by DAVID AXE
The Ukrainian army’s 100th Mechanized Brigade holds positions in or around Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka, which straddles the H20 highway threading between the ruins of Kostiantynivka northwest through Druzhkivka toward Kramatorsk, one of the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
This axis is arguably the locus of the most intensive fighting in Ukraine right now as the Russians throw troops and vehicles at Ukrainian defenses in the hope of breaking through to Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk from the south. It should come as no surprise that the H20 and adjacent roads are choked with the burned-out husks of Russian and Ukrainian vehicles.
It’s a problem, and the 100th Mechanized Brigade is solving it with sheer brute force. The brigade has attached a dozer blade to one of its drone-proofed armored vehicles, and is deploying the vehicle as a combat bulldozer. The dozer “push[es] the most difficult obstacle from the road and clears the way for other equipment,” the 100th Mechanized Brigade stated.
Danger is constant. The same drones that littered the roads with destroyed vehicles also threaten the engineers whose job it is to clear the scorched hulks.
The 100th Mechanized Brigade is proud of its road-clearing engineers. It recently posted a drone video depicting the dozer in action in Druzhkivka, motoring out from under the partial protection of overhead anti-drone netting to shove destroyed vehicles off the H20.
The 100th, like many Ukrainian mechanized brigades, has an engineer battalion that supports its infantry and tank battalions. The engineers ride in an array of specialized vehicles for digging trenches, clearing earthen obstacles and mines, and towing damaged vehicles. And they can also convert practically any armored vehicle into a do-it-yourself combat engineer vehicle, or CEV, by attaching a dozer blade, like the one made by U.K. firm Pearson Engineering.
Pearson’s General Purpose Blade “is suitable for clearing obstacles, urban roadblocks and rubble and it can also be used to move earth and fill craters,” the company explained.
It’s hard to say on the basis of one grainy drone video what kind of vehicle the 100th Mechanized Brigade fitted with a dozer blade for road-clearing duty. The brigade rides in Marder and M-2 infantry fighting vehicles, YPR-765 armored personnel carriers, and T-64, T-72, and T-80 tanks, among other types.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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