Inside the Ukrainian tank brigade trying to hold back Putin’s onslaught – by Maxim Tucker for The Times – 01.04.25
- Michael Julien
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Desperate fighting with soldiers, tanks and drones continues at Toretsk in the hope of keeping a crucial transport hub out of Russian hands.
Among the steel of their vehicles, the men speak of loss with faraway stares and shaking hands. Sometimes their words are interrupted by incoming bombs, sometimes by memory lapses left over from concussion.
The men of 2nd Tank Company, Ukraine’s 28th Mechanised Brigade, are busy welding metal grilles to their tanks’ turrets to protect them from aerial attack.
The tank crew use what materials they can spare to help protect themselves from attacks by Russian drones.
The recent deaths of a popular crew of three, wiped out by a Russian drone, has hit them all hard. Kostya, 23, Korny, 28, and Victor, 33, were some of the company’s more experienced soldiers.
“I knew Victor for six years, we served together in the same company all that time,” Sergeant “Nemo”, 27, a driver and mechanic, said as the men gathered to pay tribute to their comrades. “I wept when I found out he died. Even speaking about it now, I’m emotional.
“It doesn’t get easier. They stay with you. For ever.”
President Putin’s troops are advancing at Toretsk, aiming to push the Ukrainian soldiers back before any ceasefire on land. All but the uppermost part of the town is now under Russian control.
The strategic prize is ten miles north, a key rail and road junction at Kostiantynivka, vital to controlling the Donbas. Seizing this town would isolate the two largest Ukrainian-held cities in the Donetsk region, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
Trying to evade detection, the Russians infiltrate Ukrainian lines in small groups, gathering at a rendezvous point from where they can attack behind the line in force. Most often they are picked off by kamikaze drones before they can gather, but they keep coming.
In audio recordings that Ukrainians say are intercepted radio transmissions, Russian commanders exhort their troops to move forward or be shot if they try to return. Few assaults are successful, but the tanks of 2nd company are called into action when they are.
Kostya, Korny and Viktor, the three fallen soldiers, had sped out of their camouflaged positions under the cover of a thick fog. Rumbling over frozen ground, their T-64 tank headed toward the Russians through the ruins of Toretsk. Amid the skeletal remains of an industrial zone on the northernmost reaches of the town, Ukrainian troops were in danger of being overrun.
A platoon of Russian infantry had taken up positions in a large warehouse, from which they could fire on the Ukrainian soldiers below. Thick grey smoke shrouded the battle, with dense mist and freezing temperatures interfering with the work of both sides’ eyes in the sky.
“Enemy infantry was advancing to the outskirts of Toretsk, at the mine, and we needed to support our infantry,” said Major “Phoenix”, 33, of Tank Battalion, Ukraine’s 28th Mechanised Brigade. “We got the order to advance with a tank and suppress with fire, destroy the infantry that had entrenched themselves in the building so that they could not advance further.”
The tank’s gun fired into the building multiple times, reducing it to rubble. This seemed to stop the Russians in their tracks. The company believes its crew killed at least ten Russian soldiers before withdrawing.
Yet as they pulled back, a tree branch tore the tank’s homemade mesh anti-drone net off the turret. Then the fog began to lift, leaving the crew vulnerable to drones.
“From 150 meters, they shot these assault groups at close range. The task was accomplished beautifully, the enemy was destroyed, which allowed our infantry to knock out the rest of the occupants who remained there and take back this position,” said Lieutenant “Beard”, 29.
“The position at the mine was strategically important. Unfortunately, a first-person-view drone on a fibre optic cable caught up with the tank and destroyed it … it tore the tank into pieces, together with the crew.”
Although they do not disclose their casualties, the Ukrainians have clearly suffered. The country’s manpower crisis is deepening — the tank company is short of crews. A new incentive of a 1 million Ukrainian hryvnia (£18,700) payout for recruits aged 18 to 24 has only attracted a few dozen people to the brigade, which should have a complement of several thousand.
“We have more than enough tanks but we don’t have enough people,” Phoenix said. “People are running out and the same ones are constantly pulling work. The crews that are currently in combat readiness, they live almost either in the tanks or near the tanks. There is no one to rotate them out for.”
Still, the Russians may be faring worse. The Ukrainians estimate Russia has suffered 13,500 missing in action over the course of the seven-month battle for the town, with the 28th Brigade alone claiming 3,153 confirmed deaths.
Determined to keep taking Ukrainian land, Moscow’s commanders appear to have sent wounded soldiers back into the fight before they have recovered, with Ukrainian drone feeds spotting men on crutches dispatched towards their lines on motorbikes. Other approaches have been more gradual, the assaulting troops fearful of being spotted and slaughtered by suicide drones.
“They camouflage themselves as much as possible and move slowly, one meter at a time,” said Lieutenant Colonel Anton “Pecheneg” Vyhivskyi, 32, commander of the 1,004th infantry battalion attached to the 28th Brigade. “We even have this video — this guy is wearing a big, big robe like a mini tent. He just raises it, moves one metre, stops, then moves again, metre by metre.”
The battalion’s infantry is thinly dispersed among the forests and fields above Toretsk, holding the Russians back from the road to Kostiantynivka. The colonel’s men, many trained in Britain, had defeated Russia’s 132nd brigade, he said, but new Russian troops have already been moved in.
“Now they are accumulating, pulling up their reserves and increasingly intense assaults are going on,” he said.
To the soldiers on the ground, words of peace in Washington appear to come from an alternate reality. On Monday Putin signed a decree for the mobilisation of another 160,000 troops aged 18 to 30 between April 1 and June 15, signalling no plans to end the fighting soon.
As the invasion grinds into a fourth year, even those who have escaped physical injury may face other consequences of a long war. Phoenix’s wife and two children, aged six and 12, moved abroad last year. Now the couple have divorced.
There are few places that men like him can turn to now for support when they face family difficulties or lose friends. “In the beginning of the war, it was hard when I lost people. Now I try very hard not to get attached,” he said.
A career military man, he rues the changing face of warfare that is steadily replacing bravery and physical ability with prowess at a joystick. “We haven’t had a tank duel for a year,” he said.
“Now it’s already a drone war.”
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The depleted tank unit tries to push back Russian forces before any ceasefire deal that could freeze territorial gains.
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