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 theon February 17th. The man’s every movement is being scrutinised on screens in the basement of a block in Orikhiv.
Taking a break from his monitors the commander, who goes by the call sign Chief, says his men are desperately short of Soviet-calibre artillery shells, but that they still have a stock ofstandard ones and that the sound is of Ukrainian outgoing fire. Avdiivka fell not just because of a shell shortage he says, but because of the sheer mass of men and munitions that the Russians threw at it. Despite his lack of shells, he does not expect the line to crumble here.
In a secret location elsewhere in the southern sector, Cartel, the call sign of the artillery commander of the 128Mountain Assault Brigade, sits in front of three large screens, one of them showing nine live drone surveillance feeds, as well as two laptops and a tablet. At only 24 years old he is one of the youngest commanders in the Ukrainian army. His men have 12 howitzers, all of which use Soviet-calibre shells.