Bakhmut, Ukraine CNN —
In a basement in eastern Ukraine, young men sit at a long table strewn with laptops, their eyes on a TV screen an arm’s length away.
They watch black figures on a desolate winter hilltop who seem to panic and then run across the image. It’s a live video feed from a small Ukrainian drone several miles away – a spotter for artillery teams trying to kill Russian soldiers in their trenches.
Plumes of smoke rise from near misses from Ukrainian volleys.
Along the eastern front lines, in basement command centers hidden behind unmarked metal doors, literal Ukrainian soldiers direct artillery fire in a desperate attempt to stem a Russian advance.
This is a true proving ground for innovative 21st century warfare. The men use cheap, off-the-shelf drones and consumer chat programs to identify and communicate targeting of weapons that, in many cases, are several decades old.
Their fiercest battle is over the city of Bakhmut, which has been under siege by Russian forces for months.
The ferocity of this struggle is evident from the first moments as you approach the city, where black smoke billows from apartment blocks.
As a CNN team pulled in on the busy main road, a Russian artillery shell landed on a building just dozens of meters away. Moments later, another shell hit the building, prompting our military escort to urge the team out of the building. Much of this war is being fought to evade the incessant Russian artillery threat.
The Kremlin has concentrated large forces on this attack on Bakhmut, and Ukrainian troops are struggling, says Petro, the commander of the National Guard who heads that unit.
“It feels like a constant, non-stop attack,” he says. “The only window of opportunity to rest is when they’re running out of people and waiting for backup.”
Like others in the Ukrainian military, Petro only uses his first name to protect his identity.
He describes a battle into which Russia has sent wave after wave of forces and seems to care little if they are mowed down.
“Their tactic is to send these poor people forward that we have to eliminate,” explains Petro. “They can’t take Bakhmut with a direct attack, so they bypassed it. We had to move out of the urban areas and into the fields where we are very exposed to artillery.”
Petro’s description matches that of Serhiy Hayday, Ukraine’s head of the neighboring Luhansk region, who said last month that the Russians are “dying en masse near Bakhmut – the mobilized are simply going forward to identify our positions.”
Some Russian soldiers have described significant casualties, although earlier this month Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that casualties “did not exceed 1% of combat strength and 7% of wounded.”
Every corner of the subterranean command center is staffed – with whiteboards listing kills, bunk beds, crates of drones waiting to be configured.
“The roads are muddy,” says Petro. “We cannot evacuate the wounded and deliver ammunition fast enough.”
Ukrainian commanders also complain of a lack of inter-unit communication and that they lack enough junior officers to keep soldiers motivated and engaged in combat after months of grueling warfare.
Further ahead, in a tree line bordering farmland, the Ukrainian artillery unit is at the other end of the phones with the basement.
Tuman, the battery’s commander, receives the coordinates on a mobile phone in one hand and writes them in a notebook he holds in the other.
He yells them out and a soldier yells them back before peering through a scope to take aim at the Soviet-era artillery piece, which they now load with Polish-made shells. With a tug on a cord, autumn leaves are shaken from the almost frozen ground and an artillery shell whistles toward the horizon.
“Our general staff is trying to deliver as many rounds as possible,” Tuman says from the relative safety of a nearby trench. “But we understand that we are not reaching our caliber. But you get what you get.”
He claims the accuracy of Russian artillery has deteriorated over the year as Ukrainian forces interfered with their enemy’s aerial reconnaissance capability.
“Their precision was failing,” he says. “But their laps fly overhead all the time.”
In another command center in the basement, further south in the Donetsk region, more soldiers are staring at their own screens.
Their commander, Pavlo, tells us they count dozens of casualties every day.
“Vehicles and ammunition are upgradeable,” he says. “We try not to count them and use as many as we need to stop the enemy from advancing. The only thing we cannot save is human lives.”
He’s confident about those costs.
“Without victims there is no war,” he says. “If we want to resist and not allow the Russians to conquer our territory, we have to fight. When we fight, we take casualties. These losses are justified and inevitable.”