“Popasna got it hard,” Yelets said, with rockets, missiles, artillery shells. Smoke billowed at several points along the rolling landscape, as heavy battles unfolded in Bakhmut and Lyman, another nearby city. “We took this position so we could see everything,” Yelets told me. A Ukrainian military drone buzzed overhead. “Only now I’m defending people’s freedoms with a rifle.” We walked to a hilltop, which gave us a wide view of the horizon. “You could say that nothing changed for me,” he said. Once the war started, Yelets joined the Territorial Defense forces, and was dispatched here, where he and other troops were digging new trenches in case of a further Russian advance. I had first met him on February 23rd, the day before Russia’s invasion, in his home town of Toretsk, fifteen miles away. Before the war, Yelets was a human-rights activist. On the road out of Bakhmut, I stopped at a military checkpoint to say hello to Volodymyr Yelets, a fifty-year-old volunteer fighter with a deep baritone and a thick silver beard. An infantryman has nothing to do in an artillery war other than dig-and run.” One of the soldiers switched to English to describe the fighting: “Let me put it like this: very fucking awful.” He went on, “We want to shoot the enemy, but we don’t see him. Since Russian forces had captured the nearby town of Popasna, in May, Bakhmut fell well within Russian artillery range it was also on Ukraine’s main supply route to Sievierodonetsk, the city that is now Russia’s main target and the site of running street battles. In Bakhmut, a midsize town a few miles from the front, I met members of a Kyiv-based unit of the Territorial Defense, a voluntary military corps, who had been sent east in recent weeks they looked ragged but cheerful. The war has become, as one soldier told me, a game of “artillery Ping-Pong.” Rather, battles are often fought at distances of ten miles or more. As Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at CNA, a defense research organization, said, “Russia is making fitful but incremental gains, and Ukraine’s position in the Donbas is more precarious than it once seemed.” I spent several days in the Donbas recently, where a number of officers and enlisted soldiers told me that Ukrainian infantry rarely see the enemy. Now the Russian military has regrouped its forces for a more targeted assault in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, drawing on its advantages in artillery and airpower. Viral videos show their direct strikes, with tanks disappearing in flame and smoke. Ukrainian troops mounted small-unit ambushes and used rocket-propelled grenades, antitank weapons, and drones to destroy Russian troop formations and armor. The Russian Army’s initial campaign, in February and March, was a three-front invasion with little coherence or military logic. Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the same conflict that it was earlier this spring.