On Avdiivka’s wretched battlefield, Russian soldiers who refuse to advance face an impossible decision

Soldiers who don’t follow the suicidal Kremlin orders now risk gunfire from both sides of the war, says Askold Krushelnycky in Ukraine

Russian servicemen at a military ceremony in the Leningrad region (Reuters)

So brutal is the conflict in the heavily fortified battlefields around the city of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine, that Western intelligence suggests some Russian commanders are now executing soldiers who refuse to advance into the tempest of rocket and gunfire.

Avdiivka, a scarred and jagged outpost of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, has become the new focal point of Kremlin efforts to snatch something they can present as a victory. Despite severe censorship, Russians now understand that Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-blown invasion has been a catastrophe, with casualties, by some estimates, topping more than a quarter of a million dead and wounded.

In the face of such merciless “human-wave zombie attacks” deployed by the increasingly desperate Russian high command, those numbers are only set to rise.