Why Did Russian Commanders Send 50 Vehicles Through An Unsurvivable Drone Kill Zone?

It was a suicide convoy.

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.

The Russian force in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles and shifted to infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled gray zone.

Which is why what happened on or just before July 8 is so bewildering. Despite Russian commanders concluding that vehicles are too easy for Ukraine’s tiny first-person-view drones to find and strike, and despite a reported ban on Russian vehicular traffic on eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Ring Road, the Russian Center Group of Forces massed no fewer than 50 vehicles 12 km south of the gray zone stretching between Kostiantynivka and Toretske in Donetsk Oblast.

The outcome was predictable. Drones from the Ukrainian State Security Service’s Ivan Franko Group detected and attacked the column of trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles just south of the ring road near the village of Malynivka, an important base for Russian forces fighting in Donetsk Oblast. When the smoke and dust cleared, more than 50 vehicles had been hit and immobilized if not destroyed.

“Despite the ban on movement of cargo and military transport on the Donetsk Ring Road, IFG with a firm hand and drones that you donated ‘detained’ several violators,” the Ivan Franko Group quipped.

It’s unclear how many Russians were killed or wounded. But the Center Group of Forces clearly failed at whatever it was trying to achieve—and the assembly of the column, in daylight, within drone reach, is the puzzle. Russian commanders knew what the sky over the gray zone does to vehicles. They sent the column anyway.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.