Ukraine is racing to finish multiple lines of defence that could halt Russia’s swift advances, but efforts have so far been marred by delays and lack of co-ordination, according to Ukrainian officials and commanders.
Russian troops have been making the swiftest gains in the eastern Donetsk region this year, pushing the frontline west, in some places to as close as 15km from the border with neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region. If Vladimir Putin’s soldiers crossed that line, it would mark the first breach into a new Ukrainian region since 2022 and deal a significant blow to Kyiv’s war effort.
“The situation with fortifications is another factor demoralising troops,” said Dmytro Razumkov, a former ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is now on the parliamentary committee investigating delays and alleged corruption in the effort to build defences.
“Funds are scattered among all the regions and everyone is building their own thing. There is no one person who is responsible for the quality, for planning, for how these positions will be transferred and to whom, and who will supervise them,” he said.
Dnipropetrovsk region spent $7.3mn on fortifications from November 2023 to November 2024, according to a freedom of information request.
But two officials involved in construction in the area said there was little to show for the money and that the efforts only picked up pace around two months ago.
A Financial Times reporter visiting areas of Dnipropetrovsk region close to Donetsk last month saw a few prepared positions and an anti-tank ditch but also several positions still under construction or abandoned, unfinished.
The current thrust of Russia’s offensive is around the towns of Kurakhove and Velyka Novosilka and the logistics hub of Pokrovsk, where there are three major highways leading to Dnipropetrovsk region and Dnipro city itself.
If Russian troops entered Dnipropetrovsk, it would significantly disrupt Kyiv’s war effort, as the region houses its military command, army support forces, volunteers, drone manufacturers and one of the largest populations outside the capital city.
One official told the FT in late November that Velyka Novosilka had fallen. Construction of fortifications was under way to stop Russia from taking control of the highway, according to the official.
The spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern command, Nazar Voloshyn, said last week that the town remained under Ukrainian control, after the Russians were pushed back from its northern outskirts.
Voloshyn added that though Velyka Novosilka was now Russia’s main target, the forces deployed did not seem to be large enough to mount an offensive on Dnipropetrovsk and other regions.
Most of the defensive lines in Donetsk region, including around the major towns, were completed in late October, a person in charge of building fortifications in the area told the FT.
But there were still gaps putting Dnipropetrovsk region at risk, they said, between Velyka Novosilka and Kurakhove as well as Kurakhove and Pokrovsk — where a second line of fortifications is still being built and a third has not yet broken ground.
“The fighting makes it incredibly dangerous for builders, and the direction of attack is constantly changing,” they said. Workers had been hit by drones and artillery and were slowed down by the heavy body armour they have to wear. “If they start attacking towards Dnipropetrovsk region, we will have a threat from yet another direction.”
Rob Lee, a military analyst, said that Russia’s military engineering corps has long had the upper hand in building fortifications at a greater speed and quality compared to Ukraine.
He added that after capturing Vuhledar, a town in Donetsk region, Russia has been able to advance quickly because Ukraine “clearly didn’t have great defences built behind it”, forcing Ukrainian troops to retreat.
Lee said Russia’s superior fortifications included concrete mazes as well as the well-built tree-line defensive positions that enabled it to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. Ukraine’s forces would benefit from “building enough good (defensive) positions that troops can fall back to,” said Lee, including inside towns.
Further compounding the problem is Ukraine’s manpower shortage, he said. “As long as that problem gets worse, (Ukraine) is risking . . . units being unable to plug gaps.”
One infantry commander whose construction company built fortifications for the army before he and his employees were mobilised said defensive lines were still a low priority.
His unit had moved 32 times over the course of the war and each time it had been forced to build its own defensive positions and raise money for the effort. Meanwhile, second and third lines were often being built without consulting troops, either in the wrong place or too far back from the first line.
Environmental laws also posed a problem, as they limited the number of trees that could be cut, according to the commander. “The Russians are cutting our trees down left and right and we can’t use them to build our trenches!?”
“We saw the fortifications that the Russians had built on our land. If we had done the same, the Pokrovsk situation would not have happened,” he said.
The construction of fortifications was initially delayed because the presidential administration believed Ukraine would recapture a lot more territory in 2023, said Razumkov. Once the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed, in November that year, there were further delays due to lack of co-ordination and some instances of corruption, he added.
Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies have opened 30 criminal investigations into alleged embezzlement with an estimated total damage of $483mn, according to a spokesperson for the parliamentary committee.
Stanislav Buniatov, commander of an assault battalion, said fortifications were important also to provide fallback positions for an exhausted infantry. “The combat potential of an infantry fighter will be reduced to zero if he has to expend energy building positions during the day, especially during the winter,” he said.
Ideally, fortifications would be taken care of by the Ukrainian version of the US army engineer corps, said Buniatov, together with a centralised inspection military body that could travel around the front lines to plan and control work.
But Ukraine’s engineering units are so depleted of men that responsibility falls to local authorities who use infantry brigades as contractors, with a small number of engineers overseeing work on the first line of defences.
Adding to their exasperation, many military engineers have been redeployed to fill frontline gaps, because they are officially classified as “rear units”.
If military engineers were “not sent to assault operations, but allowed to do their job professionally, dig trenches and prepare lines and borders so that we can defend ourselves, then things would work,” said Buniatov. “Now the system is either not performing at all or performing to a small extent.”
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