task of stopping Russian troops from moving from their stronghold in the occupied Ukrainian city of Izium to thrust down.
The battalion gave a reporter and a photographer with The New York Times permission to visit a front line provided the precise location of their base is not revealed. Most soldiers agreed to identify themselves only by their callsigns.
They have not had an easy battle.
Members of the Carpathian Sich Battalion – a diverse unit with soldiers from different countries – took shelter in a bunker on Wednesday against artillery fire in the Kharkov region. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
The Russian army has deployed a massive force along this front in eastern Ukraine, demonstrating its overwhelming superiority in tanks, fighters, helicopters and heavy artillery.
The war machines seldom remain silent for long. Tanks in particular have become a serious threat, fighters said, often coming within a mile of the battalion’s positions and wreaking utter havoc. This month, 13 soldiers with the battalion have already been killed and more than 60 wounded.
“It’s a very different war than I’ve seen in places like Afghanistan or Iraq,” said a colonel who called himself Mikhailo. “It’s tough fighting. Nobody cares about the law of war. They shell small towns, use forbidden artillery.”
Many of the battalion’s soldiers had experience in the eight-year war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and had fought in some of the most intense battles of the conflict. But most had been used to civilian life for years.
A tall, bearded soldier known as Rusin owns a bathtub selling business in the mountainous region of Transcarpathia, western Ukraine. But when Russia invaded on February 24, he quickly married his girlfriend — saying he wanted someone to wait for him at home — and went to war with a sense of mission.
A Ukrainian Mi-8 attack helicopter flies low through the Kharkiv region on Wednesday. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
“We understand that this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia,” he said. “This is a war of the pure and the light that exists on this earth, and darkness. Either we stop this horde and the world gets better, or the world is filled with the anarchy that is everywhere where there is war.”
Fighters from the battalion have temporarily taken up residence in an underground maze beneath a building now pierced with artillery shells. The cannons and ammunition boxes piled in corners are covered in the plaster dust that rains every time a grenade hits nearby.
Aside from soldiers, the bunker is inhabited by a menagerie of animals who have also sought safety from the bombs – several small dogs and a black goat that likes to make a mess of the kitchen. On Wednesday, Chevron, a very large German Shepherd, was sleeping in front of a stack of US-made Javelin rocket launchers, already out of their suitcases and ready to fire.
The whole region is rumbling with war. Low-flying Mi-8 attack helicopters share the air with fighter jets flying over the countryside, occasionally setting fires in the fields as they fire flares to divert heat-seeking missiles.
The unit’s drone operator is Oleksandr Kovalenko, one of the few without a gun. While his job is to help his comrades focus their artillery on Russian positions, he approaches his work like an artist, occasionally cutting and saving photos when the balance between light and shadow in the frame is to his liking.
Soldiers of the Carpathian Sich Battalion watch drone footage of an attack on Russian troops near the front lines in the Kharkiv region on Wednesday. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
It shows off an overhead view of the surrounding farmland. It is green with spring growth, but pockmarked like the moon of artillery strikes. As he scans the landscape, a patch of trees where Russian troops are deployed suddenly erupts into a fireball that shatters into a mushroom cloud.
The battalion is a hodgepodge, with fighters from all over Ukraine and the world. There’s Matej Prokes, a wispy 18-year-old from the Czech Republic who has scribbled “Born to Kill Russians” on the side of his helmet, but admitted somewhat shyly that he hadn’t fired yet. Elman Imanov, 41, from Azerbaijan, was moved to fight against Russia after seeing the atrocities committed against non-combatants in Ukraine.
“I pulled a four-month-old from a nine-storey apartment with my own hands,” he said, as a rack of gold teeth glittered in the bright fluorescent light. “I will never be able to forget that and I will never be able to forgive. He had never seen anything. What was he guilty of?”
The volunteer battalion accepts virtually all newcomers, such as Matej Prokes, an 18-year-old from the Czech Republic, who has scribbled “Born to Kill Russians” on the side of his helmet. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
And then there’s a 47-year-old soldier called Prapor, who is exotic even by battalion standards. Born in Siberia, Prapor had a full career in the Russian military before retiring in the early 2000s, though he declined to say where he fought. He joined Ukrainian forces when Russian troops began shelling Kiev.
“What can I say, they studied well,” he said. “But the fact that they have started killing peaceful civilians, looting. This is indecent.”
The battalion commander, Oleg Kutsin, said this diversity is part of his contingent’s ethos. When the original Carpathian Sich was established in the 1930s, it welcomed anyone willing to fight and die under the blue and gold banner of an independent Ukraine, he said.
Not only are virtually all troops welcome, but also equipment, he said. In addition to the Javelins, the troops fighting in the area recently received another gift to help them even enter the playing field: US-made M777 howitzers, a long-range artillery piece the Ukrainians were desperate to put into action.
“We wanted to revive this military tradition of the Ukrainian armed forces,” he said at his unit’s command center, where a desk was covered with maps of the region and a flat-screen TV showed live images of the smoky battlefield.
“They’re coming,” he said. “We give them weapons and point them in the direction of the enemy.”
