Don's Weekly, 15 July 2024: Part 1

by Donald Hill

Hello everybody!

We’re living through ‘historic times’, they say. Indeed, one is often not sure which way to look from all the ‘news’ about ‘historic times’…

Cannot but observe it’s getting exhausting to live through ‘historic times’, especially considering the heat outside (not only ‘in the news’). Moreover, a cold matter of fact is that even if we would like to cover few other topics, on Sarcastosaurus, we cannot (nor intend to) cover all the ‘interesting’ wars going on, right now: there are, simply, too many. Or, we’re too few (whichever way you prefer).

Thus, we’re going to remain focused on analysing the War in Ukraine.

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Northern Kharkiv: Vovchansk

Most of the single story buildings in Vovchansk do not have roofs and many no longer have walls. With much of the cover and concealment degraded, the density of manpower is very light for both sides in order to minimize detection and losses from massive bombardments and drones. Even the multi-story buildings in the “citadel” are being destroyed. With such a small number of troops manning the front lines, it takes just a few casualties for a sector to become unmanned.

It’s clear that Russia’s main effort is to hold on to the aggregate plant and to take territory to the north and west of the plant to establish secure supply lines to the plant - even if they’ve largely been unable to do so. The infantry that do make it to the plant must run a gauntlet that few survive.

Ukraine continues to fight hard for the “citadel” and the beachhead across the small river to the southwest of the plant. For the rest of Vovchansk, they seem content to attack Russian infantry where they find them with drones and sometimes artillery. If they see a big enough collection of Russians in one building they’ll use artillery and airstrikes. Ukraine hasn’t used an airstrike caught on video in three weeks, which probably means there wasn’t a big enough collection of Russians to justify it.

In the absence of Russian soldiers due to losses, Ukraine advances to fill the void. It looks like that’s what they did in the area marked in white on the map to the west of the aggregate plant, and it looks like Russian drones are trying to hunt them down.

A couple of weeks ago, a Russian Spetsnaz team ran across the street to enter a heavily damaged building. That building is no longer standing.

Two videos from drones that show the level of destruction in Vovchansk. With very little shelter left in most of the city, the front lines are held by a small number of troops. Based on those videos, here are two more views of Vovchansk:

Russian drone attacks on a Ukrainian position in the contested corridor west of the aggregate plant.

10 km west of Vovchansk, the lines near the village of Starytsia have been static for two months, but Ukraine is engaging Russian troops. A BMP is destroyed 1500 meters northwest of the village.

Bashkiria is a republic in Russia 1000 km from Ukraine. A company of Bashkir fighting for Ukraine captured one of their own fighting for Russia.

A Russian writes about his experiences with Magyar’s Birds. Half of Magyar’s unit is in Kherson, the other half in Kharkiv. In Kherson they would spot a Russian target and by the time they sent a drone to kill it the target might be gone. So in high traffic areas they would fly a drone and then land it, turning off the engines and saving the batteries. When a target was spotted, the drone would be reactivated and instantly fly to the nearby target. A modified form of that tactic was used in this encounter.

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Northern Kharkiv: Hlyboke

Russia is still hanging on to the center of Hlyboke. They are using treelines to send reinforcements on foot, and these reinforcements have to run the gauntlet of Ukrainian fire to reach the village. For weeks already, most of the Russian vehicles that come within 5 km of the village are destroyed. Given the high rate of Russian attrition while reinforcing Hlyboke, I don’t know how hard Ukraine is pushing to take the rest of the village. Russia, on the other hand, is using airstrikes to try and cut off Ukrainian supplies and reinforcements from reaching the village.

There have been an increasing number of videos where Russian soldiers freeze when spotted by drones. It’s true that a moving object attracts more attention than a stationary object, but once spotted, remaining stationary doesn’t help.

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(…to be continued…)