Inside a besieged Ukrainian city where soldiers await US arms

livemint.com:

CHASIV YAR, Ukraine—The explosion lit up the night sky, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air. Another huge blast followed a few seconds later, then a third. The booms carried for miles across the fields east of Chasiv Yar, and a few moments later, a jet ripped through the sky.

Russian planes were hitting this eastern city—now Moscow’s primary target in Ukraine—with glide bombs, each carrying at least a half-ton of explosives and capable of collapsing a building in a single strike. Ukrainian forces, outgunned and outmanned, are struggling to hold Chasiv Yar long enough for fresh weaponry from the U.S. to arrive.

Located on a ridge overlooking Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city that Moscow took last year after the bloodiest battle of the war, Chasiv Yar is a valuable strategic prize. If Ukraine loses the city, its remaining strongholds in the eastern Donetsk region would become prime targets for an expected Russian offensive this summer. “It’s the high ground," Yuriy Fedorenko, commander of the Achilles attack-drone battalion in Ukraine’s 92nd Assault Brigade, which is working around Chasiv Yar.

“If the enemy captured Chasiv Yar, they’d have fire control of Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka," naming three of the largest settlements in the region still under Ukrainian control. The situation for Ukrainian troops around Chasiv Yar is punishing. For each artillery round Ukraine fires, Russia fires 10, and soldiers in the area say that ratio is getting worse.

At the front line, which winds through the fields and villages east of Chasiv Yar, the Russians are taking heavy casualties but steadily advancing. They have now reached the eastern edge of the city. Inside the city, Moscow is destroying the buildings