KHARKIV OBLAST, Ukraine — After months of heavy fighting, Ukrainian troops are pushing Russian forces back into Kharkiv Oblast. “The situation is a little better … but we are still firing one shell for every 10 of their shells,” said Roman, an artillery gunner with the 406th Artillery Brigade, who gave only his first name in accordance with Kyiv military regulations.

A reporter visited troops at a base outside the city of Kharkiv in late July, near where the Russian military opened a new front line in May this year. The attack caused near-panic among Ukrainian forces as Russian troops advanced across the border and overran weak Ukrainian defenses.

A determined defense by some of Ukraine’s best troops stopped the Russian advance near the towns of Vovchansk and Lypty. Now the tide is turning, not least thanks to Western donations of weapons such as the M777 rifled howitzer, a weapon that was considered a relic of past wars just a few years ago.

The M777s had a special, modern ammunition that was initially used with great success. Artillery units fired GPS-guided Excalibur shells with the utmost precision, destroying key Russian hubs and making it difficult for the invaders to advance. Meanwhile, US officials in Washington relaxed the restrictions that had previously prevented Ukrainian forces from attacking Russian units firing across the border, removing a key limitation in organizing defense here.

Vitali Sarantsev, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military, said: “It gave us the opportunity to stop them and slow down their advance. They are not comfortable in border areas, so they cannot concentrate troops without great difficulty. Basically, it gives (us) the opportunity to destroy them deep in their territory, so they cannot prepare properly.”

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But now the Russian armed forces have managed to break the spell of Western high-tech weapons. Russian electronic warfare systems have improved significantly and are now capable of disrupting technologies such as the Excalibur’s controls.

Without a satellite connection, the much-vaunted missiles are expensive pieces of metal. “They fire but don’t explode,” said Roman. “So they land and are like a dud.”

The M777 still uses standard unguided explosive rounds, making them an important weapon, but they no longer have the tremendous impact they did when they were first introduced.

The broader significance is that Western assumptions regarding technological superiority have a limited shelf life here.

The recently introduced US-supplied ATACMS missiles are still operational, but many analysts believe it is only a matter of time before the Russians find countermeasures to these cutting-edge technologies.

“Warfare is about speed of adaptation,” former Air Marshal Edward Stringer, a British defense official, told the Wall Street Journal. “When you drip an antibiotic weekly, you actually train the pathogen — and we trained the pathogen. … We didn’t have to give them that time, but we did.”

The NATO standard weapons still have one important advantage over their older Soviet counterparts. For one thing, they are lighter and more maneuverable – Ukrainian soldiers pack and unpack an M777 into firing positions in about 90 seconds. When not firing, the equipment is carefully camouflaged.

Yet artillerymen here predict that their weapons’ days are numbered. When Ukraine suffered a huge shortage of ammunition, largely due to a stalemate in the U.S. Congress and Republican reluctance to approve additional military aid, the country filled the gaps in its artillery use with drones. Now the skies above the battlefield are full of Mavics, first-person-view drones, Vampyrs and all sorts of cheap gadgets, many of them repurposed civilian models you can buy on Amazon.

Drones have become so ubiquitous on the battlefield that they rival artillery in terms of enemy tanks destroyed and fighters killed. Crucially, they are not dependent on the domestic political whims of Ukraine’s Western allies.

The soldiers here claim that artillery still has many advantages over drones. For example, artillery can hit targets much faster and the shells have enough explosive power to destroy armored vehicles. In addition, a hail of artillery is extremely terrifying and has a deeply shocking effect on the enemy’s morale that drones cannot yet match.

While the Ukrainians have stabilized the front lines near Kharkiv, Russian forces are advancing elsewhere.

They have recently made territorial gains in the Donetsk region and have advanced close to the important logistics hub of Pokrovsk. Moscow’s forces have suffered enormous losses but seem to be able to absorb them.

“As long as we have enough ammunition here, we will fight until victory,” says artillery commander Roman.

It’s a familiar refrain repeated dozens of times on this battlefield, each time uttered more wearily and a little less hopefully than the last. When we ask soldiers what they need from the West, the answer is everywhere the same: grenades.

The soldiers here have accepted the logic of a bitter war of attrition, with one side wearing down the other. Despite this dynamic, none of the soldiers interviewed here are willing to entertain the idea of ​​a peace treaty that would cede Ukrainian territory to Russia – or at least no one wants to admit it.

According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, more than 30 percent of Ukrainians would now be willing to consider handing over Ukrainian territory to Russia if the fighting were to end.

Roman’s soldiers greeted the idea with disdain. When asked what he thought of people who proposed ceding territory for peace, one of them grinned and said, “I’d like to punch those people in the face.”

Meanwhile, in Kharkiv, Ukrainian urban life goes on. On a warm evening in late July, the streets were filled with a wedding party that had just celebrated its wedding – a half-hour event for close friends and family so as not to be a target for Russian missiles. In the background, birdsong and casual conversation could be heard, along with the wail of an air raid siren.

But these worries did not stop crowds from flocking to bars and clubs along Kharkiv’s main streets. “If a bomb had exploded in the street next to us, people would have turned around to look and then carried on partying,” said one reveler.

The fight for their right to celebrate here is solely the responsibility of men like Roman, who are holding the front against a seemingly never-ending stream of Russian soldiers.