Piecing Together Bits Of Information

The video above was viral on YouTube and elsewhere this morning, although the version here carries subtitles with an English translation of the Russian radio communications. It's been known for at least a week that the Russian radio encryption system isn't working in Ukraine, so that the Russians must communicate in the clear, a major intelligence exposure that probably led to the Ukrainian ambush of this column in the first place, which I assume took place yesterday, March 9.

The commander of the regiment who was killed, referred to in the radio chatter, was Col Andrei Zakharov, who had been awarded the Order of Courage by Vladimir Putin in 2016.

The map below is from the Institute for the Study of War site and provides a context for the attack's location. (It's worth pointing out that, as with all such maps of the Ukraine invasion, the areas colored pink overstate the territory under Russian control; as the video above makes clear, their control basically extends as far as the sides of the roads their columns occupy at a particular time, and the Ukrainian army is able to operate freely within those areas.)

The attack took place in Brovary, which is shown on the inset map of the Kyiv area, at the western tip of a narrow "assessed Russian advance". The ISW summary of action in the area does not make a reference to this battle, but it says generally,

Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, east.

Russian forces have likely begun renewed offensive operations that ISW has been forecasting, but at a lower level of intensity and a smaller scale than we had anticipated. Individual Russian attacks at roughly regiment size reported on March 8 and March 9 may represent the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis at any one time. [The radio chatter in the video says this was a regiment size atack.]

. . . The Ukrainian General Staff reported fighting all along the Russian line of communication from near Sumy to Nizhyn and even further north toward Hlukhiv, which is nearly at the Russian border. This continued fighting likely indicates that the Russians are struggling to consolidate control over this lengthy line of communication and that Ukrainian forces are actively contesting it. That phenomenon may partially explain the relative paucity of Russian activity reported in Kyiv’s eastern outskirts in the past 24 hours.

That the fairly major encounter east of Kyiv in the video isn't mentioned in this summary suggests it may have taken place after the summary was written. However, we may conclude that this does represent "the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis", and it suggests Ukrainian forces are capable of routing a force of that size.

However, my impression from videos in recent days has been that the Ukrainans have been attacking much smaller Russian forces, which represent more usual Russian activity as suggested in the assessment above. The video below shows Ukrainian soldiers driving one captured tank away, along with footage of cleanup in another armored vehicle following the ambush. We may assume the kitchen detergent has been used to clean blood from the interior, as the vehicle will now be reused by Ukraine against the Russians.

I noticed a help-wanted ad in English on Facebook yesterday from a Ukrainian company advertising for people to come work on its contract with the Ukrainian army to refurbish captured Russian equipment for Ukrainian use. It promised lots of overtime. I assume this will be the destination for the equipment in this and other videos.