CRANES towering over shattered homes on Ukraine’s old front line are proof that the underdog is winning.
Even as Russia’s guns turn other towns to rubble, workmen are rebuilding the most devastated parts of bomb-blitzed northern Kharkiv.
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A year ago I cowered on the city’s frozen ring road as a barrage of Russian shells screamed over our heads and tore into the flats behind.
The city had repelled a Russian tank assault and was punished for its defiance with a deadly, months-long bombardment by mortars, tanks, howitzers, rockets, cluster bombs and cruise missiles.
In its darkest days whole families — with newborn babies and loyal pet dogs — lived inside subway trains underground to shelter from the blitz.
To walk outside was to risk your life.
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We saw hero first responders caught in “double tap” strikes and watched the steely, selfless courage of a Red Cross volunteer who used his body to shield a woman as he screamed at others to find hard cover.
But slowly, and then very suddenly, Ukraine drove its invaders back.
Russia’s collapse in rural Kharkiv was one of its three defining defeats of the war, along with its retreats from Kyiv, in March, and from Kherson in October.
Today these cities are far from safe, but the green shoots of normal life are returning.
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In Kyiv and Kharkiv the metros have emptied of refugees, the electric trams are working, and the wail of the air raid sirens is now so routine that people barely flinch.
The guns which once hammered these northern cities have been pushed out of range.
Putin is forced to use longer-range weapons such as the repurposed S-300 missiles which smashed into Kharkiv this week.
The tremoring tyrant’s dream of a lightning victory was so spectacularly wrong that his stumbling military planners have scrambled to come with plans B, C and D.
Blood-soaked towns
Broadly, Russia’s war is now split into two campaigns.
The focus of its dumb bombs — its howitzers and Grad rockets — are the blood-soaked towns of the east.
The scarcer, longer-range weapons — including sub-launched Kalibr cruise missiles and Iranian suicide drones — are blitzing the national grid to break Ukraine’s will to fight.
Neither plan seems to be working.
UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Moscow had resorted to World War One tactics.
Poorly trained troops and mercenaries charge over their comrades’ bodies only to be cut down by machine guns and artillery.
Progress is measured in metres.
Western intelligence estimates suggest Russia is currently suffering a thousand casualties a day.
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They have lost almost 200,000 dead, injured or deserted, since the start of the war.
And despite Putin’s orders to mobilise 300,000 conscripts last year, commanders are struggling to mass a meaningful battlefield reserve as the troops have had little or no training.
Meanwhile, all the strikes on the grid have failed to make the lights go out.
Ukraine is lucky. The winter is mild.
And in all except the worst-hit front-line towns, shops have food, petrol stations have fuel and the central heating stations are pumping.
The risk for Kyiv is that the longer it goes on, the more this war of attrition plays to Moscow’s strengths.
Ultimately, Russia has more warm bodies to send over the top. If Putin admits it is a war, not a special military operation, he could order the mobilisation of millions.
At the start of the war, Ukraine’s armed forces were turning away volunteers as they were overwhelmed with support.
Now they have lost at least 100,000 people. All the men of fighting age with military experience are already in the fight.
Allies, including Britain, are training fresh recruits while simultaneously buying in shells from as far afield as Africa and South Asia to keep Ukraine in the fight.
Russia is trying to buy shells from North Korea and allegedly even China, according to US officials.
What Ukraine has lacked in mass it has made up for with cunning, morale and more hi-tech weapons.
Dozens of Western battle tanks — including 14 Challenger 2s — are due to arrive within weeks.
The test for Kyiv in the year ahead is whether it can use that heavy armour to recreate its successes around Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kerson — and tip the war decisively in its favour.
Nothing is impossible
President Volodymyr Zelensky insists he needs F-16 jets to fight with the tanks and more and longer-range missile systems to hit Russian supply hubs deep behind the front lines.
He joked last year that he would retake Crimea in time for the summer barbecue season. It is a long shot, but not impossible. In the minds of Ukraine’s defenders nothing is impossible.
This time last year US President Joe Biden admitted he was bracing “for the fall of Kyiv, perhaps even the end of Ukraine”.
But Kyiv stands, he said.
Ukraine stands. And most of the world stands with it.
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The best that Putin can hope for is to keep slogging away to a stalemate and hope the West’s unity fractures.
The best Ukraine can hope for is another spectacular breakthrough, snowballing momentum, galvanising morale and pushing Russia out of all its territory.
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