Ukraine SitRep – Recent Incidents Of Concern For All Sides
Sat, 8 Oct 2022 -from Moon of Alabama via thefreeonline
Kerch Bridge /US special forces/Starlink/Tirada
Yesterday saw two significant developments or incidents with regard to the conflict in Ukraine.
The Kerch bridges which connect Crimea with Russia, one for cars and one for trains, were sabotaged. At least one of the two road spans has fallen down while tanker rail cars on the parallel train bridge caught fire.
CCTV footage shows that a truck exploded while passing the bridge. Here is a video of the damage. One of the two road spans seems to be intact.
As the pillars of the bridge seem unaffected a repair of the broken road span is possible but will take some time. The more sturdy railway bridge may have some superficial fire damage but Russia is one of the few countries that has designated railroad troops specialized in and equipped for railway repairs. The railway traffic is likely to be back within a few day or weeks.
This is a severe handicap for Russian logistics to the frontlines in south Ukraine but not a catastrophe as alternative rail and road routes, as well as ferries, are available. Military logistics is designed to work even under significant constraints. It will find ways to work around the problem.
***********
Catastrophic Ukraine communication failure as Russians block Starlink
Meanwhile the Ukrainian side of the conflict experiences a communication failure that is likely way more consequential.
Adam Kinzinger🇺🇦🇺🇸✌️@AdamKinzinger – 16:26 UTC · Oct 7, 2022
Evidently the Starlink system is down over the front lines of Ukraine. @elonmusk should make a statement about this, or, this should be investigated. This is a national security issue.
ft.com: Ukrainian forces report Starlink outages during push against Russia
Some of Elon Musk’s SpaceX devices stopped working when Ukrainian soldiers liberated territory, Kyiv officials say
The Russian army is leading globally in its abilities to wage electronic warfare. It can disable ground based radio traffic on any frequency. It has now found ways to also disable ground to satellite connections as used by the Starlink constellation.
Ukrainian troops report outages of Musk Starlink
At the beginning of the war the Ukrainian military was supplied with thousands of Starlink ground terminals that can connect to the swarms of small Starlink satellites, which were financed by the Pentagon, but managed by Elon Musk’s companies.
They allowed for communication between Ukrainian ground units as well as for general command and control of larger operations. Without Starlink the Ukrainian command will depend on cable based field telephone, runners and couriers.
All of which are extremely vulnerable in an artillery rich environment.
Since 2001 Russia developed the Tirada 2 electromagnetic system which can disable ground to satellite traffic in specific areas.
Russian military in the near future can get into service systems that can disable enemy communication satellites, an informed Interfax interlocutor in the military-industrial complex said 05 January 2018.
“One of the projects is Tirada 2. Development work was started back in 2001,” he said. According to him, this complex will be able to disable communication satellites from the ground. “It acts by electronic suppression. This is a multi-million dollar project,” he said.
The fact that the Russian Federation is working on the creation of weapons to suppress satellites was announced on November 30 last year by Oleg Achasov, deputy head of the Federal State Budgetary Institution “46 Central Scientific Research Institute”.
…
In November 2018, the FSB called the “threat to national security” a project to cover the globe with high-speed satellite Internet.
In 2019 an OSCE observer drone took pictures of a Tirada complex in the Donbas region.
The disablement of the Starlink communication traffic was only a question of time.
The traffic had to be analyzed to identify the frequencies and algorithms used by the transmitter and receiver. Software had to be written to implement a matching radio jamming pattern.
The hardware of the Tirada system was likely already sufficient to emit the appropriate patterns on the identified frequencies.
As this system has now been proven to be effective in the field it will likely be made available on a wider scale. Russian electronic warfare equipment can already disable all ground radio traffic in specific areas.
Soon all frontline communications of the Ukrainian forces will be disabled.
This is catastrophic for Ukrainian operations. Forward observers will no longer be able to correct artillery missions. Platoons and companies at the front will have no way to call for support. Higher command will have no way to coordinate larger operations in real time.
*******
One Dr. Jay Tharappel has found language likely to comfort the woke U.S. and Ukrainian leaders and functionaries who are concerned about the four Oblast that have joined the Russian Federation.
“These four provinces are Russian, but they were assigned ‘Ukrainian’ at birth. Recently the have come out as trans. They are border-fluid regions and their sovereignty is non-binary. They are Russians trapped in a ‘Ukrainian’ body, and have made their decision to transition. Their pronouns are now DPR/LPR. We Indians as allies support this transition and condemn the transphobic attitudes of westerners.”
Something tells me that soon more ‘Ukrainian’ oblasts will come out and recognize their real being.
**********
American special forces Ambushed
Boris Rozhin, aka Colonel Cassad, reported on Telegraph (machine translation):
Today there was a sortie of foreign mercenaries in the Zaporozhye direction, which included, among other things, American special forces soldiers. They were so self-confident that they decided to carry out reconnaissance in battle with this stellar squadron. However, they did not take into account the presence of our units in this zone, which are able to maintain secrecy on the air, and suffered losses. However, some of these bastards still managed to escape. The presented photos are screenshots of the video from the go-pro camera of one of the dead mercenaries, who literally lost his head. I’ll probably post the video tomorrow.
I have no way to verify those claims but a recent Intercept report stated that there are significant U.S. forces on the ground in Ukraine:
One U.S. official insisted that the CIA only conducted a partial withdrawal of its assets when the war began, and that the agency “never completely left.”
Yet clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war, when U.S. intelligence officials were fearful that Russia would steamroll over the Ukrainian army.
There is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine than there were at the time of the Russian invasion in February, several current and former intelligence officials told The Intercept.
Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding, current and former officials said.
The finding indicates that the president has quietly notified certain congressional leaders about the administration’s decision to conduct a broad program of clandestine operations inside the country.
These will not be the only U.S. casualties in Ukraine. When more such reports come out the issue is likely to explode in Biden’s face.
More in The New Dark Age
- US taunts Russia to escalate in UkraineSunday, 21 August 2022 — Indian Punchline by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR An UAV hit the roof of the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol, Crimea, August…
- Lavrov – Extended Range Weapons In Ukraine Will Lead To More Loss Of Its LandWednesday, 20 July 2022 — Moon of Alabama Today the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei
Tirada 2 info
Tirada 2 electromagnetic system which can disable ground to satellite traffic in specific areas.
….. According to the Central Military District [CVO], the capabilities of the equipment make it possible to blind the enemy in the short-wave, ultra-short-wave ranges, as well as to deprive him of cellular and trunking communications.
In addition, the complex is endowed with a system-forming function, that is, it is able to combine various electronic warfare and radio-electronic equipment complexes into a single working network, which significantly increases the efficiency of their application, the department said.
In March 2019 observers OSCE noticed in the Donbass latest Russian complex electronic warfare (EW) “tirade-2.” The armament appears for the first time in the report of a special monitoring mission published on the organization’s website.
“Tirada-2” was seen from a drone 60 kilometers west of Lugansk. In addition, next to it was an automated jamming station R-330Zh Zhabitel, installed on KamAZ .
The presence of this system in the Donbas indicated that the latest Russian EW system was being tested in combat against the Ukrainian army. Also, it was possible Russia might use it to shut down the communication channel between a satellite and the American RQ-4B Global Hawk strategic drone which periodically conducts monitoring along the contact line.
On April 3, 2019, the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to OSCE & UN in Vienna published a photo of an R-330Zh Zhitel automatic jamming station and a Tirada-2 electronic warfare system that was taken on March 16, 2019, by the OSCE SMM drone near the village of Yuzhna Lomuvatka in the Donbas……
The Free 