MARIUPOL, UKRAINE – The spray bar is ringing again, and parents know they need to tell their children that they are just fireworks. There are the drones that the separatists start flying behind the lines at night and drop landmines. There are the fresh trenches that the Ukrainians can see their enemy digging, and the increase in sniper fire that they have pinned in their own.
But perhaps the strongest evidence is that the seven-year-old war in Ukraine can enter a new phase, which cuts. Mykola Levytskyi Coast Guard unit saw sail in the Sea of Azov just outside the port city of Mariupol last week: a fleet of Russian amphibious assault ships.
Since the start of the war in 2014, Russia has used the pretext of a separatist conflict to put Ukraine under pressure after its Western revolution, by supplying weapons and men to rebels backed by the Kremlin in the east of the country, while denying that it’s a party to the fight.
Few Western analysts believe the Kremlin is planning an invasion of eastern Ukraine, given the likely setback abroad. But with a large-scale build-up of Russian troops on land and sea ahead of Ukraine, the view is spreading among officials and wide sections of the Ukrainian public that Moscow is more unequivocally than ever before signaling its readiness to enter the conflict openly.
“These ships are concretely a threat to the Russian state,” Captain Levytskyi said as he propelled the engines of the speedboat, after showing a Russian patrol boat standing six kilometers from the sea. “This is a much more serious threat.”
Many Ukrainian military officials and volunteer fighters say it is still unlikely that Russia will openly invade Ukraine and that they see no evidence of a looming offensive among the assembled Russian forces. But they speculate on other possibilities, including the possible recognition or annexation by Russia of the territories held by separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainians await President Vladimir V. Putin’s annual state of the nation address on Wednesday in Russia, a matter that is regularly geopolitically signaled, for clues as to what comes next.
“I feel confused, I feel tense,” Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information Policy, said in an interview.
Mr. Tkachenko listed several invasion scenarios: a three-pronged Russian attack from the north, south and east; an assault from the area held by separatists; and an attempt to capture a Dnieper River water supply for Crimea.
Russia, for its part, has done little to conceal its build-up, insisting that it has joined forces in response to increased military activity in the region by NATO and Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials deny any plans to escalate the war, but there is no doubt that President Volodymyr Zelensky has taken a tougher line against Russia in recent months.
Zelensky has closed pro-Russian television channels and imposed sanctions on Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine. He also stated more openly than before his desire to join Ukraine in NATO, a possibility that the Kremlin nevertheless sees as a serious threat to Russia’s security.
Interviews with 150-mile frontline units across eastern Ukraine in recent days have highlighted the rapidly rising tensions in Europe’s only active armed conflict. Officials and volunteers acknowledge the concern over Russian troop movements, and civilians feel numb and hopeless after seven years of war. At least 28 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in fighting this year, the army said.
“We live in sadness,” said Anna Dikareva, a 48-year-old postal worker in the leading industrial town of Avdiivka, where people are barely startled when shells explode in the distance. “I do not want war, but we will not resolve it peacefully either.”
Most of last year, a ceasefire took place.
Mr. Zelensky, a television comedian elected in 2019 on a pledge to end the war, negotiated with the Kremlin for step-by-step compromises to alleviate the hardships of frontline residents and to seek ways out of a conflict that killed more than 13,000. people. But Russia’s insistence on policies that would essentially make itself felt in eastern Ukraine’s future was unacceptable to Kiev.
“The hope that Zelensky should solve this problem did not happen,” he said. Tkachenko, the information minister and a longtime collaborator of the president, said.
Instead, the fighting escalated again.
The Ukrainians’ labyrinths of trenches and fortresses along the approximately 250-kilometer-long front have already been so well established that the soldiers are lighting up multicolored candlelight in one tunnel near Avdiivka to brighten up the darkness. The city is located just a few kilometers north of the city of Donetsk, the largest stronghold of the separatists.
At their rampart position, overlooking a separatist position in a T-shaped growth of trees, the soldiers described the sound of separatist drones carrying what they believed were landmines, about a mile behind the line. Since December and January, they said, the sniper had increased from the other side, and they could see the separatists digging new trenches.
The letters above the skull on their shoulders read: ‘Ukraine or death’.
“The enemy has been active lately,” said a 58-year-old soldier nicknamed “the professor,” who said he would not give his full name for security reasons.
In Avdiivka, a voluntary unit of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Right Sector is holding a pet wolf in a cage outside the commander’s office. The commander, Dmytro Kotsyubaylo – his nom de guerre is Da Vinci – jokes that the fighters are feeding the legs of Russian-speaking children, a reference to the Russian state media about the evils of Ukrainian nationalists.
Both sides have accused each other of increasing violations of ceasefire, but Mr. Kotsyubaylo said his fighters, to his regret, were only allowed to shoot in response to attacks by the apartheid side.
On the video screen above his desk, Mr. Kotsyubaylo showed high-definition drones surveys depicting the quotic violence, which takes place only 400 kilometers from the European Union’s borders. In one order, two of his unit’s mortar rounds explode around separatist trenches; a naked man comes forward and jumps. In another, an explosion is seen on what he said was a separatist sniper position; the cleaning smoke reveals a body covered with yellow dust.
When asked what he expects to happen next, Mr. Kotsyubaylo replied: ‘full-scale war’.
Mr. Kotsyubaylo said he believed Russia’s troop movements north and south of the area held by separatists were a deceiver intended to pull Ukrainian forces off the front line. He said he would rather expect Russia to launch an offensive with the help of its separate proxies in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’, which Mr. Putin is able to continue to claim that the war is an internal Ukrainian affair.
“If Russia wanted to do it in secret, they would do it in secret,” he said. Kotsyubaylo said about the mass troops. “They are doing everything they can to see us and to show us how cool Putin is.”
According to the peace plan negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015, the heavy weapons of both parties must be placed far behind the front line.
Ukraine’s artillery is now in places like a Soviet – era tractor yard in an extraordinary village reached by treacherous dirt roads, an hour’s drive from Mariupol. Col. Andrii Shubin, the base commander, said he was ready to send his artillery rifles and his U.S. weapon-locating radar trucks to the front as soon as the order came.
Ukrainian officials say they are not repositioning troops in response to Russian build-up, and that current troop movements are normal rotations.
On Monday, there were dozens of tanks and armored vehicles that could be seen in the southwest of the government-controlled area in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Soldiers relax on beds at a train station in the town under graffiti that uses an obscenity to get to Mr. Putin to refer.
Around the region, from Mariupol’s fashionable waterfront to the streets of Avdiivka, which were scattered with scraps, many residents said they were so exhausted from the war that they did not even want to consider the possibility that the fighting would flare up again.
Lena Pisarenko, a 45-year-old Russian teacher in Avdiivka, said she had never stopped keeping an emergency supply of water in pots and bottles across her apartment and her balcony. During the shelling at the height of the war, she created a ritual to keep her children calm: they would play board games and drink tea while three candles burned down three times. Then it was time for bed.
Another woman passing by, Olga Volvach, 41, said she paid little attention to the recent escalation of shelling.
“Our balcony doors insulate well,” she said.
Maria Varenikova reported from Mariupol, Ukraine.