Russian Ka-52 helicopter downed near Robotyne, Ukrainian soldiers join Bentley ASMR flashmob. What happened on the front line on August 17?

Читать на русском языке

In today's summary:

• The Ukrainians are advancing south of Urozhaine, with Russian troops trying to push back.
• A Russian Ka-52 helicopter has been shot down near Robotyne, presumably with a Swedish man-portable air defense system (MANPADS).
• Russian troops at a training range have once again been hit with HIMARS.
• Russia's Belgorod Region presented Radar, a mobile app to report UAV sightings and explosions.
• The Washington Post: Russian plant in Alabuga plans to manufacture 6,000 kamikaze drones before 2025.
• A Scottish volunteer fighting for Ukraine has shown the press his “tactical kilt”.
• “It’s barely moving, smoking, wobbling,” observers criticize military equipment at Russia’s Army 2023 forum.
• Ukrainian servicemen have joined the ASMR Bentley parody TikTok trend.

The front line

Ukrainian troops have “made progress” south of Urozhaine on the Vremevsky Bulge, reports Andriy Kovalev, spokesman for the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). As per the Ukrainian open-source intelligence (OSINT) project DeepState, the Russians attempted another counterattack toward the settlement they abandoned two days ago but failed.

Russian pro-war channel WarGonzo recounts the advances of Ukrainian troops in the vicinity of Robotyne and Verbove south of Orikhiv. Its contributors assert that over 1,000 shells are hitting Robotyne daily.

According to the pro-Russian channel Rybar's overview, the troops of Russia's 6th Combined Arms Army near Kupiansk are continuing to attack Ukrainian positions on the Synkivka — Olshany defense line. The Russians are said to have captured two strongpoints southwest of Olshany, but neither side has gained control over the settlement.

Citing Colonel Mykola Urshalovych of Ukraine’s National Guard, the media write the Azov Brigade is back in active duty and has returned to the frontline; however, the brigade had previously released videos of its engagement back in early June.

Shelling and sabotage

The Telegram channel of Ukraine’s National Resistance Center has released a video of a strike on a Russian training range about 50 km away from the line of contact. The strike appears to have been delivered with a HIMARS rocket carrying shrapnel: 180,000 tungsten balls.

An earlier video showed a Ukrainian strike on Russian troops standing in rows on the Island of Dzharylhach in the Kherson Region. The formation was positioned on the open ground within HIMARS range. Even pro-Russian Telegram channels wrote that the troops “might as well have thrown a parade”.

Losses

The social media outlets of Ukraine's 47th Separate Armored Brigade report shooting down a Russian Ka-52 scout helicopter with MANPADS outside Robotyne. Photos and footage of the crash site have also surfaced in Ukrainian media.

The loss has been verified by Helicopterpilot, a Telegram channel with connections to the Russian Army Air Force. As the channel reports, the pilot ejected, but the navigator was killed in the crash.

Voenny Osvedomitel (“Military Informer”), a Russian pro-war observer, believes the helicopter was hit with an RBS 70 (Robotsystem 70), a Swedish shoulder-fired air-defense weapon. The operator uses a laser beam to orient an RBS 70 missile, making the helicopter’s infrared countermeasures useless.

Oryx volunteer Jakub Janovsky points out Russia has had 41 of its Ka-52 helicopters confirmed as destroyed at this point, therefore losing up to one-third of its Ka-52 fleet.

Russia's MoD has released a relatively rare video documenting a target hit at a considerable distance from the front. As the ministry asserts, the target in question was a Ukrainian military train with munitions at Mezhova railway station in the Dnipropetrovsk Region.

Geolocation suggests a distance of up to 60 km from the frontline. The train in the video had three cars. Russian pro-war channels assess the damage as totaling 1,000-1,200 munitions (if there in fact were any on the train). Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops are using an average of 8,000 rounds of munitions daily.

Russia's Belgorod Region presents Radar, a mobile app locals can use to report UAV sightings and explosions. According to the regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, Radar is a fast alert system that submits timely reports to security services. For now, the app is only available for Android devices.

Radar's developers may have drawn inspiration from ePPO, a Ukrainian app for reporting drones and missile strikes. The Ukrainian app appears to be feeding its data to Virazh-Planshet, an alert system for Ukrainian air defense troops. For now, it remains unclear how Radar expects to process user reports and convey them to Russian air defense crews.

Arms supplies

The German government has updated the list of military equipment and weapons donated to Ukraine. The new supplies include two IRIS-T SLS short-range surface-to-air missile launchers, ten Ground Observer 12 (GO 12) light-weight ground surveillance radars, smoke ammunition, and load-handling trucks.

As Voenny Osvedomitel remarks, with the range and the flight altitude of 12 kilometers, the IRIS-T SLS will most likely “counter the fatal threat to Ukrainian armor posed by Ka-52 [helicopters] on the frontline”. The Vikhr anti-tank missile system used by the Ka-52 against Ukrainian armored vehicles has a range of up to 10 kilometers in daylight and up to six kilometers at night.

Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat reports that Ukraine will not receive F-16 fighter jets until the spring of 2014, although “progress has been made” in their transfer.

The Washington Post exposes Russian plans to manufacture 6,000 Shahed-family loitering munitions before 2025 at the plant in Alabuga, Tatarstan. The evidence at the publication’s disposal suggests Moscow is making progress toward its goal of setting up mass production of drones. The documents include blueprints, plant layouts, presentations, and personnel notes. The publication obtained them from a plant employee who is opposed to the war.

The papers suggest that Moscow has “ensured sustainable progress in the achievement of its goal: the production of a version of the Iranian Shahed-136 drone”. Russian specialists are trying to copy the German engine, replace the drone’s Chinese components with more reliable analogs, and achieve autonomous coordination between drones during massive strikes.

A retired FSB officer was hired to ensure the security of the enterprise. The key engineers’ passports were confiscated to prevent them from leaving the country. In correspondence and other papers the engineers used code: “boats” instead of “drones”, “bumpers” instead of “explosives”, and “Ireland” or “Belarus” instead of “Iran”.

This is an opportune moment to revisit the investigations (1, 2) that reveal the use of college students as a cheap workforce in the production of drones at the Alabuga technology park, where the students are forced to sweat for up to 15 hours a day.

We’re still keeping an eye on Army 2023, an international military industry fair hosted by Russia.

Blogger Andrey “Murz” Morozov is unimpressed:

“You're walking around the hall, browsing what they call state-of-the-f*cking-art Russian weapons. And you can't help looking back at the frontline, where soldiers have to fight using Soviet-era equipment and buy their own boots and uniform, where they can only get armored vests, radios, and first-aid kits from volunteers, and where they drive vehicles bought with their own money or donations... And their success or failure in fending off yet another Ukrainian assault depends on the availability of ordinary Mavic 3 [drones], which they also have to ask volunteers for.”

Andrii Tarasenko, the author of the Telegram channel Tanks. History and Modernity. Btvt.info, criticizes the Army 2023 armored vehicle show, in particular, the demonstration of the Armata tank:

“It's barely moving, smoking, wobbling, shooting from flat concrete at a stationary target. Is that all they could manage in ten years? Looks like a track-mounted Potemkin village.”

Meanwhile, the Russian MoD reports signing and handing in $4.3 billion worth of contracts at the forum, with the anticipated delivery of over 2,500 new weapons and equipment and over 1.8 mln munitions for the army. Notably, the release mentions no delivery dates.

The Army 2023 Forum is essentially an exhibition dedicated to the war Russia has started against Ukraine. Some of the exhibits raised a few eyebrows. Thus, the visitors saw a T-54/55 tank developed in the 1950s and painted to look like the Gzhel crockery (a traditional Russian style of blue-and-white ceramics) or a mobile church bearing Christ’s face, the letters Z and V, and the caption “For Faith, Tsar, and Homeland”.

Ukrainian journalist Yurii Butusov has shown the tactical kilt used by a Scottish volunteer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces with the call sign “Braveheart” (a nod to Mel Gibson’s eponymous movie about Scottish resistance to English conquest, led by William Wallace).

The garment is said to provide comfort in hot weather. The military skirt features a belt to which small bags are attached. Besides that, the tactical kilt includes pockets for assault rifle magazines and rings for other equipment. Apart from his kilt, Braveheart packs an M4 carbine and up to nine hand grenades before leaving for battle.

Ukrainian troops have taken part in a trend mocking a viral video featuring a young woman performing an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) sequence with a Bentley Mulsanne.

In the video, the woman begins by softly whispering the word “Bentley,” and then lightly taps the emblem on the car's hood.

The flashmob started with owners of less costly civilian vehicles like Citroen and Land Rover. Then an American soldier joined the fun with his HMMWV armored vehicle, and Ukrainian servicemen have now joined in.

Here's the version with a KrAZ truck:

This one features a captured Russian BTR-82A armored personnel carrier:

For the principal developments of August 16, read our previous digest: Ukrainians officially confirm liberation of Urozhaine, Shaheds over Reni Seaport, Russia thwarts sabotage attack in Bryansk Region. What happened on the front line on August 16?