PHOTOS: Inside the front-line trenches around a destroyed town where Ukraine is fighting the war's longest and bloodiest battle

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Trenches are not a revolutionary aspect of land warfare — they are part of a tactic that's been used in many conflicts going back in history, though perhaps they are most well-known for their role during World War I.

As a grinding war of attrition that features trenches, constant artillery barrages, incremental gains, human wave attacks, and extremely heavy casualties, the fighting in Ukraine has often drawn comparisons to the First World War.

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Ukraine's battlefields, however, have modern touches like the use of advanced drones that buzz overhead.

Fighting in trenches can be "brutal," Billy Fabian, a senior fellow in the defense program at the Center for New American Security and former infantry officer in the US Army, told Insider.

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Trenches are a "survival tactic" and are constructed to protect front-line troops from machine guns and accurate artillery, rather than leave them exposed to this modern firepower out in the open, Fabian added.

"Trench warfare often emerges because of a combination of a relatively static battlefield, where forces are in the same place for a long time, so they have the time to dig these elaborate fortifications," Fabian said.

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Fabian said trenches involve the constant threat of artillery, a major attack, or a raid, and soldiers often endure really rough conditions.

Conditions in the trenches can really deteriorate, Fabian said. "People living in these narrow trenches for weeks and months on end — they get dirty."

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Trenches can also be cold and fill up with water when it rains, leading to disease and other health issues like trench foot, a common ailment in World War I.

"The living conditions are very harsh and unhealthy," Gaelle Girbes, the French photographer, told Insider previously of life in Ukrainian trenches as the country fought Russian-backed separatists in the east prior to the invasion. Life "is really hard," she added, saying it takes a mental toll on the troops. Given the intensity of the battle for Bakhmut and the strains on the armed forces, the situation now may be far worse.

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Fabian said fighting between Ukraine and Russia around Bakhmut — where both sides make use of trenches — comes at a "very high cost," echoing what officials and military leaders have said about the costly battle.

Both sides, Russian forces, including Wagner mercenaries, and Ukrainian soldiers, are continuing to push troops to the front, pushing them into a bloody fight for a town gaining significance despite its limited strategic value. So far, here don't seem to be any major breakthroughs, where massive sections of the front are collapsing, Fabian said.

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Fabian described combat as slow and grinding, with "positional warfare" that features "attritional ebb and flow."

When there's attritional warfare on the battlefield, Fabian says the equation boils down to who gets exhausted first.

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"Does the attacker reach a culmination because they just don't have enough combat power anymore to gain anything?" Fabian asked. "Or does the defender no longer have enough people to sort of plug the breach?"