Day 1156a, April 26 — Drone Wall in Action, Blasts and Bombs, Dead Deals, Estonia and Some Humor
Hi All!
I know it looks like the main thing in the war is all these peace talks and all this shameless US pressure on Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. Some of you will have noticed the Russians fired off another big drone/missile attack against Kyiv.
I have sections on that below, but, for us here in Ukraine honestly this looks like one of those weeks when the Ukrainians took it to the Russians more than usual. But a war week. Image of a 43rd Brigade soldier being calm and smoking a pipe.
Still, the last seven days have — as in the past — attested pretty convincingly of lethal Ukrainian defense capacity becoming more lethal. Maybe, this week, we have seen a growing Ukrainian ability to hit targets inside Russa, but it’s also possible the Ukrainians are just about done worrying about what the Americans are worrying about and have decided to hit Russia when it suits them.
The Big Russian Spring Offensive Is Getting Smashed by a Ukrainian Drone Wall
The early days of this week saw continuation and intensification of Russian attempts to gain ground using combined arms assaults. There were at least two very substantial attacks and several more smaller ones. I’ll focus on four, they are a pretty good indicator of how the fighting seems to be going but they are not all the fighting that’s been taking place.
Battle 1: 20 April, village Kayan’ske, Zaporizhzhia region — A mixed unit of tanks, BMPs and Mad Max-rigged trucks attacked along dirt roads, probably in an attempt to get infantry into the village ruins. All the vehicles were heavily upgraded and rigged with anti-drone armor panels, jammers and netting. Ukrainians later estimated the force at 300 men, 40 armored vehicles including three tanks, and lighter vehicles including 10 buggies.
Air space in this sector was being patrolled by an Ukraine military intelligence drone special operations unit called Artan. Ground defenses were the responsibility of 128th Mountain Assault Brigade; this is a formation from far west Ukraine that has a solid complement of ethnic Hungarians (Ukrainian nationals, not from Orban’s “real Hungary”) in it. They’re a veteran unit and they’ve been fighting in that sector for at least a year. So that was tough luck for the Russians, a bit.
Reports are the Russians broke out their force into six vehicle groups. Initial drone strikes went in 8 kilometers from Ukrainian lines. I take this to mean Artan had birds in the air above the Russians as the attack columns were forming up. Image of a BMP moving through a village, note excellent image quality.
Vehicles were halted after hitting mines dropped by drones in their path, or by FPV strikes to front wheels or through windshields. Follow drone (bomber and FPV) hits stopped vehicles and cut up dismounted infantry. At some point the Ukrainians started calling in mortars and artillery. Image of a BMP with troops on the back, recorded by an FPV drone about to hit.
All of this is just pretty much bog-standard Ukrainian defensive tactics, perhaps executed especially well but nothing really new since early 2024.
Artan later claimed 15 vehicles and 100+ soldiers put out of action, the remainder retreated. 128th Mountain reported 29 Russian armored vehicles destroyed, 140 Russians “destroyed”, no lost ground, no losses to troops. Ukraine’s Army General Staff confirmed the main details of the engagement. Independent observers geo-located the video to Kamyanske. By the end of the week the basic facts of the battle filtered back to me via a soldier.
A Russian account of the battle surfaced on Thursday via the pro-Moscow blogger Dva Majora, in general terms confirming that the attack was a disaster for the Russians. He added the details that besides the drone units identified in Ukrainian sources, in on this battle was another strong reputation unit called Ronin, and two companies of the HUR special operations “volunteer” group Kraken. I take the latter with a grain of salt as Kraken is one of those “evil Nazi” units the Russians love to hate and from time to time when something gets wrong the unit shows up in Russian accounts to explain the failure: the Russians had been fighting against “fanatic Ukrainians”.
Battle 2: 21 April, Toretsk-Kuhaove sector, Russians attempted to push positions west with a rapid assault by dozens of infantry mounted on motorcycles. Subsequent reports said the Russians threw 96 motorcycles into the attack; this is an all-war record for that type of vehicle. All involved agree the reason the Russians are employing motorcycles en masse is because trying to advance by other, slower means across ground patrolled by Ukrainian is too dangerous.
28th Mechanized Brigade (Odessa) was the main unit defending. This is a veteran unit operating mostly in the southern sector since the start of the war. Besides the 28th, one gets the impression at least a half dozen drone units were having a picnic in the vicinity. Drone groups involved in the fight included the UAV companies from 28th Brigade’s 2nd and 3rd Battalions, the independent/attached drone units Spalakh and Kurt&Company, and pilots and aircraft from the adjacent Feniks drone battalion, which is part of 93rd Mechanized Brigade (Kholodny Yar). Potentially, that’s a lot of pilots and aircraft. Image of motorcycles driving through a village.
Once out in the open the Russian attack came under fire by mortars, artillery and bomber drones. Some of the Russians reached wood lines to the west of Toretsk; FPV and bomber drones hunted them down. In some places there were few leaves on trees and there are no trenches so the Russians are exposed and easy to see from the air. In other places the Russians found bunkers and entrenchments; the drones followed them.
Once the Russian attack was broken up the Ukrainians seem to have so many drones in the air with so many bombs, that they went back and bombed abandoned motorcycles. Repeatedly. Image of that; the motorcycle is being blown up by the first bomb and already the pilot is dropping a second.
From the Ukrainian side the Russian casualty estimate was that basically their unit was wiped out, a few men might still be alive but under that kind of drone density they probably wouldn’t survive for long.
Battle 3: Eastern sector, probably vicinity of Pokrovsk, 21 April. A Russian armored assault of about 15 vehicles and 100–120 men drove out into the open towards positions held by 59th Brigade. This is a formation that had a tough time at the start of the war and only slowly came together as a unit. This battle the mortar/drone/mortar/artillery tactical doctrine functioned normally. 59th Brigade claimed destroyed 7 BMPs, 2 BTRs, 1 tank and 89 Russian soldiers, assault was turned back. Khortitsiya eastern force command and a drone unit called Stepnoi Zhizhaki confirmed the battle and its general outcome. Video shows several hits of fast-moving vehicles by drones. Image from a drone about to hit the back end of a Russian carrier loaded with infantrymen.
Battle 4: 20 or 11 April, Russian infantry advance vs. positions held by 4th Battalion (Sila Svobody), 4th NG Brigade Rubizh, in the Kupyansk-Lyman sector. This was relative to the previously-listed engagements relatively small, probably 30 or so Russian soldiers attempting to advance quickly and occupy a wood line. As near Toretsk the same day, motorcycles were used in quantity. Over several hours kamikaze bomb-dropping drones killed 18 and wounded 3. Flights took place during daylight and night. Buggies, cut-down autos and two armored vehicles seen to be destroyed. Rubizh Brigade on Sunday (last week) reports five separate Russian motorcycle waves in the course of a day, identifies the Russian attackers as 6th and 123rd Motor Rifle Brigades, and predicts more “Banzai attacks” will take place as soon as Russian high command can organize them. Image of a Rubizh drone operator.
There were dozens of smaller engagements across the front over the week but the Russian pattern was much the same everywhere: Someone had given the Russian troops orders to push forward somehow, and that “somehow” was cut to pieces once it reached ground observed by Ukrainian drones.
This is not to give you the impression that the Russians are completely stopped, for instance on Thursday their control of the village Sukha Balka was confirmed. Today Gerasimov reported to Putin that Kursk Oblast’ is fully liberated from the boot heel of the evil Ukrainian invader, which may be true and it may be that this is like Krynky on the Dnipro, when the Russian general staff declared the Ukrainians evicted from a place a full six months before it actually happened.
I think it’s best to close this section with a quote from Dva Majora who, again it’s worth pointing out, is a pro-Moscow source. This guy has something like a half a million followers, pretty much all of them patriotic Russians and fans of the Russian military, this is just about the last source that would write positive things about the ZSU if he could avoid it:
The enemy (the Ukrainians) having an advantage in drones, monitors any movement of our troops 24/7, strikes even (Russian) individual attack aircraft. It also identifies the movement of our equipment and evacuation groups. (If) we reach attack objectives then there are difficulties in the transfer of reserves, evacuation, and even just food. The Ukrainians mine all approach routes with Baba Yaga (a heavy-capacity drone) and they observer any movement from the sky. The entire sky is filled with enemy reconnaissance aircraft, in the (Russian) rear, on the front lines. FPV (kamikaze attack) drones are flying there as well.
Trading Long Range Punches
Neither side is even pretending any more to be observing the supposed ceasefire on long-range strikes against civilian energy grid infrastructure, and for the most part both the Russians and the Ukrainians have reverted back to conventional targeting and objectives, although for the record it seems like the Ukrainians for reasons best known to themselves are still avoiding hitting Russian oil and gas infrastructure.
The highest-profile Russian attack of the week was a big missile/drone bombardment conducted on Thursday, Kyiv was the main target but other cities were in the cross-hairs as well.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/51462
But if one is talking “spectacular explosions”, then by several orders of magnitude the most impressive development on that front, not just on either side but on either side for about the past twelve months, took place on Tuesday, when one of the biggest ammunition depots in the entire Russian Federation blew up. Russian officials say it was an accident, there is some but not much Russian social media chatter that some one maybe heard drones in the air, and — uncharacteristically if it had a hand in it — Ukraine’s special services HUR and the SBU aren’t saying anything about it.
What is clear is that the 51st Arsenal of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate (military unit №55443) was the Russian army’s primary storage site for surface-to-surface missiles and rocket artillery ammunition, that the site is rated to hold 270,000 tons (!) of munitions of various types and that 120–150,000 tons probably were inside, and that the site is about 3.5 kilometers square and that about 2+ square kilometers went up in smoke. Secondary explosions and fires burning through Thursday. Ten villages evacuated. Image of base once they got the fires out.
https://x.com/NijhuisClaretta/status/1915734238516650377
What however was clearly Ukrainian secret services was a car bombing that took place in Moscow’s suburbs on Friday, which killed Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, the main Russian Army General Staff planner for operations in Ukraine. The bomb went off as he was walking passed a parked VW Golf, the blast threw his body across a parking lot. I haven’t seen Kyiv taking official responsibility but no one seems to think it was Russian mobsters squeezing general Moskalik on a bad loan. There is more than a little speculation that the assassination of a senior Russian general is an indicator that the Ukrainian special services no longer feel obliged to worry about American concerns regarding possibly antagonizing Russia. Image.
Same day, in the western Russian city Bryansk, reports surfaced that a car bomb killed a Russian electronic warfare expert named Evgeiniy Ritikov; according to Ukrainian news reports he was a key developer and designer at the Bryansk Electromechanical Plant, which in turn is one of the main design and production centers for Russian military jamming equipment. A colleague in the car died as well. According to some reports, they had been on a business trip and were assassinated after returning to Bryansk. Apparently the attack happened on the 17th or 18th.
And then on Apr. 23 about five long-range Ukrainian drones appeared in the sky above a drone factory in Russian Tartarstan and attacked it. There was plenty of Russian internet video of local anti-aircraft cannon banging energetically and missing the drones, er, droning in. No reports of major damage.
Not to belabor the point, but it’s not easy to buy the sales pitch that Ukraine is about to collapse when stuff like this keeps happening.
continued…
Still waiting for trump to acknowledge that President Zelensky has some damn fine cards. Clearly, trump is quite a few cards short of a full deck.
The fall in prices from Trump's tariff war might be making Russian oil & gas infrastructure a lower priority target.