A vast cobweb of spent fibre-optic cable is draped over the buildings in the small Ukrainian city of Lyman. Used to control the deadly drones deployed by both Russia and Ukraine, it has accumulated so densely after the years of fighting here that fresh drones struggle to fly through it, rotors tangling in the mass. Birds pluck it out to make their nests.
Beneath the glistening strands, residential blocks are shattered from shellfire as Moscow’s forces still push daily to take a city they briefly occupied until the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2022, when they were driven out.
The 1,000 or so civilians who remain live in cellars without electricity, gas or running water.
Lyman is the northern outpost of the “fortress belt”, a string of towns and cities crucial to Ukraine’s defence in the Donbas region. It has come to epitomise Kyiv’s years-long but at times controversial strategy to tie down and exhaust Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in an urban landscape ringed by trees and rivers.
Oleksandr Pavlovych, a vegetable seller, fled Lyman the day before the Guardian met him in the evacuation centre in nearby Sloviansk. His 78-year-old mother had been hit in the stomach by shrapnel. Over the course of a long day, she died slowly and without help.
He buried her in the garden and then took a bicycle to ride the 19 miles (30km) to relative safety, surviving an encounter with a Russian first-person-view drone (FPV) which exploded on an anti-drone net covering the road, the battery striking his ankle.
“The city is so badly damaged,” he said as he packed his handful of belongings to move to a nearby apartment. “You have to go to the central park for the chance of mobile phone signal. And outside the drones are everywhere. We were afraid to leave. But when my mother died I was scared to stay on my own.”
Some Donbas towns and cities, including Pokrovsk and Bakhmut, have already fallen amid bloody sieges that have wiped them from the map. Others have teetered perilously on the brink.
But in May, for the first time since another Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023, Kyiv took back more territory than Russia captured. There are signs that the tide of the war may at last be tipping – for now – in its favour.
Ukrainian drone attacks have increasingly decimated Moscow’s long supply lines in the Donbas and to Crimea, and a tenacious defence of the fortress belt has absorbed vast amounts of Russian lives and efforts. It is part of the 10% of the Donbas not under Russian control, and which Russia has demanded as part of any peace deal – a scenario that Ukraine fears would leave the cities to its west, including Dnipro and Kyiv, vulnerable to a future invasion.
The fortress belt was identified for its potential strengths in the event of a full-scale Russian invasion under Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, in 2015 – the year after Russia seized Crimea and fighting began in Ukraine’s east, events which Ukrainians regard as the start of the war. The strategy foresaw a defensive line based around four large cities in Donetsk oblast and their satellite settlements running 30 miles north to south along the H-20 Kostyantynivka-Sloviansk main road.
The area consists of a concentration of dense urban centres, often with sprawling industrial facilities in close proximity, and a complex geography of rivers, woods and rising terrain that favours its defenders.
In an April paper on the importance of the belt, the US thinktank the Institute for the Study of War described it as “optimised for defence across nearly every possible topographical and geographical characteristic” and said it gave Ukraine a significant advantage. “The high costs that Russia paid in the Battle of Bakhmut or the campaign for Pokrovsk will pale in comparison to those necessary to seize the fortress belt, assuming that Russian forces can even succeed,” it added.
The tempo of Russian assaults has increased sharply in recent weeks, but – for now at least – Russian troops have made little by way of concrete gains, while ever more lives have been fed into Kremlin’s “meat grinder”.
The conduct of warfare has been utterly transformed over the course of the conflict, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of February 2022 and has lasted longer than the first world war.
The brigades that came to fight in this region for the counteroffensive of 2023 travelled in convoys of hastily camouflaged civilian cars. They now traverse the cities and the front in vehicles that evoke the dystopian Mad Max films, bristling like hedgehogs with spikes constructed from heavy metal cable designed to pre-detonate the hunting Russian drones, or caged-in with wire grilles.
In the woods and fields, defences that were once rudimentary have been transformed into layers of deep obstacles: tank ditches and bollards, tangled with barbed wire.
Beside the physical deterrents are antenna to spot drones and electronic countermeasures to knock them out, while the streets and vast sections of highway are cloaked in anti-drone net tunnels.
“The war has changed since [the full-scale invasion in] 2022,” said Lt Col Shamil Krutkov, a commander in Ukraine’s 93rd brigade and veteran of battles across the Donbas, whom the Guardian met in Kramatorsk.
He conceded that the defence of the fortress belt and outlying towns was viewed with scepticism over the years by many of those doing the fighting, but that it was a strategy that had bought time for Ukraine to adapt to a new kind of war dominated by drones, battlefield robots and remote sensing.
The Ukrainian soldiers you meet have changed too. Where once infantry would talk about the experience of close combat in the woods and cities, now they are as likely to be drone operators fighting remotely on a frontline that has become a heavily surveilled “kill zone”, where every effort to advance is visible and lethally perilous.
“Technology has turned everything upside down. We have had very tough fights in the Donbas, but those hard times forced us to think and be creative,” Krutkov said, adding that there was now little opportunity for manoeuvre warfare with massed forces. “We both have same technologies,” he said. “I’m not sure either side has the chance for a big offensive.” That is a problem for Russia’s generals as they promise imminent fresh victories along this front, but less of an issue for the defenders.
“The situation over the years,” added Krutkov, “has gone from where we might be facing a Russian regiment to two Russians trying to infiltrate. I joke that since the beginning of the war, we have gone from fighting hard for villages and cities and districts, and then for forests, to fighting for foxholes where the Russian soldiers want to hide.”
His best guess for the coming months is the expansion of the deadly “grey zone” separating the forces, consolidating Russian forces in their quagmire.
Vadym, an officer in the 63rd brigade, which is fighting in and around Lyman, credited the fortress belt successes to military reforms instigated in 2024 that improved the Ukrainian armed forces’ ability to coordinate on a larger scale.
“Before, a single brigade would stand its ground and try and hold its position, and then be outflanked [by the Russians] on the right and left. There was no coordination and the enemy is always looking for the gap between brigades. Now you can feel the difference. It is better,” he said.
“We started creating proper kill zones. Clearing the forests and digging tank ditches, and laying wire and obstacles with trees. When the enemy moves it’s all right there in plain sight … Over the last six months in our sector we haven’t given the Russians a single metre.”
None of which means that Russian troops have not advanced in places. In Kostyantynivka, the southern-most point of the belt, Russian forces now occupy the east side of the city, while the western side across the Kryvyi Torets river has become a kill zone as Russian groups try to infiltrate the city centre. The advance has come at a huge cost in lives to Russian forces.
For the Ukrainian military and civilians, the cost has also been heavy. In Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, factories and apartment buildings display the evidence of the daily strikes by drones and rockets. Petrol stations are netted, fuel pumps sandbagged, with concrete duck-and-cover shelters for staff and customers.
When the FPV drones appear as they do multiple times each day, a continuous siren reverberates, distinct in its length from the conventional air raid warnings.
In Kramatorsk, on leaving the basement meeting with Krutkov, the Guardian encounters the recent aftermath of a strike on an apartment building a block away by a delta-winged Shahed drone that has injured four people.
Yulia Melnyk, 46, who lives in the building, is fatalistic as she tidies up her flat, the stairwell outside charred and acrid with the smoke of the fire set by the explosion. “Sometimes the noise scares me. But if I’m hearing the explosion, I’m alive and life goes on. It exploded somewhere else,” she said. “I’ll think sometimes – I need to do something and move. But two hours later I will have changed my mind. And look, my building is still standing.”
Other buildings in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk have been less lucky, but recently installed drone nets and shelters allow residents to shop, including at open markets. However, the nets are effective only against smaller drones and offer no protection from the much larger Shaheds and glide bombs.
But overall, Ukraine feels that the fortress belt is largely holding up against Russian attacks and that it can resist Moscow’s demands to surrender territory in exchange for an uncertain cessation of hostilities that Kyiv believes would allow Russia to use the Donbas as a springboard to attack again in the future. The defence has given Kyiv time to implement other strategies, most notably the drone attacks on supply lines to occupied Crimea and the Donbas that are degrading Moscow’s ability to sustain its operations.
Vadym, whose brigade is fighting in and around Lyman, said: “The enemy is not giving up on trying to storm Lyman and establish a foothold there. Their task last year was to take Lyman by October. Then it was by the end of the new year. Then March. Now, by the end of summer.”
Defending one town also helps to defend the others, though Vadym observed that the interconnectedness of the fortress belt’s urban centres and industrial facilities could be a strength as well as a vulnerability if logistics routes are cut. “Obviously if we lose Lyman, then it’s a problem for Sloviansk. But that’s if …”
He noted a change in the way the strategy is viewed more widely in Ukraine, where previously there were sharp questions over the cost of the defence.
“I do remember from two years ago that there were all these questions about why are we holding [in certain places], although it was obvious anyway,” he said. “But now it’s completely different. Back then they said: ‘Why hold on to this?’ What do they say now? It’s the opposite. We need to build up our strength so that we can somehow gain a tactical advantage.”
The human cost – often forgotten as the war has continued to drag on with success and failure measured in metres – remains.
At the evacuation centre in Sloviansk, Lyudmilla, 68, and her friend Tatiana have just escaped from a village two miles from the Russian lines.
Lyudmilla is exhausted and traumatised. The day before, a Russian glide bomb had hit her house, killing her husband and two other men, and amputating the hand of a neighbour. “I had just gone into the yard. It was a miracle I wasn’t hurt. For the last two years we have been living in the cellar.
“The soldiers came to help and look for my husband. But he’d vanished. I don’t feel safe in Sloviansk,” she added. “We could hear explosions last night and couldn’t sleep. I’ll go to the west of the country where my son and his wife and my grandchildren are. But I need to know what happened to my husband. I can’t rest until I know.”
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Satellite imagery courtesy of Planet Labs PBC
