Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
BAKHMUT, Ukraine — On a recent morning, Ukrainian soldiers ran around the shell in a field. In a flurry of activity, a man brought a 106-pound explosive shell from a truck to the gun. Another, using a wooden stick, pushed him into the breach.
“Loaded!” the soldier shouted, then knelt on the ground and covered his ears with his hands.
The gun went off with a thunderclap. A cloud of smoke rose. Leaves were falling from nearby trees. The shell went off towards the Russians with a metallic screech.
It’s a scene repeated thousands of times a day on the frontline in Ukraine: artillery duels and long-range attacks by both sides against targets ranging from infantry to fuel depots and tanks.
And what followed the salvo fired Wednesday morning in eastern Ukraine was also indicative of the pace of this war: a coffee break.
It is a war fought in a cycle of opposites: bursts of chaos from outgoing or incoming bombing, and then long pauses in which soldiers carry out more routine activities. Fighters who minutes earlier had launched destructive weapons with a thunderous roar settled in a grove of oak trees around a picnic table with wooden ammunition boxes, boiling water on a camp stove and pouring mugs of instant coffee
They rested in a grove of oak trees, overlooking a field of tall green grass and purple flowering thistles. Elsewhere, soldiers used a lull to smoke or cut their hair.
Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
On a recent visit, soldiers of the 58th Brigade fighting in and around the town of Bakhmut, where the artillery war is raging, were attacking and under artillery fire.
Around the rolling, grassy hills west of Bakhmut, puffs of brown smoke rose from incoming Russian attacks, aimed at Ukrainian artillery positions.
The paramount importance of long-range fire was one of the reasons why the United States and other allies rushed NATO-caliber shells into Ukraine. Its military is on the verge of exhausting the entire stock of Soviet shells in its own arsenal and that of allied Eastern European countries, and is now switching to more abundant NATO munitions.
Russia has a large supply of artillery ammunition, but signs are emerging that it is dipping into older stockpiles that more often than not detonate on impact.
The Soviet-heritage shell fired by the Ukrainian team, a model called the D-20 nicknamed the “fishing lure,” has held up well, said commander Lt. Oleksandr Shakin. Long-range weaponry provided by the Americans, such as the M777 howitzer and the high-mobility artillery rocket system, known as HIMARS, have extended the reach of Ukraine’s military, but the largest part of the arsenal are still guns from the Soviet era.
Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
The gun they fired was made in 1979, he said, and most of the shells were from the 1980s. Still, Lt. Shakin said, “They haven’t let me down yet.”
Typically, he said, he fires about 20 shells a day with each gun, conserving Ukraine’s dwindling supply of 152mm ammunition.
“We have a lot of motivation,” said Capt. Kostyantin Viter, an artillery officer. “In front of us are our infantry and we have to cover them. Behind us are our families.”
Inside the city of Bakhmut on Wednesday, at a position where soldiers of the 58th Brigade are garrisoned in an abandoned municipal building, the whistles of shells from their comrades could be heard sailing overhead, aimed at Russian forces in the east of the city.
Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
The soldiers stood in a courtyard, smoking and listening to the whistling of shells overhead and the thud of explosions in the distance.
The hum of electric clippers also filled the air, as one soldier cut another’s hair. A few trucks were parked in the yard and a dozen soldiers were moving around.
Half an hour or so in, a new noise joined the background of distant booms: the sound of nearby explosions. What had been a languid summer morning turned into a scene of chaos.
Soldiers threw themselves onto the deck or fell to the ground. After a dozen booms, it was over. Acrid smoke wafted across the yard, and there were pieces of glass. “Is everyone alive?” shouted a soldier.
Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
All the soldiers who had been in the yard came out unharmed. But the Russian rocket attack killed seven civilians and wounded six others in the neighborhood near the soldiers’ base, authorities said later.