Jan 9, 2024
501ST MARINE BRIGADE
For every 10 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles the Russians roll toward the Ukrainian bridgehead in Krynky, on the Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, just one comes back.
“There are some idiots on our side … who don’t learn from mistakes and drive equipment to Krynky,” one Russian blogger wrote. “So you understand, 90 percent of the equipment that gets there is not returned.”
It’s no secret—to the Russians or Ukrainians—what’s been happening in Krynky since the marines from Ukraine’s 35th Brigade first motored across the Dnipro and, in a series of brutal infantry actions, secured their bridgehead in Krynky.
“You cannot storm when the enemy has superiority in artillery and drones,” the Russian blogger wrote. And in Krynky, against all odds, the outnumbered Ukrainians have managed to out-gun and out-drone the Russians … for three months.
Yes, the marines are taking casualties. But they’re inflicting far more casualties on the Russian 810th Marine Brigade, 104th Air Assault Division and attached army regiments.
According to the Ukrainian defense ministry, one Russian assault “ended very brightly” when an explosives-laden first-person-view drone from the Ukrainian 501st Marine Battalion struck a tank, triggering a powerful secondary explosion.
Russia and Ukraine both build or buy thousands of FPV drones a month, but merely acquiring a drone is just one small link in a chain that starts with strategy and doctrine and ends with a two-pound quadcopter blowing up a 40-ton tank.
In Krynky and in other key sectors of the 600-mile front line of Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine, the Ukrainians have local control of the air because they’ve jammed the radio links between Russian drones and their operators while preventing the Russians from jamming the Ukrainians’ own radio links.
“In the Krynky area, Ukraine appears to have electronic superiority, which means they have drone superiority,” analyst Donald Hill wrote in fellow analyst Tom Cooper’s newsletter. “They are jamming Russian drones and destroying Russian vehicles both with mines, dropped munitions and kamikaze drones.”
A short path of russian tank in Ukraine ended very brightly.
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 8, 2024
📹: 501st UA Marines Separate Battalion pic.twitter.com/uDzF5OeYnC
“Deep behind Russian lines, jammers, counterbattery radar, rocket-launchers and anti-aircraft systems are hit,” Hill added. The Ukrainians’ drone advantage also gives them an advantage in artillery, as howitzer and rocket batteries depend on drones to scout targets for them.
So Russian assaults on the bridgehead usually end the same way. The attackers run afoul of mines, get pummeled by artillery then, in the final yards, get swarmed by tiny exploding drones. Russia’s own drones and artillery can’t save them.
The numbers tell the story. Since mid-October, the Russians have lost at least 152 pieces of heavy equipment around Krynky, including 18 tanks and 58 fighting vehicles. The Ukrainians have lost 31: artillery, mostly.
The Ukrainians also have lost at least 50 boats. It’s on the water where they might be most vulnerable. “It seems that the Ukrainians are being squeezed by a couple hundred meters not so much because of Russian attacks,” Hill noted, “but because of the attacks on both shorelines and the boats that shuttle supplies, ammo, replacements and wounded back and forth across the river.”
The easiest way for the Russians to eliminate the Krynky bridgehead would be to make the Dnipro uncrossable, and cut off the marines on the left bank from their sources of supply.
But overwater strikes behind the bridgehead depend on drones, and Russia’s drones are struggling to get off the ground. Unable to sever the Ukrainians’ supply lines by air and by water, the Russians keep attacking by land.
A “daring Zhukov maneuver,” is how a Russian blogger described one attack, referring to Russian general Georgy Zhukov, who has become notorious—fairly or not—for likely false claims he cleared German minefields by ordering his soldiers to just … walk across them.
The other Russian blogger had a unique way of describing the assault groups that keep trying, and failing, to get through the mines, drones and artillery in order to attack the marines in Krynky—and losing nine out of every 10 vehicles each time.
They called them “temporary units.”
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“They called them “temporary units.””
Indeed, the entire roach army is a temporary army, just like the shithole they came from – the russian federation – is a temporary entity and especially the criminal fascist organization called putlerism is a temporary phenomenon. One day it all will have disappeared and be only another bad memory in history.
Every Ukrainian success is very sadly accompanied by the deaths of many utterly irreplaceable men. The subhuman dreck eliminated by the defenders are just no problem for putler.
Orcs must get smoked in absolutely industrial quantities in order to drive them out and force regime change in the shithole.
It seems to me that this could be a pivotal area in this war.
Area liberated needs to be increased to whereby it is as riskless to resupply as other areas, with sufficient supplies to push further forward.