Drone Wall in Action, Blasts and Bombs, Dead Deals, Estonia and Some Humor

I know it looks like the main thing in the war is all these peace talks and all this shameless US pressure on Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. Some of you will have noticed the Russians fired off another big drone/missile attack against Kyiv.

I have sections on that below, but, for us here in Ukraine, honestly, this looks like one of those weeks when the Ukrainians took it to the Russians more than usual. But a war week. Image of a 43rd Brigade soldier being calm and smoking a pipe.

43rd Mechanized Soldier, showing patience

Still, the last few days have, as in the past, attested, pretty convincingly, of lethal Ukrainian defense capacity becoming more lethal. Maybe, in recent days, we’ve seen a growing Ukrainian ability to hit targets inside Russia, but it’s also possible the Ukrainians are just about done worrying about what the Americans are worrying about and have decided to hit Russia when it suits them.

The big Russian spring offensive is getting smashed by a Ukrainian drone wall

The early days of last week saw the continuation and intensification of Russian attempts to gain ground using combined arms assaults. There were at least two very substantial attacks and several smaller ones. I’ll focus on four – they are a pretty good indicator of how the fighting seems to be going, but they are not all the fighting that’s been taking place.

Battle 1: April 20, village of Kamianske, Zaporizhzhia region – A mixed unit of tanks, BMPs (Soviet / post-Soviet infantry fighting vehicles) and Mad Max-rigged trucks attacked along dirt roads, probably in an attempt to get infantry into the village ruins.

All the vehicles were heavily upgraded and rigged with anti-drone armor panels, jammers, and netting. Ukrainians later estimated the force at 300 men, 40 armored vehicles – including three tanks, and lighter vehicles – including 10 buggies.

Air space in this sector was being patrolled by a Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) drone special operations unit called Artan. Ground defenses were the responsibility of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade – this is a formation from far west Ukraine that has a solid complement of ethnic Hungarians (Ukrainian nationals, not from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban‘s “real Hungary”) in it.

They’re a veteran unit, and they’ve been fighting in that sector for at least a year. So that was tough luck for the Russians, a bit.

Reports are that the Russians broke out their force into six vehicle groups. Initial drone strikes went in 8 kilometers (5 miles) from Ukrainian lines. I take this to mean Artan had birds in the air above the Russians as the attack columns were forming up. Image of a BMP moving through a village, note excellent image quality.

Very heavily protected BMP moves through a village in the Zaporizhzhia sector and is observerd by an elite drone unit. Note the image quality.

Vehicles were halted after hitting mines dropped by drones in their path, or by first-person-view (FPV) drone strikes to front wheels or through windshields. Follow drone (bomber and FPV) hits stopped vehicles and cut up dismounted infantry. At some point, the Ukrainians started calling in mortars and artillery. Image of a BMP with troops on the back, recorded by an FPV drone about to hit.

128th Mountain Assault drone zeroes in on a Russian armored personnel carrier loaded with infantry, possibly paratroopers, in an attack in the Zaporizhzhia sector.

All of this is just pretty much bog-standard Ukrainian defensive tactics, perhaps executed especially well, but nothing really new since early 2024.

Artan later claimed 15 vehicles and 100+ soldiers were put out of action – the remainder retreated. 128th Mountain reported 29 Russian armored vehicles destroyed, 140 Russians “destroyed,” no lost ground, no losses to troops. Ukraine’s Army General Staff confirmed the main details of the engagement. Independent observers geo-located the video to Kamianske. By the end of the week, the basic facts of the battle filtered back to me via a soldier.

A Russian account of the battle surfaced on Thursday via the pro-Moscow blogger Dva Majora, in general terms confirming that the attack was a disaster for the Russians.

He added the detail that besides the drone units identified in Ukrainian sources, in this battle was another strong reputation unit called Ronin, and two companies of the HUR special operations “volunteer” group, Kraken.

I take the latter with a grain of salt as Kraken is one of those “evil Nazi” units the Russians love to hate and from time to time when something gets wrong the unit shows up in Russian accounts to explain the failure: the Russians had been fighting against “fanatic Ukrainians.”

Battle 2: April 21, Toretsk–Kurakhovo sector – Russians attempted to push positions west with a rapid assault by dozens of infantry mounted on motorcycles.

Subsequent reports said the Russians threw 96 motorcycles into the attack. This is an all-war record for that type of vehicle. All involved agree the reason the Russians are employing motorcycles en masse is because trying to advance by other, slower means across ground patrolled by Ukrainians is too dangerous.

The 28th Mechanized Brigade (Odesa) was the main unit defending. This is a veteran unit operating mostly in the southern sector since the start of the war.

Besides the 28th, one gets the impression at least a half dozen drone units were having a picnic in the vicinity. Drone groups involved in the fight included the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) companies from the 28th Brigade’s 2nd and 3rd Battalions, the independent/attached drone units Spalakh and Kurt & Company, and pilots and aircraft from the adjacent Feniks drone battalion, which is part of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade (Kholodny Yar). Potentially, that’s a lot of pilots and aircraft. Image of motorcycles driving through a village.

Russian motorcylists drive en masse through a Toretsk suburb in the early stages of a rapid mounted assault.

Once out in the open, the Russian attack came under fire from mortars, artillery, and bomber drones. Some of the Russians reached wood lines to the west of Toretsk – FPV and bomber drones hunted them down.

In some places there were few leaves on trees and there are no trenches, so the Russians are exposed and easy to see from the air. In other places, the Russians found bunkers and entrenchments – the drones followed them.

Once the Russian attack was broken up, the Ukrainians seemed to have so many drones in the air with so many bombs that they went back and bombed abandoned motorcycles. Repeatedly. Image of that. The motorcycle is being blown up by the first bomb and already the pilot is dropping a second.

Ukrainian bomber crew is so enthusiastic about blowing up Russian motorcyclists and their rides, that they drop a second bomb even after the first one blows up and gets a good kill.

From the Ukrainian side, the Russian casualty estimate was that basically their unit was wiped out, a few men might still be alive, but under that kind of drone density, they probably wouldn’t survive for long.

Battle 3: April 21, Eastern sector, probably vicinity of Pokrovsk – A Russian armored assault of about 15 vehicles and 100-120 men drove out into the open towards positions held by the 59th Brigade. This is a formation that had a tough time at the start of the war and only slowly came together as a unit.

In this battle, the mortar/drone/artillery tactical doctrine functioned normally. 59th Brigade claimed it destroyed seven BMPs, two BTRs (Soviet / post-Soviet military armored personnel carriers), one tank and 89 Russian soldiers. The assault was turned back.

Khortytsia Eastern Force Command and a drone unit called Stepnoi Zhizhaki confirmed the battle and its general outcome. Video shows several hits of fast-moving vehicles by drones. 

Battle 4: April 11 or 20, Kupyansk–Lyman sector – Russian infantry advance vs. positions held by 4th Battalion Syla Svobody (Power of Freedom), 4th National Guard Brigade Rubizh. This was, relative to the previously listed engagements, relatively small – probably 30 or so Russian soldiers, attempting to advance quickly and occupy a wood line.

As was the case near Toretsk on the same day, motorcycles were used in quantity. Over several hours, kamikaze and bomb-dropping drones killed 18, and mounted three. Flights took place during the day and night.

Buggies, cut-down autos, and two armored vehicles were seen to be destroyed. Rubizh Brigade, on April 19, reports five separate Russian motorcycle waves over the course of a day, identifies the Russian attackers as 6th and 123rd Motor Rifle Brigades, and predicts more “Banzai attacks” will take place as soon as the Russian high command can organize them. Image of a Rubizh drone operator.

Rubizh Brigade drone operator.

There were dozens of smaller engagements across the front over the week, but the Russian pattern was much the same everywhere: Someone had given the Russian troops orders to push forward somehow, and that “somehow” was cut to pieces once it reached ground observed by Ukrainian drones.

This is not to give you the impression that the Russians are completely stopped, for instance, on Thursday, April 24, their control of the village Sukha Balka was confirmed. On Saturday, April 26, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov reported to Russian leader Vladimir Putin that Kursk Oblast is fully liberated from the boot heel of the evil Ukrainian invader, which may be true – or it may be that this is like Krynky on the Dnipro River, when the Russian general staff declared the Ukrainians were evicted from a place a full six months before it actually happened.

I think it’s best to close this sector with a quote from Dva Majora who, again it’s worth pointing out, is a pro-Moscow source. This guy has something like a half a million followers, pretty much all of them patriotic Russians and fans of the Russian military. This is just about the last source that would write positive things about the Ukrainian Armed Forces (ZSU) if he could avoid it:

“The enemy [the Ukrainians] having an advantage in drones, monitors any movement of our troops 24/7, strikes even [Russian] individual attack aircraft. It also identifies the movement of our equipment and evacuation groups. [If] we reach attack objectives, then there are difficulties in the transfer of reserves, evacuation, and even just food. The Ukrainians mine all approach routes with Baba Yaga [a heavy-capacity drone] and they observe any movement from the sky. The entire sky is filled with enemy reconnaissance aircraft, in the [Russian] rear, on the front lines. FPV drones are flying there as well.”

Trading long-range punches

Neither side is even pretending any more to be observing the supposed ceasefire on long-range strikes against civilian energy grid infrastructure, and for the most part both the Russians and the Ukrainians have reverted back to conventional targeting and objectives, although for the record it seems like the Ukrainians, for reasons best known to themselves, are still avoiding hitting Russian oil and gas infrastructure.

The highest-profile Russian attack of the week was a big missile/drone bombardment conducted on Thursday, April 24. Kyiv was the main target, but other cities were in the crosshairs as well.

But if one is talking “spectacular explosions,” then by several orders of magnitude the most impressive development on that front – not just on either side but on either side for about the past twelve months – took place on Tuesday, April 22, when one of the biggest ammunition depots in the entire Russian Federation blew up.

Russian officials say it was an accident. There is some, but not much, Russian social media chatter that someone maybe heard drones in the air, and – uncharacteristically if it had a hand in it – Ukraine’s special services HUR and the SBU aren’t saying anything about it.

What is clear is that the 51st Arsenal of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate (military unit No. 55443) was the Russian army’s primary storage site for surface-to-surface missiles and rocket artillery ammunition, that the site is rated to hold 270,000 tons (!) of munitions of various types and that 120-150,000 tons probably were inside, and that the site is about 3.5 kilometers square (1.4 square miles) and that about 2+ square kilometers (.8+ square miles) went up in smoke. Secondary explosions and fires burning through Thursday. Ten villages evacuated. Image of base once they got the fires out.

51st GRAU ammunition storage site, Russia’s Vladimir Region, before and after the place blew up.

What, however was clearly Ukrainian secret services, was a car bombing that took place in Moscow’s suburbs on Friday, which killed Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik – the main Russian Army General Staff planner for operations in Ukraine.

The bomb went off as he was walking past a parked VW Golf, the blast threw his body across a parking lot.

I haven’t seen Kyiv taking official responsibility, but no one seems to think it was Russian mobsters squeezing General Moskalik on a bad loan. There is more than a little speculation that the assassination of a senior Russian general is an indicator that the Ukrainian special services no longer feel obliged to worry about American concerns regarding possibly antagonizing Russia.

Moscow suburb, car burns after bombing. The owner a Russian Lieutenant General died instantly.

ADDITION: Ukraine news reports Saturday, April 26, say this guy was the senior officer for missile and drone strike planning vs Ukraine – he was the guy signing off on each target. As an aside to the ceasefire section above, one of the things no one seems to be thinking about, ceasefire or no ceasefire, peace or no peace, is that HUR and the SBU are going to be hunting Russians like this guy, worldwide, for the rest of our lives. It’s going to be like the Israelis and Germans complicit in the mass murders of Jews during WW2.

Same day, in the western Russian city of Bryansk, reports surfaced that a car bomb killed a Russian electronic warfare expert named Yevgeny Rytikov; according to Ukrainian news reports he was a key developer and designer at the Bryansk Electromechanical Plant, which in turn is one of the main design and production centers for Russian military jamming equipment. A colleague in the car died as well. According to some reports, they had been on a business trip and were assassinated after returning to Bryansk. Apparently, the attack happened on April 17 or 18.

And then on Wednesday, April 23, about five long-range Ukrainian drones appeared in the sky above a drone factory in Russian Tartarstan and attacked it.

There was plenty of Russian internet video of local anti-aircraft cannon banging energetically and missing the drones, er, droning in. No reports of major damage.

Not to belabor the point, but it’s not easy to buy the sales pitch that Ukraine is about to collapse when stuff like this keeps happening.

The Ceasefire “Deal” – This is what you get when salesmen get involved in geo-politics

OK, really, the important strategic, battle-critical news of the week was that two sources, one US President Donald Trump and one the Ukraine Presidential Administration, said that US arms shipments are still going to Ukraine but they are wholly that which was contracted by the Biden administration, and after that there will be nothing unless the US national leadership deems it in US national interest.

No one is holding his breath on that.

This is most important because it gives clarity. The Ukrainians know what is in the pipeline and although there is always the chance the Trump administration will betray Ukraine and pull the plug (again) on assistance promised and paid for by the Biden administration, Kyiv and its European allies have a much bigger picture of the gaps and, since reports are the pipeline will finally run dry this summer, they have a reasonable picture of how much time they have to fill the gaps.

I’ll take this on in a different review, but, the real hole left by the end to American weaponry will be Patriot missiles and their ability to intercept Russian ballistic missiles, there is no replacement for that at the moment so we can assume that finding one is an absolute top priority for Ukraine and Europe.

Maybe SAMP/T production can really be ramped up, maybe Japan might somehow produce Patriots for Ukraine, maybe Germany might cough up enough Taurus missiles so that Ukraine might credibly be able to hunt Russian ballistic missile launchers, maybe Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrksy’s hope that Ukraine might come up with its own version of that missile might bear fruit. But in all cases, work along those lines will become more focused and almost certainly better financed. But the clock is ticking.

On the end-of-the-war ceasefire negotiation soap opera, as before, I think the best way to step away from all the talk and noise is, wherever possible, just to ignore all the salesmanship and pressure pitches, and to concentrate on the decision makers’ decisions, and as few of those as possible.

As I write this I’m seeing reports and photos from the Vatican and all manner of speculation about the Ukraine peace deal – it’s irrelevant, don’t care, let someone else click on that I don’t plan to. However, I note that French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met and talked for some time in Rome, over espresso. 

The presidents of France and Ukraine talk and drink espresso in Rome, as one does.

In that sense, the key development this week was not the publication of the US’ “final, buy today this deal will disappear tomorrow!” ceasefire terms and how close they were to Russian war aims.

There is goofy talk about the Americans running the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and a magic lifting of sanctions on Russia by Europe, which isn’t even participating in the talks.

What was important was caveat emptor, and identifying the holes in the sales pitch. That’s enough Latin reference for an image of Julius Caesar, whom I’m sure all of us learned in school was both a perfect grammarian and negotiator.

Julius Caesar, a skillful negotiator.

Ukraine and its European allies said that even if the US were to agree that Russia had legally annexed Crimea, they would not. The United Nations, with very few exceptions, is of the same point of view. Were the US to pursue foreign policy in the face of that, the US would make itself a sanctions target and take a very big step towards decoupling its economy from the rest of the world, and tightening ties with Iran, Russia and North Korea. The US “deal” only works if everyone agrees to the US/Russia proposal about accepting that Crimea is now part of Russia, but if no one agrees but Russia and the White House, that kills the deal. The contents of the US Constitution are in the public domain. It’s very clear that US acceptance of Russian annexation of Crimea permanently would require 60 votes in the Senate – the White House doesn’t have a ghost of a chance of getting the votes.

Any attempt by the White House to bypass Congress to legitimize Russia’s takeover of Crimea would be opposed in the Congress and the courts. For instance, the moment Apple were to attempt to restart business in Russia, a Congressman could sue Apple on the grounds that that was illegal, as Russia is under international sanctions for invading Ukraine. The Trump assertion that he, by himself, can legitimize Russia’s control of Crimea doesn’t work constitutionally, it’s a bluff – the rest of the world can read the Constitution. That kills the deal.

The Ukrainians have, from the outset of the peace talks, said that there can be no agreement without a hard, credible guarantee – on the level of NATO Article 5 – protecting Ukraine from a repeat Russian invasion.

Absent that guarantee, it is in Ukraine’s best interests to fight on because a Russian army taking losses of 1,000 men a day is much less dangerous to Ukraine’s survival than a Russian army rested for a year or two and rebuilt thanks to profits from a lot of new Russo-American trade.

The Americans refuse to have any part with security guarantees for Ukraine, and their plan is that others will do that, without specifics about exactly who and precisely by what means. Symbolic troop presence is insufficient. Were a security force to deploy to Ukraine, it would have to be physically capable of, along with the Ukrainian military, not just defeating the Russian army, but of deterring Vladimir Putin from attacking in the first place. There are no specifics, no one has offered them – the American pitch is to suggest that’s a detail that will be worked out.  

That kills the deal.

The British, on Tuesday, along with making clear that Washington can do what it wants about Crimea, London isn’t ever going to accept what the Russians did as legitimate, what’s more, the UK has thought about it and British troops deploying to Ukraine as a security force is not something London is prepared to consider.

This is quite rational. The British military is among the best in the world in terms of quality, and by almost any measure the most high-quality force on the European continent, but it is small, and even if all of it were sent to Ukraine, it would struggle to take on the Russian army, which is about ten times bigger. No British participation in the Ukraine security guarantee force, no credible security guarantee force.

That kills the deal.

Attached is a handover image from the Royal Welsh to the King’s Royal Hussars, Estonia 2022.

British Army promo pic from Estonia, the King’s Royal Hussars (L) takes over in a joint battle group from the Royal Welsh (R). This rotation to eastern NATO ongoing from 2017 is one of the reasons Britain decided not to deploy troops to Ukraine; what they have is doing other stuff.

Other Items: 3rd assault gives us a small window into the future

The Brigade (now Corps) that would have the world believe it is winning the war single-handed, Kyiv’s own 3rd Assault, this week published a pretty slick video of combat operations last month leading to the capture of the village Nadiia, Luhansk region, by elements of the 3rd on March 23 last month.

I’m passing on the link because there are some uncommon images of Ukrainian tanks in the attack (Bucha Platoon, 3rd Coy, Tank Battalion), as well as some proper mech infantry assaults.

Although it’s far from an unbiased source, how 3rd Assault shows us how it goes about the business of taking over a Russian-held tree line is probably a pretty good picture of the state of Ukrainian armored assault tactics, by a skilled unit, in Spring 2025.

So we see, the 3rd can mass close to a battalion of troops and combine armor, drones, infantry, mortars, and artillery. They have at least some sergeants in the tanks who think about cover and keeping their men moving. Their infantrymen know the value of suppression. They are carefully aggressive. They have reasonably effective trench assault drills. They know about covering fire. Like any guy who’s ever been on a battlefield and who’s been shot at from he-doesn’t-know-where, they are very enthusiastic about popping smoke.

I’m not trying to imply 3rd Brigade are as drilled and smoothly operating as say an armored infantry battalion in the Yorkshire Regiment or the Royal Welsh. That would be unfair – those are professional units financed by a first tier state, and that’s not counting the British military tradition.

Rather, it is to point out that in almost exactly three years, 3rd Assault wasn’t 3rd Assault, they were a territorial infantry battalion about one-third 2014-2021 war veterans and two-third armed civilians from the greater Kyiv area.

No outsiders trained them. No military institutions told them the right way to fight. The competent non-commissioned officers (NCOs) we see in the video certainly didn’t get trained by professional NCOs. What we see in the video is a combat unit that has learned on the job. What they do, the tactics they use – that was figured out by trial and error and paying for mistakes in blood – fighting the Russian army.

If a major NATO army is training its mechanized infantry to fight differently than the way you see 3rd Brigade going about its business in this video, a very serious question would be “why?”

Attached is a 2025 US Army image from a doctrinal journal about how the Pentagon sees drone warfare.

Recent US Army promo photograph from a doctrinal manual, this is how the Pentagon sees drone warfare. Eventually they will learn it’s conventional not light infantry/special ops. But they haven’t yet.

Estonia

This week, Estonia is closing the program for paying assistance to Ukrainian refugees for rent. Estonia is one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters, the reception to Ukrainian refugees has been positive, and the economy is growing. This was expected. I think we’ll see more of the same elsewhere in Europe over time. I don’t think it will help the ZSU on manpower, not least because the Ukrainians outside Ukraine are heavily weighted towards women and children. Remember, military age men aren’t allowed to leave the country. This is a theme we’re going to see come more to the fore if hard fighting really continues. The (second) Ukrainian diaspora has integrated well into most European economies and many have normal lives in their adopted homes, and they are, by and large, excellent low-cost labor that wealthier states really would prefer not to lose. Estonia-Ukraine flag image.

Generic image of Estonia and Ukraine flags.

Tanzanian bulker gets arrested in Black Sea, someone is going to get done for grain smuggling

At the start of the week, reports surfaced that a small cargo ship got arrested, probably by Turkish authorities, for shipping grain illegally from an occupied Ukrainian port. The vessel is a Tanzania-flagged cargo ship named the Anka, 5,000 tons, and according to the report, in 2024, it carried a load of grain from Sevastopol, i.e. a port under international sanctions. It seems the ship’s name at the time was Viktoria, but the owners decided to change it. When the Anka reached, it seems, Ukrainian waters after a stop in Moldova, it was boarded by some part of the Ukrainian military, and now authorities are deciding what to do with what media is calling a piece of the Russian shadow fleet.

The interesting question is how and why this particular ship got stopped. Did the Moldovans tip off the Ukrainians? Or maybe Interpol? By and large Russian theft of Ukrainian grain from sanctioned ports has been going on for some time, primarily for the Middle Eastern and African markets.

It’s a little peculiar that this particular ship got stopped for doing what others have been doing for years. Maybe the captain didn’t think the Moldovans would warn the Ukrainians? The ship right now is tied up near Reny port.

Bonus for those that read to the end – early war joke

As I understand it, this really happened. First the original, courtesy the milbloggers, Kryrylo Sazonov:

Я чудово пам’ятаю співвідношення арти у 2022 під Лисичанськом. Нас криють, а ми майже не відповідаємо

– Командир, в нас взагалі гармат немає?!

– Є

– Скільки?

– Таємниця, але небагато

– Дві?

– Трохи менше…

My translation:

Early days of the war. Lysychansk. Russian artillery fire is much overwhelming. Nothing Ukrainian shoots back. In a break between the shelling, a junior officer buttonholes his commander:

– Commander, we don’t have any cannon at all?!

– Of course we have cannon!

– How many?

– That’s a military secret. But not so many.

– Two?

– A little less than that…

 

Stefan Korshak, Kyiv Post’s military correspondent, shares his perspective on recent developments in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Reprinted from Kyiv Post’s Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak’s blog. You can read his blog here.