The off-duty soldiers were in a coffee shop near to Peace Square in Kramatorsk when a Russian glide bomb struck nearby.

The owners had taped giant Xs across the windows to stop the regular explosions from shattering them. But the men were showered with glass all the same, a reminder that the fortified city that for years has offered troops a respite from combat has come into range for the Kremlin’s artillery and air strikes.

Glide bombs are “scarier little guys than drones” and used more than artillery, said another soldier, who shared videos of the aftermath and asked only to be identified by his call sign, Komers, for security reasons. He said the tactic seems designed to intimidate the local population.

Positioned in a valley in the highlands of eastern Ukraine, Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk came under heavy aerial bombardment after the full-scale invasion of 2022, but became an oasis of sorts for Ukrainian troops as fire moved elsewhere. They would buy new armor or just hang out and smoke hookah pipes during brief stretches away from the front.

Now Russia’s air campaign is making the city unlivable.

A combined drone and artillery attack earlier this month killed a 78-year-old woman and wounded five other people as cluster bombs hit a bus stop, according to Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko. One foreign trainer of Ukrainian medics who’s been in Kramatorsk for years says the town has become overrun with drones.

“The Russians want to cut off Kramatorsk and Sloviansk but they just don’t have the strength,” said Ilya Kostin, another soldier who’s just been redeployed after six months at a command unit in the region. “So they are fighting now so that all that is left for us is bare earth.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying and failing to complete the capture of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk for more than a decade and has refused to discuss peace until Ukraine agrees to hand over the roughly 30% of Donetsk it still controls. Kramatorsk is at the heart of this defense.

Before the war, the city had a population of almost 200,000. The recent offensive has seen many civilians finally move away. The foreign medic, who asked not to be named for security reasons, said most of their operations are relocating to a town 60 kilometers (38 miles) to the west. The soldiers though are staying.

“Ukraine’s recent success has turned media attention away from the battle for Donetsk,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a frequent visitor to the region. ‘‘And to some extent, folks have forgotten that the battle for Donetsk has been continuing all this time.’’

It’s unlikely that Moscow can actually take and hold Kramatorsk, Kofman said. Russia has still not managed to take the much smaller surrounding towns of Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka, where back-and-forth assaults have been raging for years. But Russia’s creeping advance in the highlands to the east has brought the city within range of new levels of Russian fire power.

Kostin witnessed this transformation through the hundreds of live feeds that flash through the drone command post where he was serving.

“You have 150 windows on one big screen and each of these films show some forward push by one or two enemy infantry,” he said. “Step-by-step, they go to one place where they build up, and then they go on to form a unit. This is happening constantly, non-stop, 24/7.”

Kostin said that in his experience about nine out of 10 enemy soldiers are killed, but those that survive have still been enough to consolidate Russia’s presence nearer to the city and create a base for more attacks. The first fiber-optic drones started to reach the city in October. Now they are a constant presence.

Such drones can’t be jammed and have to be shot down one by one. Russia has used them to turn other cities into ghost towns, most famously Kherson, where the Dnieper River reaches the Black Sea. In Kherson, hundreds of civilians have been the victims of attacks by Russian drones, according to a report last year by Human Rights Watch.

For Komers though, who’s been based in Kramatorsk since early 2024, the biggest recent change has been the increase in glide bomb attacks. Adapted from Soviet-era aerial bombs, glide bombs have wings and crude satellite-guidance kits that allow them to fly long distances and carry enough explosives to take out a building.

“There’s no room there for civilian life,” Kostin said.

Kofman remembers a similar process of Russian destruction when he visited Dobropillya, 70 kilometers (43 miles) to the south, last October. In the summer it had been packed with people out on the streets, by the fall is was desolate.

“We were the only car on the road in the entire city,” he said. “It’s very sad to see a city die.”

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(With assistance from Brendan Scott.)

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