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 exte...