I saw this earlier, and it kind of answers the question of the original OP, though this one isn’t near Kyiv:
There aren’t any additional details about how they did it aside from a coordinated attack by Ukrainian air force and territorial defense units, but they are hitting these things when and where they can. I’d like to see a BDA on this, but, sadly, that sort of thing isn’t being released by either side.
Several countries are donating small arms and individual carried SAMs and AT weapons. What about donating drones? Who can say who’s operating them?
I haven’t heard anything about donated drones, but I know both India and Turkey have sold a number of armed and recon drones to Ukraine and they seem to be using them a lot.
Why couldn’t Ukraine ‘purchase’ hundreds of American drones? How close does one have to be to operate a drone? Could the drone operators be located in, say, Poland?
My WAG is that America (and most other countries) didn’t sell them to Ukraine. That’s why they didn’t buy them. They bought from countries that would sell them drones, such as Turkey.
Yes, you could operate a drone from Poland into Ukraine. You could operate a drone from California into Ukraine as well if you have a sophisticated enough system that has plenty of autonomous features.
Seems that selling drones to Ukraine would be a more lethal form of assistance than shoulder fired SAMs or AT missiles. One potential drawback, of course, is that the sale could certainly elevate Putin’s NATO-threat-o-meter. But an army of drones operating from Lviv could certainly put a hurt on the column.
I’m not sure why we haven’t given them drones, but my WAG is that Russia might plausibly be able to use a recovered downed drone to implicate the county selling it to Ukraine as actually operating it to attack Russia during this war.
Either that or perhaps the US or other European drones are sophisticated enough and require enough specialized parts that selling or giving them to Ukraine now would be mainly useless. Ukraine had plenty of spin-up time on the drones it had previously bought…they wouldn’t have any experience with any of the aspects of using and maintaining new drones, nor the spare parts or technical expertise to do so rapidly. All of this is pure speculation on my part, BTW.
I can’t speak intelligently about the situation on the ground in Ukraine. But I have participated in multi-mile convoys of armored and wheeled vehicles on several occasions in the distant past. I can tell you that even in ideal sunny-day conditions, these things have a dismaying tendency to clusterfuck.
And a 40-mile convoy of demoralized draftees, transiting contested territory in the muddy season… whew, I wouldn’t want to be leading that. Really you can’t even call this a convoy anymore. I guess it will eventually reach its destination, but not anytime soon.
Yeah, this was my thought as well. In combat conditions, with deteriorating weather and deteriorated and degraded roads through contested areas and by folks who might not be the best trained (I don’t know what emphasis Russia puts on its logistics and transport units, but it’s probably not their top of the line folks), I could see it rapidly turning into a complete CF fairly easily, and taking a long time to move that amount of stuff even a relatively short distance.
What are the most common sunny-day issues that detour this kind of convoy to clusterfuckville?
Consider the normal issues that might plague your typical 3-car road spring break trip to Destin and multiply it by 100. Communications failures, flat tires, someone didn’t refuel when ordered, mechanical issues, forgot to change the oil, driver has to take a shit, you name it.
I couldn’t find the video right now but one shows an armored column speeding along but stopping to allow civilian cross traffic!
Got it. I was thinking there was more to it than that, but it makes sense: there’s gonna be a lot of minor bullshit happening across 40 miles of machinery.
This is definitely one of the more surreal aspects of this war. The video that shows tanks driving down the street while a city bus follows closely behind. Invading soldiers and civilians mixing almost freely on the street.
So what you’re saying is … all the artillery the Ukrainians have is unusable?
One article I read said that the troops doing logistics are almost all conscripts, serving only one year, poorly trained and poorly paid.
just to add…
I did quite a bit of fairly “hairy” off-roading in my younger years … and yes … as soon a you drive out with 10 fully decked out 4x4s, a 4 hour leisurly joyride turns into a 14 hour oredeal at the drop of a hat …
A is low on gas, didn’t notice his tank is leaking … B “popped a bead” and just rolled over down that off camber ledge …his heavy as fugg truck is now on its roof in the wood 5 meters below the track - gas is pouring out of the filler-cap… ladies, break out the winches - start your chainsaws we need to deforest the better part of this mountain region like we were brazilians paid to do so to get this worthless POS truck up again. Ohhh … btw watch out the rivercrossing is really tricky - C’s truck is already floating for a mile and a half since he took in water and hydrolocked the engine hence “throwing a rod”… but he’s lucky and the engine keeps on running on the left 4 cyl of his V8 - so he’s good
and that was just before the beer came out
i just dont want to imagine that type of shit with 20, 30 or 40 years old russian “stuff”
Drones are complicated to control and fly and require a lot of custom-built infrastructure. If you don’t know how to maintain and operate a Predator, you aren’t learning in a few days.
Ukraine operates the Baykratar TB2 drone (I am unsure what munitions they are primarily using but based on the videos we’ve seen I am guessing the UMTAS antitank missile, also of Turkish manufacture.) They’ve had them for a few years, and have been fully trained on its use and actually used it against Russians in Donbass. They have gotten more TB2s from Turkey, as they work with existing command equipment. American drones would not.
I served in an electronic warfare unit. We deployed about 25 vehicles in full field deployment. We would literally have exercises where all we were practising was going from point A to point B with all our stuff. It was amazing how hard it was to get it right. Get 25 vehicles and 75-100 people to go 20 miles down the road and they’d come up with 1000 ways to fuck it up.
Russia would view a third nation letting Ukraine operate drones from their territory a hostile act. Letting al Qaeda attack the US from Afghanistan was the reason we invaded.
I saw a great thread on Twitter from a veteran who specialized in armored vehicle maintenance, especially tires, and he said that from the pictures he saw of broken down Russian vehicles, their tires weren’t properly maintained - apparently, if vehicles are parked for months at a time, they have to regularly spin the tires so the sun doesn’t shine only on part of the tires, which can cause brittlement and lead to tire breakdown. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to do if there’s a good maintenance program in effect, and easy to forget if there’s not, and in a corrupt system like Russia there may be endemic failures in these kinds of programs that require good and honest record keeping.
And there are probably a million little things like that which can go wrong with heavy pieces of equipment that are poorly maintained.
If this is accurate, and the Russian military doesn’t maintain their equipment well, then that convoy may be parked for a long, long time.