Don's Weekly, 5 May 2025: Part 2

by Donald Hill

(…continued from Part 1…)

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Terny

Camouflage disrupts the form of an object, making it harder to be detected. Certain materials can reduce a body’s thermal signature, making it more difficult for a thermal camera to detect it. But movement makes it significantly easier to detect an object. When you use anti-thermal pouches while rapidly moving across flat ground without any trees or bushes, you can be spotted from fairly long distances with thermal cameras, as the 60th Mech Brigade (ZSU) shows.

The 115th Brigade said the Russians also used the anti-thermal cloaks last winter in the forests just south of Terny. Avoiding observation is always a challenge. At the 5:45 mark of this video, Ukrainians talk about how they’d rotate troops at night and had to cross open ground. The Russians would fire parachute flares to illuminate the night and the Ukrainians would lie on the ground without moving and effectively avoid being observed, a technique that has been used for a hundred years. While the ground can be brightly lit, the moving light of the parachute flare or star shell drifting on the parachute makes it a little more difficult to detect low profile stationary targets.

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Chasive Yar

A nighttime TOS attack on Chasiv Yar. This was certainly followed by - yet another - Russian assault, which was repelled.

7 km from the front line ‘something’ is destroyed by drones: It was either an assault tractor or an armored logistics tractor.

Kostiantynivka is hit by an airstrike.

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Toretsk

Ukrainian drones hit targets in the city and outside the city, or both. There were a lot of drone attacks posted by Ukraine.

Russia conducted assaults north of Druzhba and attacked Ukrainian infantry 500 meters to the north of the assaults.

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Pokrovsk

A Russian car is destroyed by a drone 2 km south of Lysivka. Russian infantry are hit inside Lysivka.

Ukrainians assault Russian positions northeast of Vodiane Druhe. Ukrainians are pushed out of Tarasivka. After driving 3 km on motorcycles, Russian infantry clear Novoolenivka. They continue to push the Ukrainians out of positions south of the village.

There were well-constructed trenches in the Novoolenivka area, but without overhead protection they are obsolete: death-traps at most. The bunkers provided solid overhead protection, but without any ability to observe and fire out of them they are nothing better. Optimally, drones should have seen the Russian assault forming and moving from Tarasivka to Novoolenivka, but with or without the drones, Ukrainian infantry should have deployed to cover the approaches to Novoolenivka. When the modern-day Russian infantry is moving, it’s not use any tactical formations: it’s clustering on whatever form of ‘road’ is there - with unsurprising results. Defenses and drones aside, these actions indicate an insufficient level of training and leadership.

An assault is eliminated by the 414th Drone Brigade.

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Andriivka

Rozlyv was hit by a Ukrainian airstrike and Russian infantry hunted in both Rozlyv and Kostiantynopil.

Ukrainian soldiers were bombarded by multiple airstrikes and pursued in Bahatyr. 37 airstrikes hit Bahatyr over several days.

Odradne was hit by Russian drones.

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Komar

Ukrainian positions in Vilne Pole are bombarded. Russian positions in the village are also attacked.

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Zaporizhzhia

If there are any doubts about the ferocity of this war, if anybody thinks it’s ‘short of its conclusion’, if anybody thinks there’s lesser - or even ‘no’ - need to continue supporting Ukraine with everything we can (but, and especially: means of air defence) then mind this statistics: in just one day, 12 settlements in Zaporizhzhia were hit by 21 Russian airstrikes, 210 drones, 6 rocket attacks and 117 artillery shells.

Just east of Novodanylivka, the Russians claim to have destroyed yet another drone team, this time with rockets. In Orikhiv, a Ukrainian self-propelled gun is destroyed by a drone. Two kilometers south of Mali Shcherbaky, some Russians are killed by artillery, others surrender. A couple dozen Russian reconnaissance drones are brought down. The 123rd TD Brigade targets foreign volunteers for the Russian army.

An airstrike on a Russian trench.

Ukrainians try to save their own from the rubble after the strike on Zaporizhzhia.

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(…to be continued…)