'We can't give up' Fight on, say Ukraine's weary frontline troops

For almost all of their 62-day deployment on the frontline east of Pokrovske, Bohdan and Ivan hid - first in a village shop, then, after a deadly firefight with Russian soldiers, in a tiny basement where the infantrymen from Ukraine's 31st Brigade had to survive seven more weeks.

- Dan Sabbagh

Food, water, cigarettes and other supplies were airlifted in by a friendly drone, their toilet was their room measuring 3 metres squared, their nearest comrades 200 metres or so away. Their only hope was to remain underground, because they knew if they were detected a Russian drone could kill them all.

The fight in Ukraine is characterised as a war of remotely piloted craft and the role of infantry is easily forgotten. In large parts of the front, the job of Ukrainian ground troops is to quietly hold a position, while danger looms overhead. "I can't sleep properly now," says Bohdan, easily the more talkative of the pair. "It's too quiet for me." When the infantrymen headed out to the front at the end of September, a diplomatic effort to end the near four-year war after the Alaska summit appeared to have faltered.

But by the time the crew had returned at the end of November, from the south-east of the Dnipropetrovsk region, a new Russian-US peace plan had emerged. Hand over all of Donetsk province, just east of the soldiers' position, abandon occupied territory to Russia, give up permanently on joining Nato, and only then, Moscow said, it would be willing to consider peace. It was in effect a demand for a surrender. Ukraine objected.

But a revised plan with Ukrainian input was then deemed "unacceptable" by Russia.

If Ukraine fights on, it is infantrymen such as Bohdan, 41, who installed heating insulation before he volunteered in 2022, and Ivan, a 45-year-old handyman who joined up in July, who will have to risk their lives and resist for some time to come. "Nobody, of course, wants the war to continue because there have been a lot of sacrifices, a lot of victims. But at the same time we don't want to give up, to give our land because we don't then want those sacrifices to be wasted," Bohdan says, dirt still on his hands and uniform.