For months, Ukrainian soldiers in southeastern Ukraine were able to fend off Russian assaults.
Even with shortages of artillery shells, the 58th Motorized Infantry Brigade repelled repeated attacks as they fought to defend the limited gains from their counteroffensive last year. The brigade took casualties but thwarted each Russian attack, including one by an elite marine brigade, leaving burned-out Russian armor littering the open steppe.
But at the end of March, Russian troops turned their focus on two small villages: Urozhaine and Staromaiorske. It took the Russians three months, but after occupying Staromaiorske in June they finally broke through the weary Ukrainian defenders and reclaimed Urozhaine on July 14.
An account of the fierce defense and loss of Urozhaine and Staromaiorske was pieced together through conversations with Ukrainian soldiers who served in the villages, as well as through one survivor’s post on social media. Official Russian posts on social media confirmed many of the details.
The loss of the villages was a blow for Ukraine, coming amid recent Russian gains along many parts of the 600-mile front line, and because Ukrainian marine infantry had fought so hard to capture them during the bloody counteroffensive.
For the men of the 58th brigade, who had been defending Urozhaine since October, and units of the National Guard attached to them, it was doubly hard. Up to 100 men were killed or went missing over three months of fighting in the village and commanders were bracing for recriminations from the military high command, which usually demands its soldiers hold their positions to the last.
Soldiers and officers who had been inside the two villages said there were no civilians living there and the houses were so destroyed there was nothing left to defend.
“The battles took place in ruins, from basements,” said Karay, 43, an army major who was inside Urozhaine and saw some of the earlier fighting. “There were a few trenches, but there were no defensive structures, and it was impossible to build them.” He asked that he only be identified by his call sign, Karay, according to military protocol.
Urozhaine consists of just two streets and Russian troops had already occupied half the village in June, Karay said. “For a month and a half, it was like a fight between two packs of dogs,” he said.
“So much was flying around, the wounded could only be evacuated at night,” he said. “So there came a moment when it made no sense to keep people there.”
The end, when it came, was lightning fast and forced a rapid retreat from the village.
Those of the 58th Brigade who survived the final retreat were in the hospital and not available for interviews, officers of the brigade said.
A 40-year-old member of the National Guard, who asked only to be identified by his first name, Mark, posted a dramatic account on the X social media platform. The New York Times was able to verify his identity.
Ordered in to help defend Urozhaine on July 8, his unit “hit the jackpot,” he wrote. Sheltering in the basement of a house, they endured four days of heavy Russian bombardment.
By July 12, their house was being targeted by drones. His commander warned them that the Ukrainian unit in front had retreated and Russians had taken up positions in a house opposite. At first light the men were ordered to pull back to another position, which they did safely as another bombardment began.
Official Russian news reports described the same events. “A motorized rifle unit and tank crews of the Vostok group exhausted the enemy, creating suitable conditions for the final assault,” a journalist with Russian troops reported on First Channel. “Then, armored groups with assault units moved out from three directions.”
Mark, the Ukrainian National Guard member, described three Russian troop carriers racing past his position at 6 a.m., inserting infantry that blocked their retreat. The main assault had begun.
First Channel reported that Russian marines carried out the main assault, using dune buggies for a speedy attack on the village.
“We cleared it so quickly, the guys did not even realize it, in hour and a half, maybe two hours,” a Russian soldier, who gave his call sign, Hors, told the reporter.
Mark’s unit were ordered to withdraw through the fields because the road was under Russian control. That began in orderly fashion but within a few hours, it became a desperate scramble under shellfire with wounded and dead left behind.
“Enemy drones were constantly hovering over the retreating groups, adjusting enemy artillery,” Mark wrote. An hour later he was caught in an explosion and wounded in both legs. “I could not go on,” he wrote. “There was another wounded man with me.”
He applied a tourniquet to his leg and saw groups of retreating soldiers passing by. A National Guard soldier who used the call sign Ruberoid, stopped to help.
Led by Ruberoid, Mark said he crawled through the undergrowth and a minefield to the designated collection point for the wounded. The second wounded man tried to follow but was too weak and told them to leave him.
“The only thing I really feared was that I wouldn’t be able to see my family again,” Mark wrote. “That was my main motivation as I had to crawl across the hot earth and stubble of the Donetsk steppe under the scorching sun and not give up.”
It took him more than 12 hours to reach a medical station.
Members of his company all got out alive, but other companies suffered dead and wounded, he wrote.
The Russians raised their flag over the village that evening, but the most difficult thing was to hold the village as Ukrainian drones began attacking them, the Russian soldier, Hors, said. “They shot from everything they had,” he said of the Ukrainians. “The sky was black from their drones.”
In conversations after the fall of the village, soldiers on the nearby front said they were feeling the strain of three large-scale Russian assaults in October, November and February, and then three months of intense fighting in Urozhaine. They described the Russian assault troops as a determined and motivated force.
Members of the 58th brigade spent a recent day hunkered down in mud trenches on the frontline near Urozhaine, listening for incoming shells and drones, and fending off explosive drones with hand-held electronic jammers. They have rigged up metal fencing and draped carpets over many openings to block the small but lethal exploding aircraft.
There was little sound of Ukrainian artillery fire.
The most dangerous moment for the men is when units swap in and out after several days on the front line and frequently come under shell fire.
On a recent night a squad was hit by mortar fire as it was heading back from the front. Three men — fresh recruits who had recently joined the brigade — were wounded and a fourth was killed, members of the brigade said.
The 58th brigade’s sniper unit has retrained to double as a drone team and has been deployed at Staromaiorske since June.
“We will restrain them as much as we can,” said a 28-year-old sniper using the call sign Sten and now working as a drone pilot.
He showed videos on his phone of his successful drone strikes on Russian vehicles, on a lone motorbike rider and on an ammunition store in the village.
“They are trying to attack our positions constantly, mostly in small groups on motorbikes,” he said of the Russian troops. “They get into the tree lines and dig in there. They spread like cockroaches.”
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
