The WSJ has published front line reporting, the first I've seen anywhere. One thing to keep in mind is that most of the western trained and equipped brigades haven't been committed yet.
‘A Wall of Steel’: Ukrainian Troops Face Hard Slog in Offensive’s First Days - Brigades with Western arms make small gains against Russia’s defensive lines in occupied regions
Updated June 10, 2023 2:04 pm ET
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—The assault began Thursday night, with about 100 troops, two German-made Leopard II tanks and several American-made armored personnel carriers.
The plan was to push south toward the Russian-occupied town of Tokmak, in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, according to a soldier who was part of the operation. Two other units would also push toward Tokmak from different axes.
As soon as the regiment crossed a road outside the town of Mala Tokmak, the 28-year-old soldier said, the Russians began to pummel them with Grad rockets. The fields were mined. Russian helicopters and jet fighters buzzed overhead.
The assault progressed less than 2 miles, the soldier said. One of the Leopards was hit and disabled.
“They were just waiting for us…prepared positions everywhere,” he said. “It was a wall of steel. It was horrendous.”
Several days into Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive aimed at taking back land occupied by Russia, the scale of the challenges that Ukrainian troops face is already clear.
Russian forces have spent months preparing for attacks in occupied parts of the country’s south, where the Ukrainians would like to push through and cut the land bridge that connects Russia to Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014.
Videos posted on social media have appeared to show the loss of a few Leopard tanks and several U.S.-made Bradley Fighting Vehicles in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, where flat, open fields offer almost no cover for an attacking force.
Ukrainian officials have said little about what progress their forces are making, but insist that the offensive will take time and that casualties are inevitable.
The campaign could decide whether Kyiv will succeed in its goal of dislodging Russian forces from some of the nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory they currently occupy.
The West has supplied Kyiv with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and has trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops to support the push. Kyiv needs to show its Western backers it can turn that aid into gains on the battlefield.
Military analysts say that the main Ukrainian attack hasn’t yet begun, with most of the newly delivered Western weaponry not yet in use.
Further east from Tokmak, near the eastern edge of the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukrainian soldiers from several units said they were making progress.
In a small town near the fighting, tired-looking troops were resting from days of heavy fighting, while freshly arriving men with clean boots awaited their orders.
A haggard-looking infantryman known by the call sign Suska said the offensive had taken several nearby villages in the past week.
“We are advancing, but there is constant shelling” from the Russians, he said.
At least three people were killed and more than two dozen injured in a Russian drone strike on the city of Odesa early Saturday. Ukraine’s military said air defenses destroyed all of the drones, but falling debris hit residential buildings. Photo: Serhii Smolientsev/Reuters
Two members of a reconnaissance unit, known as Kopa and Devyatka, had just returned from a night of combat. The Russian troops they had encountered, a mix of professionals and mobilized men, had worse morale and combat discipline than the Ukrainians, the pair said.
“They’re screaming and running around frantically,” said Kopa, adding, “Morale is fine, but I really need sleep.”
Devyatka, who like his friend has been fighting since Russia’s first incursions into Ukraine in 2014, said the Ukrainian army engaged in the offensive is the best-armed he has seen.
A short, wiry commander of a mine-clearance vehicle, known by his call sign “Finn” for his red Viking-style beard, said his unit of marines was making small gains near Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region, and morale was good as a result.
“We’re inevitably going to have losses, but we’re trying to make sure they have more than us,” Finn said.
Damp conditions were posing a challenge to some of the newly delivered Western equipment, he said.
After two weeks of rain, his unit’s U.S.-made MaxxPro armored vehicles don’t always have enough clearance for the marshy ground. “They were made for urban combat and the desert,” he said. “In our reality, they can get through but it’s a struggle.”
New Ukrainian brigades are also struggling with some officers’ too-brief training and lack of combat experience, he said. “They are getting disoriented in stress situations,” he said.
There isn’t enough Western weaponry for all of the Ukrainian units. Artillery spotters Taxist and Sus had just returned from the front in a battered blue Lada sedan, bought with their own money, which was their only transport. Where the Lada can’t go, they have to move on foot.
Ukrainian troops across the southern front said they expected this offensive to be tougher than the ones last year, when Ukraine retook thousands of square miles in the northeastern Kharkiv region and southern Kherson region.
“It’s very fortified,” said a veteran soldier known by his call sign Did, meaning Grandpa, who’s been taking part in the fighting in the southern part of the Donetsk region, near the border with the Zaporizhzhia region. “They are waiting for us.”
The 28-year-old soldier who was part of the assault on Tokmak said he’d been part of the offensive in the Kherson region last October. “They were just running,” he said of the Russians. “We barely had to do any fighting. We were just chasing them.”
Before the push toward Tokmak, his commander warned them that this time would be different. He set out as a machine-gunner on top of a Humvee, but ended up spending much of the night in a basement, while Leopards traded fire with Russian tanks.
“We knew it was going to be hard,” he said. “Regardless, everyone’s morale was high, even when we heard the Leopard was taken out.”
His squad was sent at around 6 a.m. on Friday to recover the Leopard, to make sure the Russians couldn’t seize it. As the team reached the tank, he heard it beeping, and walked around it to find a position to set up a machine gun and provide cover. About 50 yards from the tank, he stepped on a mine, which blew off most of his foot.
It was part of the job, he said, adding that, after he gets a prosthetic, he plans to return to the fight.
Ievgeniia Sivorka contributed to this article.
Write to Ian Lovett at [email protected] and Marcus Walker at