The first time anyone mentioned the phrase “zero line” to me it was in a bar in which a man who had been in the International Legion (the foreigners’ part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces) for two years who was resting on his leave in Lviv. He told me he was going back to the Zero Line, where he had been before, and I asked him what he meant. He told me exactly where he was going, and out of respect to him I will not tell you but let’s just say that it’s a village near Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine that’s been in the news quite a lot. What he meant by the “zero line” was that he would be engaged in street-to-street combat with Russian soldiers in a contested settlement: quite a spicy job. I haven’t seen him since and I hope he’s alright. Then I heard the phrase being used more and more and I wasn’t sure what it referred to. I was told the other day that I would be taken to the zero line but there was no line I could see. The point I’m trying to make is that the so-called front line (or zero line) in the war in Ukraine is not some clearly drawn marked division of territory but something more hazy and it changes in each case depending on where you are in this enormous front of some 1,000 kilometres.
There are many allusions to the conditions in this war being like World War I, as though all the soldiers are living in trenches over here and there are Russian trenches over there and we are lobbing artillery shells across the divide which is heavily mined and with tank traps and so on and so forth. That is partially true, and there are men living in so-called defensive trenches with forward trenches beyond them (from where weapons are fired) but it’s far from the entirety of the story. Those sorts of trench take a lot of time to build and indeed one of the main tasks of infantry soldiers is the digging of trenches. It’s simple manual labour with a shovel; it’s extraordinary that in the twenty-first century soldiers are still digging trenches at all rather than heavy machinery being used but such is the Ukrainian war. In many ways this war takes us back in time and in other ways, with FPV (kamikaze remote controlled) anti-personnel drones it takes us forward in time to some new era of computer-driven warfare.
However the fact is that the two opposing sides have not constructed 1,000 kilometres of liveable trenches neatly opposing the other as in images of World War I battles in France. This modern war is much more chaotic. A large part of the front line is a river, the Dnipro, separating the sides between near Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. In Kupiansk, the front line’s northeasterly point (if you ignore the Russian incursion into Vovchansk and the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk) there is also a river separating the parties and I have sat there and stared at the military positions on the Russian side of the river, just as I have in Kherson. I suppose I was on the “zero line” then. When it is a question (as it is in much of the Donbas) of infantry soldiers moving through forests or across hills to try to obtain control of settlements (which are virtually always completely flattened in the process) then the zero line can be anywhere. You just turn down the wrong village road (of which Ukraine has many, some marked and some unmarked) and you bump into the Russians. When going on these drives you might be considered the zero line.
You can’t simply say that you’ve not reached the zero line until you can see a Russian soldier, although I’ve only seen them over the river in Kupiansk and Kherson. Maybe going anywhere near the front is being on the zero line, given that by far the greatest contemporary danger living on the front line (whether military or civilian) is FPV drones which have a range of 55 kilometres. Therefore maybe going within 55 kilometres of Russian positions is the zero line. I don’t know. The point I am trying to make is that this is not some easy and straightforward front line as though there is a line drawn through Ukrainian territory - at least, not in the Donbas. There are fields and forests and there are settlements, some destroyed, and there are soldiers. The soldiers aren’t sleeping in trenches for the most part, by the way; they’re sleeping in abandoned or destroyed buildings, in villages and other settlements that have seen fighting or are close to the fighting. This makes the idea of providing supplies effectively to soldiers, who wake up in a house and go to war each day, often in their own vehicles, and then drive back to sleep in a house at night, quite a complicated one. And al the time there are drones. This is the sort of stasis in which soldiers on both sides are occupying.
Russian soldiers are by all accounts being told to advance in certain territories and not to come back alive. This is what is known as the “meat grinder” and it involves Ukrainian soldiers trying to slaughter as many Russians as possible hopelessly advancing without proper cover and being gunned down. It is is slaughter but it is testament to the lack of care the Russian Armed Forces have for their personnel. Where the Russians do make advances (and we read in the news that occasionally the Russians have occupied another village) it is through the use of “meat grinder” tactics - in other words at incalculable loss of life, but at some point the Ukrainians run out of bullets and have to retreat. I have been told on the front line in no uncertain terms that what the soldiers need is not more food (I have already written that there are little shops and stores close up to the front line) but bullets and ammunition. The thing that is enabling the Russian “meat grinder” tactics to work is that the Ukrainians simply don’t have enough ammunition to fire and the advancing Russian enemy; and the Russians have a seemingly indefinite number of infantry soldiers, many of whom are effectively foreign mercenaries.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces also need medical supplies desperately, and they need adequately trained medical personnel which they are not getting. Only the hardiest of doctors and nurses want to work in such dire conditions. However I will write about that in a later article as it is a tale all of its own. They appreciate food; but they are getting enough of it as far as I can tell because they can buy it and basic rations are adequate. If you want to make a solider happy, take them some tasty food such as a large piece of fresh meet.
Now I want to talk about red zones (and yellow zones and even green zones). People like talking about red zones but there are lots of definitions out there about what they are. One semi-official definition I have heard is within Russian shelling range which is the Krasnopol artillery system with an accurate shelling range of 25 kilometres. However this seems increasingly irrelevant as the parties shift from relatively expensive artillery to drones that cost next to nothing and have a range as I have said of up to 55 kilometres. The place where to guy if you like being shelled is Kherson. The city is shelled relentlessly day and night and if you are a foreigner (or even a Ukrainian who does not live in Kherson oblast) you will have difficulty getting in and out because you need the permission of the military governor and the answer will be no because a lot of foreigners have been killed there. Buildings get blown up all over the place while you are walking down the street, and Kherson is possibly the most dangerous city in the world right now (up there with Gaza). There is a way in and out of Kherson as a foreigner and you can in fact stay the night there, without the paperwork, but I am not going to reveal that in this article. Anyway with artillery hitting buildings about once every two to five minutes, Kherson is definitely “red zone” as well as “zero line” (you can see the Russian positions across the river).
Then there is another definition of “red zone” which seems to apply in Donbas. Any entry of a foreigner to free Donetsk oblast is defined as a red zone by the SBU, the Ukrainian State Security Service. They ought to take a photocopy of your passport and give you a statutory warning (“you know that you are entering a war zone and you may be killed’, or words to that effect). However they let you in after these relatively brief formalities and then you can pretty much go anywhere you want; you can drive right up to the Russian positions if you want, without anyone stopping you, but of course you will be killed by an artillery shell, a mortar or a drone. This just goes to show that there is not really a strict front line per se but the parties are separated by a no man’s land. There are two roads from free Donetsk oblast to Russian-occupied Bakhmut and you can just drive right down them (past an unoccupied checkpoint) but then you will be killed. The SBU defines the entirety of Donetsk oblast as a “red zone” and you are permanently at risk of artillery, drones and sometimes mortar. Previously people were doing aid and evacuation runs of civilians in villages in the “no man’s land” and I heard one story of a civilian volunteer who was driving down a village road to deliver aid in a car with European plates, only to turn the corner and find a Russian checkpoint. He thought he was in Ukrainian-occupied territory but there are no precise maps and it’s all jumbled up. Anyway he did the wise thing and just saluted the Russian soldiers and drove on. Presumably they didn’t stop him and arrest him because they didn’t want to do the paperwork, speak to their commanders, get interrogated by the FSB and all the other things that would follow in the Russian Armed Forces if you detain a western civilian volunteer who will then end up in a Russian prison, sentenced to death and released some years later emaciated in a spy swap.
So that is another sort of red zone: you hardly know where the front line is but it’s certainly all extremely dangerous.
Then there is another sort of red zone, which applies to journalists accredited by the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the SBU. For accredited journalists, there are three sorts of zone although it’s all rather hazy. The red zone journalists are not allowed to go into at all, and this is loosely defined as 1.5 kilometres from the Russian positions. The yellow zone you are allowed to go into only with soldiers, although nobody seems to know quite where the yellow zone starts or finishes. I suppose that entering and sleeping in military bases counts as yellow zones but I am not sure quite what else does. Showing your military journalist’s ID or wearing patches that say “press” seems to be a bad idea and nobody seems to want that at all. Finally there are green zones where you are allowed to go even without a military escort and it’s not clear what those zones are either - at least, not to me.
Now I want to talk about occasional foreign documentaries in which journalists wearing brazen press patches and black body armour and black helmets and this kind of thing appear to be following soldiers around damaged buildings with lots of sounds of bullets firing in the background. This isn’t real. These events are put on occasionally for the foreign media. You’re not allowed to film or photograph anything in the presence of soldiers in reality, unless the event is staged (for example they are not real front line soldiers). Ukrainian soldiers are rightly paranoid that if their faces appear in media or (even worse) social media they will be identified by the exceptionally skilled Russian intelligence internet trolls in St Petersburg, put on lists, their family may be threatened, and all sorts of things. This also happens to foreigners, by the way: if you go to the front line, don’t let your face be seen or photos be taken of you or the Russian intelligence may be onto you and start messing with your email, your banking or something else they hack into. Or they may troll you on the internet. That’s why this article doesn’t have a “by line”: I don’t want my name to be associated with it, intentionally, because the Russians do infiltrate foreigners working in Ukraine to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces and they are very clever at it.
The real message of this article is that apart from the River Dnipro, and a hard front line of trenches south of Zaporizhzhia, there really isn’t a specific zero line or red zone that we can refer to. There are just varying levels of danger, depending on what you are doing. Assuming this war ends (as I predict) in an armistice of some kind without a peace agreement (Ukraine will never accept annexation of her territory but Russia cannot it seems be dislodged) then someone will have to draw a line on a map and it will not be an easy task. Each and every settlement down to the tiniest will be argued and debated over and that is why the Russians are using “meat grinder” tactics to make minuscule advances in a vast country like Ukraine. It’s all in anticipation of an armistice agreement which I will predict will be in about March of 2025 once the new US President, whoever that may be, has settled in. In the interim we have red zones, zero lines and other things, but basically it’s all just one vast mess.