MARIUPOL, Ukraine – There are explosions that echo again, and parents know how to tell their children that they are just fireworks. There are drones that the separatists began flying behind the lines at night, dropping landmines. There are new trenches that Ukrainians can see the enemy digging, the rise of sniper fire fixes them inside.
But perhaps the closest evidence that Ukraine’s seven-year war could enter a new phase is what Captain Mykola Levytskyi’s coastguard saw cruising in the Sea of Azov just outside the port city of Mariupol last week: a flotilla amphibious assault ships.
Since the start of the 2014 war, Russia has used the pretext of a separatist conflict to put pressure on Ukraine since its west-facing revolution, supplying weapons and men to Kremlin-backed rebels in the east of the country, while denying it is a party to the fight. .
Few Western analysts believe the Kremlin is planning an invasion of eastern Ukraine, given the likely backlash in the country and abroad. But with a large-scale accumulation of Russian troops on land and at sea on the threshold of Ukraine, opinion is spreading among officials and large areas of the Ukrainian public that Moscow is signaling more directly than ever that it is ready to enter into open conflict.
“These ships are, in fact, a threat from the Russian state,” said Captain Levytskyi as he sailed to the Sea of Azov, after pointing to a Russian patrol stationed six miles offshore. “It’s a much more serious threat.”
Many Ukrainian military officials and volunteer fighters say Russia is still unlikely to openly invade Ukraine and see no evidence of an imminent offensive among Russian forces. But it is speculating on other possibilities, including the possible recognition or annexation by Russia of the territories held by separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainians are awaiting President Vladimir V. Putin’s annual state of the nation address in Russia on Wednesday, a business often full of geopolitical signaling for clues as to what will happen next.
“I feel confused, I feel tense,” Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Ukrainian minister of culture and information policy, said in an interview.
Mr Tkachenko listed a number of invasion scenarios: a Russian attack in three directions from north, south and east; an attack on separatist territory; and an attempt to capture a water supply from the Dnieper River to Crimea.
Russia, in turn, has done little to hide its build-up, insisting it has massed troops in response to increased military activity in the region by NATO and Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials deny any plan to escalate the war, but there is no doubt that President Volodymyr Zelensky has taken a tougher line against Russia in recent months.
Mr Zelensky shut down pro-Russian television stations and imposed sanctions on Mr Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine. He also said more openly than before his desire to get Ukraine to join NATO, a distant possibility that the Kremlin still considers a serious threat to Russia’s security.
In recent days, interviews with front-line units in a 150-mile area in eastern Ukraine have highlighted rapidly growing tensions in Europe’s only active armed conflict. Officials and volunteers acknowledge concern over the movements of Russian troops, and civilians feel numb and hopeless after seven years of war. At least 28 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in fighting this year, the army says.
“We live in sadness,” said Anna Dikareva, a 48-year-old postal worker in the front-line industrial city of Avdiivka, where people are barely shaking when shells explode in the distance. “I don’t want war, but we won’t solve this peacefully either.”
For most of last year, there was a ceasefire.
Mr Zelensky, a television comedian elected in 2019 with a promise to end the war, has negotiated step-by-step compromises with the Kremlin to ease the hardships of front-line residents and find ways out of a conflict that has killed more than 13,000 people. people. people. Russia’s insistence on policies that will essentially give it a say in eastern Ukraine’s future has been unacceptable to Kiev.
“The hope that Zelensky had to solve this problem did not come true,” said Mr Tkachenko, the president’s longtime information minister and associate.
Instead, the fighting began again.
Ukrainian labyrinths of trenches and fortifications along the front of about 250 miles are already so well established that in a tunnel near Avdiivka, soldiers put multicolored Christmas lights to enhance the darkness. The city is located just a few kilometers north of the city of Donetsk, the main fortress of the separatists.
In their fighting position on the hill, overlooking a separatist position in a T-shaped growth of the trees, the soldiers described the sound of separatist drones that they said were carrying fallen landmines about a kilometer behind the line. Since December and January, they said, sniper fire on the other side has increased and separatists have been able to see new trenches being dug.
The inscription above the skull on their shoulders read, “Ukraine or death.”
“The enemy has been active lately,” said a 58-year-old soldier, nicknamed “the professor,” who said he would not give his full name for security reasons.
In Avdiivka, a volunteer unit from Ukraine’s right-wing ultranationalist sector keeps a pet wolf in a cage outside the commander’s office. The commander, Dmytro Kotsyubaylo – his war name is Da Vinci – jokes that the fighters feed the bones of Russian-speaking children, a reference to Russian state media troops about the evils of Ukrainian nationalists.
Both sides have accused each other of a growing number of ceasefire violations, but Mr Kotsyubaylo said that – to his regret – his fighters were only allowed to fire in response to the separatist attacks.
On the video above his office, Mr Kotsyubaylo presented high-definition images of drones depicting the daily violence that takes place just 400 miles from the European Union’s borders. In a single sequence, two rounds of his unit’s mortar explode around the separatist trenches; an empty, sprinting man appears. In another, there is an explosion in what he said is a separatist sniper position; the cleaning smoke reveals a body covered with yellow dust.
Asked what is expected to happen next, Mr Kotsyubaylo replied: “large-scale war”.
Mr Kotsyubaylo said he believed the movements of Russian troops north and south of the separatist-held territory were a ploy to divert Ukrainian forces from the front line. He said he expected Russia to launch an offensive using its separatist powers in the self-declared “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, allowing Mr Putin to continue to say the war is a Ukrainian internal affair.
“If Russia wanted to do it in secret, it would do it in secret,” Mr Kotsyubaylo said of the mass troops. “I’m doing everything I can to see them and show them how strong Putin is.”
According to the peace plan negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015, the heavy weapons of both sides must be positioned far behind the front line.
Ukrainian artillery is now stationed in places such as a Soviet-era tractor yard in an off-road village, which can be reached on treacherous dirt roads, an hour’s drive from Mariupol. Col. Andrii Shubin, the base commander, said he was ready to send artillery weapons and radar trucks to provide weapons provided by the Americans to the front as soon as the order came.
Ukrainian officials say they do not reposition troops in response to the Russian buildup and that any current troop movement is a normal rotation.
On Monday, dozens of tanks and armored vehicles could be seen moving in the southwest of the government-controlled area of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The soldiers relaxed on cots at a village station under graffiti that used obscenity to refer to Mr. Putin.
Around the region, from the fashionable waterfront of Mariupol to the streets of Avdiivka with shrapnel, many residents said they were so exhausted by the war that they did not even want to consider the possibility of fighting again.
Lena Pisarenko, a 45-year-old Russian teacher from Avdiivka, said she never stopped keeping an emergency source of water handy in pots and bottles throughout her apartment and balcony. During the bombings at the height of the war, she created a ritual to keep her children quiet: they played board games and drank tea while three candles burned three times. Then it’s time to go to bed.
Another woman passing by, Olga Volvach, 41, said she did not care about the recent escalation of bombings.
“The balcony door insulators sound good,” she said.
Maria Varenikova contributed to the reports from Mariupol, Ukraine.