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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Avdievka trophies: what arsenal did the Russian army get? |
| 2024-02-23 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Zakharov [REGNUM] The other day, Russian troops completely took control of Avievka, a northern suburb of Donetsk, previously turned by the Kyiv regime into a powerful fortified area. Kiev, of course, tried to present the events in Avdievka as a planned retreat, but even Western journalists are forced to say : it was a chaotic retreat, during which Ukrainian formations lost many militants killed, wounded and captured. In the abandoned positions, Ukrainian servicemen abandoned in panic not only their less efficient comrades, but also a large amount of equipment, including Western-made ones. Now Russian military specialists are collecting and removing it. Some will go to units of the Russian Armed Forces, some will go to laboratories, and some of the trophies will join the displays of museums and exhibitions. ABANDONED WEAPON On February 17, the “Center” group of troops of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation under the command of Colonel General Andrei Mordvichev took full control of the city of Avdievka of the Donetsk People’s Republic, which Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the same day. The head of state congratulated the Russian military on such success, especially noting the formations and military units that distinguished themselves in the battles for the city. “The liberation of Avdievka made it possible to move the front line away from Donetsk, thereby significantly protecting it from terrorist attacks by the criminal Kiev regime,” explains the importance of the event, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov. According to him, during the offensive of Russian troops, only isolated separate formations of the Ukrainian military managed to hastily leave Avdievka, abandoning their weapons and military equipment. On February 17–18 alone, Ukrainian losses in the Avdievka direction amounted to 2,400 people, Sergei Shoigu said during a meeting with the Russian president. The DPR authorities announced the end of the clearing of Avdeevka on February 20, but activities to inspect and clear the territory, of course, will continue. And as the bodies of Ukrainian Armed Forces employees are discovered in rubble and caches, the lists of their losses will also be replenished. A lot of work remains to be done to clear the area: Ukrainian military personnel have well strengthened their positions, having, in particular, equipped many warehouses with a variety of weapons. Now our soldiers are finding abandoned equipment and stockpiles of weapons there, many of them made in the West - the “allies” tried their best. Collecting trophies is always dangerous: however, capturing abandoned weapons is worth it. What was found in repairable condition will be put into operation on the right side. For example, such things as well-preserved TOW anti-tank guided missiles from American combat vehicles will be of interest to our military engineers, who will be able to study the resulting trophies for original military solutions. So, despite the fact that the TOW complex itself was developed back in the 1960s, its new modifications with an increased range and an improved guidance system like the TOW-2B can cause big trouble for modern tanks. NATO ZOO According to the Ministry of Defense, in the process of clearing the territory of Avdievka, our fighters, in particular, discovered an arsenal of NATO weapons and ammunition in one of the strongholds of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. There were Kalashnikov assault rifles, automatic grenade launchers - Swedish, a manual anti-tank "Carl Gustav", and mines (made in Poland, by the way), and hand grenades from the USA, and cartridges made in Italy. There are also “guests” from distant countries: 125-mm high-explosive fragmentation shells made in Pakistan, for example. In addition, servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces found there a terminal of the Starlink satellite system, which the Ukrainian Armed Forces use for communication and coordination, including the operation of drones - the latter also became our trophies. Weapons are Western, communications are Western, medicines are imported, even food is from abroad: Canadian dry rations found in abandoned positions apparently previously belonged to mercenaries from Canada and Georgia. Heavier trophies were also collected on the streets of Avdeevka: Western infantry fighting vehicles, tanks and all-terrain vehicles. It is reported that our troops are evacuating dozens of captured armored vehicles to the rear areas for repair, including T-64 and T-72 tanks, a considerable number of armored vehicles, including the American Humvee, BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles and American M113 armored personnel carriers. These “boxes,” launched into production in the United States in 1960 and mass produced until 2007, were actively supplied to Ukraine almost from the very beginning of the Special Military Operation. Now the American Lend-Lease worked in the other direction: the M113 ended up in the hands of our repairmen. “We’ve never seen anything like this, now we’ll study it,” says the evacuation platoon commander with the call sign Ares about the M113. “ We will check every bolt with our own hands, and in the future our mechanics will restore this equipment too.” Our soldiers also received the modern American M2A2 ODS Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the product of many modernizations of the early Bradleys, with a set of dynamic protection BRAT (Bradley Reactive Armor Tiles, a modern system of dynamic protection of armored vehicles to increase their survivability on the battlefield). The American armored repair and recovery vehicle M88A2 Hercules, which has various equipment for repairing armored vehicles, such as a boom crane, also has a chance of being taken to the rear. Due to the enormous usefulness of the Hercules for the tank units of the Kyiv regime and their small number in Ukraine, this probably became a separate disappointment for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. STUDYING TROPHIES In each case, the trophies taken may be of some interest to us, military expert Anatoly Matviychuk comments on the situation with the Avdievka finds for IA Regnum. “We would like to study them in order to subsequently successfully destroy them, and secondly, to create conditions so that this equipment does not destroy our soldiers and our equipment, to make adjustments to our military-technical developments,” he explains. As for the specific trophies that are most interesting for our defense industry, as noted by experts interviewed by Regnum, these are predominantly Western models of military equipment, in particular communications equipment and systems. “These are all anti-tank weapons that were put into service by the Armed Forces of Ukraine - NLAW (Swedish-British anti-tank missile system. - Ed.), Javelins (FGM-148 Javelin, American anti-tank missile system. - Ed.). A very interesting point is the system for controlling and transmitting data among troops; it is an automated control system, including Starlink. These are, of course, tactical air defense systems,” Matviychuk lists. Captured heavy equipment of Western origin is unlikely to fall into the hands of Russian troops, as will certainly happen with captured tanks and infantry fighting vehicles of domestic design - and not only for statutory reasons. The soldiers note that our vehicles have better maneuverability and are easier to maintain. After studying, NATO samples can go to an exhibition like the one in the Patriot Park near Moscow. Other trophies captured during the special operation are successfully displayed there. Even if it turns out that some of the equipment has already been studied after successful seizures earlier, this does not make the situation in Avdievka less valuable for us, says military expert Vladislav Shurygin in an interview with Regnum news agency. In his opinion, what is important is that Ukraine lost all this equipment. The trophies taken clearly show how the Ukrainian Armed Forces retreated in disorder and lost everything in flight. “Considering that they live on what they are given, these are, of course, quite painful losses. We won’t say that they are shaking the Armed Forces of Ukraine to its core, but in any case, this is something that they will have to write off,” the expert sums up. |
| Posted by:badanov |