Kill zones and drone nets define Ukraine's fortress belt, a strategic line of towns and cities crucial to the country's defence in the Donbas region. The Guardian visited the front, where anti-drone nets cover roads and buildings, and soldiers and civilians live under constant threat of Russian attack.
Lyman: The northern outpost
A vast cobweb of spent fibre-optic cable drapes over buildings in Lyman. Used to control deadly drones deployed by both Russia and Ukraine, it has accumulated so densely after years of fighting that fresh drones struggle to fly through, their rotors tangling in the mass. Birds pluck it out to make their nests. Beneath the glistening strands, residential blocks are shattered from shellfire as Moscow's forces still push daily to take a city they briefly occupied until the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2022, when they were driven out. The 1,000 or so civilians who remain live in cellars without electricity, gas or running water.
The fortress belt strategy
Lyman is the northern outpost of the “fortress belt”, a string of towns and cities crucial to Ukraine’s defence in the Donbas region. It epitomises Kyiv’s years-long but at times controversial strategy to tie down and exhaust Russian forces in an urban landscape ringed by trees and rivers. The belt was identified for its potential strengths under President Petro Poroshenko in 2015, foresaw a defensive line based around four large cities in Donetsk oblast and their satellite settlements running 30 miles north to south along the H-20 Kostyantynivka-Sloviansk main road. In an April paper, the US thinktank the Institute for the Study of War described it as “optimised for defence across nearly every possible topographical and geographical characteristic”.
Human cost: Civilians under siege
Oleksandr Pavlovych, a vegetable seller, fled Lyman the day before the Guardian met him in the evacuation centre in nearby Sloviansk. His 78-year-old mother had been hit in the stomach by shrapnel. Over a long day, she died slowly and without help. He buried her in the garden and then took a bicycle to ride 19 miles to relative safety, surviving an encounter with a Russian FPV drone which exploded on an anti-drone net covering the road, the battery striking his ankle. “The city is so badly damaged,” he said. “You have to go to the central park for the chance of mobile phone signal. And outside the drones are everywhere. We were afraid to leave. But when my mother died I was scared to stay on my own.”
Transformation of warfare
The conduct of warfare has been utterly transformed over the course of the conflict. Brigades that came to fight in this region for the counteroffensive of 2023 travelled in convoys of hastily camouflaged civilian cars. They now traverse the cities and the front in vehicles bristling with spikes constructed from heavy metal cable designed to pre-detonate hunting Russian drones, or caged-in with wire grilles. In the woods and fields, defences have been transformed into layers of deep obstacles: tank ditches and bollards, tangled with barbed wire. Beside the physical deterrents are antenna to spot drones and electronic countermeasures to knock them out, while streets and highways are cloaked in anti-drone net tunnels.
Military perspective: Adapting to drone warfare
Lt Col Shamil Krutkov, a commander in Ukraine’s 93rd brigade and veteran of battles across the Donbas, said: “The war has changed since [the full-scale invasion in] 2022.” He conceded that the defence of the fortress belt was viewed with scepticism over the years by many fighters, but that it bought time for Ukraine to adapt to a new kind of war dominated by drones, battlefield robots and remote sensing. “Technology has turned everything upside down. We have had very tough fights in the Donbas, but those hard times forced us to think and be creative,” Krutkov said. “We both have same technologies. I’m not sure either side has the chance for a big offensive.”
Kill zones and Russian losses
Vadym, an officer in the 63rd brigade fighting in and around Lyman, credited the fortress belt successes to military reforms instigated in 2024 that improved coordination. “Before, a single brigade would stand its ground and try and hold its position, and then be outflanked on the right and left. Now you can feel the difference. It is better,” he said. “We started creating proper kill zones. Clearing the forests and digging tank ditches, and laying wire and obstacles with trees. When the enemy moves it’s all right there in plain sight … Over the last six months in our sector we haven’t given the Russians a single metre.”
Daily life under attack
In Kramatorsk, the Guardian encountered the aftermath of a strike on an apartment building by a Shahed drone that injured four people. Yulia Melnyk, 46, who lives in the building, is fatalistic as she tidies her flat, the stairwell charred and acrid with smoke. “Sometimes the noise scares me. But if I’m hearing the explosion, I’m alive and life goes on. It exploded somewhere else,” she said. “I’ll think sometimes – I need to do something and move. But two hours later I will have changed my mind. And look, my building is still standing.”
Future of the fortress belt
Ukraine feels that the fortress belt is largely holding up against Russian attacks and can resist Moscow’s demands to surrender territory. The defence has given Kyiv time to implement drone attacks on supply lines to occupied Crimea and the Donbas. Vadym said: “The enemy is not giving up on trying to storm Lyman and establish a foothold there. Their task last year was to take Lyman by October. Then it was by the end of the new year. Then March. Now, by the end of summer.”
