The planners of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the country’s Russian invaders last year envisioned that elite forces, like the unit led by Capt. Anatoliy Kharchenko, would sweep in to deliver the final blows of a D-Day-like triumph.
But by the time paratroopers in Kharchenko’s company entered the battle on a moonless night last August, the counteroffensive was already skidding toward failure—and his men were about to learn all of the deadly reasons why.
As the company crept along the edge of a field in southeastern Ukraine, the operation’s objectives had already been severely downsized. Because the West had dithered for months over the provision of tanks and other armored vehicles, the Russians were ready. They had dug in on the flat farmland of southeastern Ukraine, laying hundreds of thousands of mines and setting up firing positions for machine guns and antitank missiles.
The first wave of Ukrainian brigades, launched in June, had barely advanced and suffered heavy losses. A switch to small, infantry assaults had been stymied as well, advancing just a short distance and seizing only one village. Now Kharchenko’s company came in not as closers, but as a final roll of the dice.
Their initial goal, assaulting a hill near the village of Verbove, was modest. But things went badly wrong within minutes.
Just after dawn on Aug. 12, drones swept overhead as they approached the target along a line of trees between farm fields. Kharchenko’s men had been told Russian drones would be downed by Ukrainian jamming equipment and assumed they were their own. Then the drones began dropping explosives. The trees exploded with machine-gun fire. Grenades lobbed from automatic launchers burst around them.
The platoon was incapacitated. More than half of its 20 or so men were dead or wounded within minutes, including the medic.
“What shall we do with the injured? F—!” Senior Sgt. Maksym Serheyev, commander of the first platoon, yelled over the radio to his commander. “There are more of them than us.”
A Russian soldier appeared suddenly, just yards away, and opened fire. Serheyev shot back, and the Russian fell down, apparently dead. Serheyev realized he had been hit, too. A bullet had grazed his right cheek and sliced through his ear lobe. As he fell down, a second bullet had pierced his CamelBak water pack. He had been millimeters from a fatal wound.
The Ukrainian assault was over before it had even begun. Kharchenko’s desperate new mission was to retrieve their dead and rescue as many as possible of those who remained alive.
“We really landed in it,” Serheyev said later.
Ukraine had turned the world’s expectation on its head in 2022 by repelling a Russian assault on Kyiv and reclaiming some lost territory. The failure of its counteroffensive in 2023, on the other hand, has led to a number of bleak realizations as the war approaches the start of its third year.
The biggest problem may be that Ukraine is insufficiently armed to penetrate Russian defenses. The U.S. and allies were willing to provide armored vehicles for the counteroffensive—but not modern fighter jets that are central to the way Western militaries attack. That left Ukraine mismatched with its opponent. The derring-do of Ukrainians like those in Kharchenko’s company that brought victories in 2022 is no longer enough against entrenched defenses.
“This isn’t World War II and Guderian,” said a senior Ukrainian security official, referring to German Gen. Heinz Guderian, a pioneer of Blitzkrieg. “This is World War I and trenches.”
Ukraine’s push southward
Front line Aug. 1, 2023
Russian-controlled area Dec. 31
UKRAINE
Dnipro
Detail
Velyka Novosilka
Zaporizhzhia
Orikhiv
Robotyne
Verbove
Tokmak
Melitopol
Berdyansk
20 miles
Sea of Azov
20 km
Front line Aug. 1, 2023
Russian-controlled area Dec. 31
UKRAINE
Detail
Dnipro
Velyka Novosilka
Zaporizhzhia
Orikhiv
Robotyne
Verbove
Tokmak
Melitopol
Berdyansk
20 miles
Sea of Azov
20 km
Front line Aug. 1, 2023
Russian-controlled area Dec. 31
UKRAINE
Dnipro
Detail
Velyka Novosilka
Zaporizhzhia
Orikhiv
Robotyne
Verbove
Tokmak
Melitopol
Berdyansk
20 miles
Sea of Azov
20 km
Front line Aug. 1, 2023
Russian-controlled area Dec. 31
UKRAINE
Dnipro
Detail
Velyka Novosilka
Zaporizhzhia
Orikhiv
Robotyne
Verbove
Tokmak
Melitopol
Berdyansk
20 miles
Sea of Azov
20 km
Front line Aug. 1, 2023
Russian-controlled area Dec. 31
Dnipro
UKRAINE
Detail
Velyka Novosilka
Zaporizhzhia
Orikhiv
Robotyne
Verbove
Tokmak
Melitopol
Berdyansk
20 miles
Sea of Azov
20 km
It’s unclear whether Ukraine and its allies can craft an alternative approach. Ukraine has lost thousands of troops, including some of its most skilled and best-motivated fighters, like the men from Kharchenko’s company. The counteroffensive fizzled with an advance of only a few square miles to show for it.
Ukraine’s top military officer says it needs better technology to defeat an enemy with a population more than three times larger, but support from the U.S., Ukraine’s most critical ally, is wobbling amid domestic political squabbles.
“I understand the West’s reasoning not to give us everything they have,” said Kharchenko. “But what will they do when there’s no one left to give to?”
‘Always first’
Kharchenko—the 45-year-old commander better known by his call sign Khorol, the name of his ancestral hometown—was the leader of a company from Ukraine’s air-assault forces.
Fewer than half of the around 100 soldiers were battle-tested veterans like Khorol. He had taken part in a daring mission to stop the Russians from landing reinforcements at a Kyiv airport on the very first day of the war, then took charge of the company, which chased Russians out of forests in the northeast. His first platoon was led by Serheyev, a 44-year-old former sports journalist who acquired the call sign Cannoli after bringing a box of the Sicilian pastries from his coffee shop to a militia he joined early in the full-scale war.
The rest were total newcomers stepping in for those who have died in battle. The closest these soldiers had come to a battlefield was in their training programs in places like the U.K.
The men included Grizzly, a broad-shouldered 30-year-old from a farming family in northern Ukraine, and 43-year-old Taler, a coin collector who had been deputy director of a construction company. There was a tattoo artist known as Ink, a teacher from occupied Berdyansk on the Azov coast, and a children’s entertainer from an amusement park called “Happy Kids.”
The motto of Ukraine’s air-assault forces is “Always first!” But much of this company’s hardware was developed decades ago when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, including lightly armored scout cars and three motorbikes with sidecars produced in the 1960s. It also uses the soldiers’ own vehicles or ones provided by donors, which are constantly in need of repairs.
The age of the scout vehicles hardly mattered—they would serve little purpose on the booby-trapped battlefield Khorol’s company entered on the morning of Aug. 12. To avoid detection, they had to leave the vehicles miles away and walk in. (“We’d never drive closer because the vehicles would just be destroyed,” Cannoli had explained to his French instructors a few weeks earlier.)
The unit stuck to thin trenches recently seized from the Russians because everything around them was mined. That meant walking over enemy corpses decomposing in the heat. At midnight Cannoli called a halt, because it was hard to see where they were going in the pitch black. They rested for three hours in the trenches, then set off again.
The final stretch took them south along a line of shrubs and trees at the edge of a field. The Russians held the eastern edge of the field. The target was a hill that lay beyond an intersection between treelines.
That’s when the Russians launched their surprise assault. Two company members were killed immediately from grenade blasts: Ink, the 32-year-old tattoo artist, and Forty-Five, the platoon medic known by his age. Another, a man known as Bull was wounded by an explosion close to Cannoli and died later. Several men froze in fear. They’d had plenty of training, Grizzly said, “but when bullets whistle over your head and slap into branches above you, it’s something different.”
Cannoli, his face badly bleeding, called on his remaining men—only about half of the original 20—to pull back. Hearing Russians closing in and calling on them to surrender, Grizzly tossed a couple of grenades. Only a handful of healthy men remained to help the injured and find a way out.
“Come on, crawl!” Cannoli called to those lying with injured legs. “Guys, we can’t drag you out. We’re injured ourselves. Crawl!”
‘They are your guys’
The company’s path out was the same as the way in, along the edge of the field back to a place where a vehicle might be able to pick them up. Khorol sent his personal jeep to evacuate the wounded but it got stuck in a hole in the road, the remnant of a mortar bomb. He dispatched an armored vehicle, which was pummeled by a machine gun.
So the job fell to one of the company’s Soviet-era motorbikes. Cannoli squeezed into the sidecar with another soldier whose leg was bound by a tourniquet, and the driver set off across a field that they knew was mined. The bike’s engine kept dying, so Cannoli, nearly fainting from blood loss, and his wounded companion would slide out every few hundred yards or so and push it to get it rolling again. He eventually made it to a medical-aid station, where a medic sewed his face up with 40 stitches. The motorbike shuttled back for more wounded.
Taler, meanwhile, had been hit by shrapnel in the leg, heel and shoulder by grenades dropped from drones. Nearby lay Berdyansk, the teacher from that port city, who was mortally wounded. As the Russians closed in, Taler could barely move after cinching a tourniquet on his thigh.
Sure he was done for, Taler rolled into the field and lay on his side, playing dead. He buried his telephone so it wouldn’t wind up in enemy hands and fumbled for a grenade; he had no intention of surrendering alive. At that moment, Ukrainian artillery began firing and the Russians withdrew.
Russian drones hovered overhead. Over the next half-hour or so, two swooped in and dropped grenades nearby, but missed Taler. Realizing he needed to move, Taler loosened the tourniquet to get some feeling back in his leg, but he was still bleeding, so he tightened it again. A third drone buzzed toward him and dropped a grenade, which also missed. “This is my last chance,” Taler said to himself.
When the drone flew off, he loosened the tourniquet. There was a bit less bleeding. He began to crawl. Soon he was deep in the field under the cover of tall grass and weeds that had grown on the unfarmed land. He dragged his body two miles in about six hours under the beating sun. When he arrived at a Ukrainian trench in the next treeline, he drained most of a 5-liter water bottle in huge gulps.
By the end of the day, only three of 22 men in the first platoon remained fully fit.
The following day, Khorol met with some of the men and showed them images from a drone showing where their four dead comrades lay. “Grizzly, they are your guys,” he said.
Grizzly headed back with a rescue team, but they were beaten back by heavy gunfire and took more casualties. The company medic was killed when half his head was blown off by a mortar bomb.
“You walk, you crawl, you run, then you walk, you crawl just to get there. And then you get back the same way. You drag your comrades,” Grizzly said.
The next day, Khorol ordered artillery to lay down a smoke curtain to disorient the enemy. Russian drones couldn’t see the Ukrainians’ movement, and the Russians in the trenches were busy pulling on gas masks, fearing a gas attack of the kind the Russians themselves employed. There was no wind, and by the time the smoke dispersed the Ukrainians were in the trench. The Russians ran away, and the Ukrainians hit them with cluster bombs.
An exhausted Grizzly provided supporting fire from a ditch because his rifle “was on its last legs,” he said. “It was spitting rather than firing.”
After a hard day of fighting, the company had achieved its original aim of taking the hill. But the cost was high. It was turning dark around 8:30 p.m. when Grizzly went to help a group carrying a dead soldier out. There was little noise, as both sides had stopped shooting out of exhaustion. Another soldier, sensing Grizzly’s fatigue, offered to take the handle of the canvas stretcher. Grizzly tossed the dead man’s machine gun over his shoulder and led the way. The men stumbled and cursed.
Grizzly turned and saw the men had stopped to rest. A mortar bomb exploded just in front of him, about where they would have been if they hadn’t stopped. Grizzly was knocked down. He had a sharp pain in his leg and no feeling in his hand. He picked himself up, scraped the dirt from his mouth and checked his leg and arm were still there. They were, but he’d been peppered with shrapnel, most worryingly in the groin.
He applied a tourniquet to his leg and began to limp through the field, as he knew he’d be too heavy for the others to carry. He followed the track marks of an armored vehicle on the assumption there would be no mines and radioed Khorol, who sent the buggy to fetch him from the evacuation point.
It took him about an hour to lumber 500 yards to meet the buggy, which took him to a medical-aid station. Nurses pulled off his boots and cut off his clothing.
“Doc, if I’ve been hit in the balls, just finish me off,” Grizzly cried to the surgeon.
The doctor told him everything was where it should be.
“Thank god I have small balls,” Grizzly said. The doctor and his aides laughed.
They recovered two of the four bodies that day, but they were in a pitiful state, discolored and bloated from the summer heat and with their faces disfigured, apparently mutilated after death by the Russians. Cannoli received their photos while in hospital and had to identify them by their tattoos and clothes.
Inching forward
Despite the deadly setbacks, Khorol’s company tweaked its tactics and pressed on toward Verbove. New recruits replaced the dead and injured.
Khorol deployed assault teams often numbering as few as five to avoid drawing the attention of Russian drones or artillery. Small support teams would bring ammunition and water to assault teams, and help them deal with any wounded.
When they suffered casualties, the Ukrainians would throw more men into attempts to save their wounded or recover bodies. But the Russians would often leave their dead and injured where they fell, avoiding additional losses but leaving a stench of rotting flesh in the trenches.
“That’s their attitude to their own people,” Khorol said. “It’s cynical, but it’s rational.”
Khorol’s company could tell they were advancing through the Russian lines as the nature of the trenches changed. At first, the trenches were littered with dead Russian soldiers and abandoned weapons. As they approached Verbove, they found trenches with rudimentary kitchens, sinks and toilets.
On Aug. 25, the unit assaulted a trench network on the eastern edge of Verbove. Another airborne unit had tried to break through there on armored vehicles but the Russians had hit them with antitank missiles. So a team from Khorol’s company went on foot.
Around 4 a.m. Khorol had moved his command post forward when a blast caused by a mine or another kind of explosive fired out shrapnel, injuring his hand, killing one soldier and wounding several others. Khorol was taken to a medical-aid station.
The assault squad of a dozen men were angry and pumped up by the losses. Led by a sergeant known as Hrom, or Thunder, a huge man who liked to carry a PKM machine gun rather than a rifle, they thrust into the trench.
A 20-year-old soccer fan known as Maliy, or Kid, and 28-year-old children’s entertainer Syava remained at the entrance to stand guard. The rest pushed on, sending the Russians fleeing despite being outnumbered. They ran out of ammunition but they picked up weapons and bullets from Russians they had killed and pressed further. Suddenly, Hrom emerged from the trench and found himself on the edge of Verbove, well behind Russian lines. He was cut down by a machine gun. The men pulled back under heavy bombardment, dragging Hrom. In the chaos, they didn’t see exactly what had happened to Syava and Maliy.
Returning to his company the next day, Khorol struggled to raise a rescue team.
“I don’t blame you,” he told his men. “You’re all shook up as it is.”
In the end, he offered to reward volunteers with seven days off.
The rescuers found the men buried under a mound of earth near the entrance to the trench. A 152-millimeter mortar round had scored a direct hit. Maliy, who was taller, was most likely killed immediately by the blastwave. Khorol believes Syava must have survived the initial explosion as he appeared to have started unfastening his body armor to remove it but couldn’t and succumbed to a shrapnel wound around his collarbone.
“It’s hard for me to think about,” said Khorol.
Names and numbers
It was a snowy day in early December when Cannoli, Taler and a dozen other soldiers gathered at a crematorium in Kyiv to bid farewell to the soldier they knew as Berdyansk, the man from that occupied city who died on Aug. 12. By the time his body was recovered it was unrecognizable and took months for his identity to be confirmed by DNA testing.
According to Ukrainian tradition, the mourners touched the coffin to say farewell. There was Cannoli, whose hearing was damaged after he was wounded. He had just received a hearing aid and is hoping to become an instructor in air-assault forces. And there was Taler, who had recovered from his injuries and joined a unit focused on electronic warfare.
The funeral officiant addressed the gathering: “Russia is sending its scum here, and we are losing our best children.”
After a three-volley salute ended the ceremony, soldiers quickly piled into their vehicles. They had a long drive back to Zaporizhia.
Verbove remains in Russian hands. Further infantry assaults by Khorol’s men led to further small gains, but more losses and no significant breakthrough.
On a recent visit to a cemetery in Kyiv, Khorol visited the graves of Maliy and Syava. He recalled parachute training with Maliy and letting Syava, who he’d promoted to sergeant, have days off to visit his pregnant wife. Both men had been with him on the successful operation in forests in the northeast.
Khorol held one cross after the other, leaning forward and whispering a few words.
“I gave you that badge, buddy,” he said to the portrait of Maliy, a fresh-faced youth flashing a smile.
“I hate this tradition of touching crosses,” he added. “I’ve done it too many times.”
Khorol is handing over command of his company. A promotion is in the cards. He wants it, he said, less for the prestige than because he would no longer have to lose soldiers he knew so well.
“I want to know people as numbers,” he said, “not by names.”
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com