Ukraine's front lines: Real war overshadows fears of future one with ...

That’s where the Russian-backed forces are posted.Distant booms can occasionally be heard from the road — what one Ukrainian soldier described as the “enemy saying hello.”This has been the daily, draining status quo in Ukraine’s nearly eight-year conflict with pro-Moscow militants who control two separatist enclaves along the border with Russia. There are approximately 100,000 Russian troops and an array of military hardware massed in annexed Crimea and near Ukraine’s border, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.Russia makes sweeping security demands from the WestMoscow has also said it isn’t readying an attack on Ukraine, but has demanded written “security guarantees” from the West. NATO has said that’s a non-starter — what some analysts fear Russia could use as justification for starting a war at Europe’s eastern edge.In Hranitne, a village on the Kalmius River that borders the territory controlled by separatists, war is already here — against forces Ukrainians say are Russian proxies. He decided to visit the area with eight others: four civilians who also work for the military civil administration and four Ukrainian soldiers.“It was actually really joyful,” said Vesyolkin, who fled Horlivka, a coal-mining city about 85 miles northeast of Hranitne, when it came under the control of the pro-Russian insurgents in 2014.“For me, as a person whose home is occupied and where I have not been for eight years, I entered this territory again as a representative of Ukraine, in an area that had not seen a civil servant in more than seven years,” he said. I did not know what to do, I was standing there all frightened.”Six ways Russia views Ukraine — and why each should worry the WestOn Oct. 26, a day after Vesyolkin had crossed the bridge, Ukrainian forces ordered a drone strike on the separatists’ D-30 howitzer — an act Putin later referred to as an escalation on the part of Kyiv. The weapons have not yet been used.But Russia clearly has the advantage in firepower, particularly its missile arsenal.“There is no doubt that the Russian army is larger than the Ukrainian army,” said Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council.“But there is also a weapon called the Ukrainian spirit,” he added.