SOCIAL MEDIA/Social Media via REUTERS
- Fog is providing cover for Russia’s push into Pokrovsk, which Ukraine has been defending with drones.
- The bad weather’s impact on the frontline highlights how UAVs can suffer from poor visibility.
- Russian troops are capitalizing on the weather advantage by advancing quickly on motorbikes and cars.
Thick fog is threatening the fall of a critical Ukrainian city, shielding the advance of Russian troops on foot, motorbike, and civilian cars.
Pokrovsk, a railway city in Donetsk that previously housed about 60,000 people, has become one of the war’s focal points as Moscow wages a grinding, nearly two-year campaign to pincer the transport hub.
As with many other frontline strongholds, Ukrainian forces in the city have largely relied on drone surveillance to spot and counter repeated ground assaults, which are now Russia’s typical mode of attack.
But blankets of heavy fog descending on Pokrovsk in recent days have suppressed that tactic.
Many Ukrainian drones, both for reconnaissance and strike purposes, rely on optical cameras and can perform poorly in low visibility. Some are equipped with more expensive thermal cameras, but even these can be hindered by thick fog.
Under the cover of bad weather, Russian troops are pushing quickly into Pokrovsk with renewed aggression.
“Currently, there are more than 300 Russians in the city,” wrote Ukraine’s 7th Airborne Assault Corps in a statement on Tuesday.
Just two weeks ago, the Ukrainian estimate was around 200 Russian troops in Pokrovsk.
The 7th Airborne Assault Corps wrote in its Tuesday update that the Kremlin’s forces were combining the advantage of the dense fog with “light equipment” to attack Pokrovsk’s southern flank.
Russian troops regularly use civilian vehicles such as motorcycles or cars to conduct assaults, hoping their smaller and faster frames can help them evade detection or attack from first-person-view drones.
On Monday, Russian Telegram channels began circulating a video of about two dozen Russian troops moving through heavy, gray fog on a motley assortment of motorbikes and civilian cars.
While it’s unclear when the video was filmed, Business Insider was able to verify the clip’s location as a main road leading into Pokrovsk from the south.
A freely moving convoy at this location indicates that Russia has pushed much deeper into the city than Ukrainian monitoring tools, such as the widely used DeepState UA, have previously confirmed.
Another video of a Russian vehicle traveling uncontested along the Pokrovsk E50 highway, previously marked as the edge of Russian-taken territory, also indicates further gains by the Kremlin.
Ukraine says it’s outnumbered 8-to-1
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that Russia was “increasing the number and scale of assaults” at Pokrovsk.
“The situation there is difficult, and in particular due to weather conditions that favor attacks,” he said in a statement.
Moscow’s goal is likely to encircle Pokrovsk. With Russian troops on three sides of the city, Ukraine has been left with a nine-mile corridor in the north to supply its troops in the settlement.
Kyiv’s forces already face bleak odds there. Zelenskyy said in late October that Russian troops likely outnumber Ukrainians in Pokrovsk by eight to one.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, told The New York Post on Sunday that Russia had likely committed 150,000 troops to taking Pokrovsk. The Kremlin is believed to be deploying a total of 700,000 to 750,000 soldiers in Ukraine.
Pokrovsk is strategically significant to Ukraine largely because it’s considered a “gateway” buffer for the rest of the country’s fortress belt in Donetsk.
The loss of the city, which had been in turn shielded by the now-fallen city of Avdiivka, could be detrimental to morale in Ukraine, which has focused on the embattled settlement for over a year.
Renewed Russian advance in Pokrovsk could also highlight challenges for Ukraine’s cheap drones, which have become the war’s top killer and sparked a race among the world’s militaries to build their own drone arsenals.
While Kyiv’s forces have often advocated for more funding toward drones, they’ve also warned against relying too much on uncrewed systems.
“If you have fog weather, you can’t fly these drones because you can see nothing,” Oleksandr Chernyavskiy, a drone prototyping specialist for Ukraine’s 241st Territorial Defense Brigade, previously told Business Insider.
“But artillery does not care about the fog. If they have coordinates, they will fire and destroy whatever is alive in this sector, no problem,” he added.
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