A grinding, difficult war on Ukraine’s southern front

ARUSSIAN SOLDIER pops up beside his infantry fighting vehicle which was hit, but not destroyed along with two others the day before. He makes a ten-second dash for one of the other ones and then appears to start digging beside it. He is 15km away, close to Robotyne, where there has been fierce fighting since the on February 17th. The man’s every movement is being scrutinised on screens in the basement of a block in Orikhiv. Now an moves over the soldier and, from its live feed, a shell can be watched plummeting straight down towards him. When the smoke clears there is no body. Maybe the soldier heard the drone and scrambled under the vehicle just in time to save his life.In the wake of the fall of Avdiivka Russian forces have captured outlying villages and attacked several other small eastern towns such as Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk. To Avdiivka’s south the front line turns and then slopes gently towards the Dnieper river just below the industrial city of Zaporizhia. Last summer there were high hopes that Ukrainian troops would punch through the Russian lines here and drive on through to the Sea of Azov, some 100km further south as the drone flies. The counter-offensive failed, but not before the Ukrainians captured the villages of Robotyne and Pyatyhatky. Since the fall of Avdiivka Russian troops have launched several assaults to recapture Robotyne, whose fall would be symbolic because of its earlier liberation.