Desperate To Cross The Vovcha, The Russians Are Stacking Bridges Onto Every Available Vehicle

Improvised bridging vehicles are now top drone targets

A World War II ‘funny'. Imperial War Museum photo

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Aiming to expand their foothold along Ukraine’s northern border and, in the process, tie down Ukrainian brigades that could be useful elsewhere, Russian troops have been trying to cross the Vovcha River, which threads west through the town of Vovchans’k just a few kilometers south of the border in Kharkiv Oblast.

But there’s a problem for the Russians. In the 52 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, every single nearby bridge across the Vovcha River has been destroyed by air strikes, shelling or sabotage.

Desperate to get across, the Russians are deploying a bewildering array of improvised bridging vehicles. Desperate to stop them, the Ukrainians are relentlessly hunting those do-it-yourself assault bridges. Usually with drones.

The most recent case of drone-on-bridge action took place on or just before Tuesday, when a drone team from the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine spotted and struck a Russian MT-LB armored tractor wearing what appears to be part of a folding span borrowed from a TMM-3 truck-based bridging system.

The bridge components of the TMM-3 are fairly abundant in Russian stockpiles, so the Russians have been piling them onto all sorts of vehicles in order to produce DIY assault bridges. The idea, it seems, is for the crew to drive the vehicle straight into the Vovcha River and then bail out, leaving the vehicle in the water as a link in an improvised bridge.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.