A Russian Soldier On Crutches Tried to Breach Ukrainian Defenses Near Pokrovsk
The crutch-trooper got tangled in razor wire ... and then droned
“On the Pokrovsk direction, the enemy attempted to advance near Sukha Balka, Yelyzavetivka, Lysivka, Kotlyne, Udachne, Kotlyarivka, Bohdanivka and Andriivka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted on Tuesday.
What CDS didn’t note, in this edition of its excellent daily report, is how Russian forces attempted to advance around Udachne, a few miles southwest of the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. At least one Russian soldiers limped into battle … on crutches.
“Stormtroopers on crutches,” the 3rd Spartan Brigade, a Ukrainian national guard unit the holds the line outside Udachne, mused on Telegram. As a surveillance drone observed, the soldier—possibly injured in a previous assault—limped along a thicket of Ukrainian razor wire, and finally tried to thread his way through the wire.
That’s when an explosive first-person-view drone barreled in … and killed the wounded trooper.
Limping into battle
We’ve seen Russian “crutch battalions” before. Earlier this year, the 20th Combined Arms Army—one of the field armies laying siege to Pokrovsk—formed assault groups made up of walking wounded, and sent them into battle with predictably tragic results.
Despite losing more than 800,000 troops killed and wounded in the first three years of its wider war on Ukraine, the Russian military has still managed to sustain a front-line force of no fewer than half a million troops in Ukraine.
That’s enough people to give Russian field armies a manpower edge over Ukrainian forces in all of the most important sectors of the 38-month wider war.
But that doesn’t mean the Kremlin isn’t struggling to generate fresh troops. It’s not for no reason Russian commanders routinely force injured men to limp back into battle.
“Russians throw everyone forward indiscriminately,” the Spartan Brigade explained. “We have previously reported on similar cases when the invaders, staggering on homemade crutches, moved towards Ukrainian positions. Their commanders give an ultimatum: either you go into battle, or you will be destroyed by your own henchmen.”
Razor wire is particularly vexing to crutchborne infantry, and the Ukrainians take pains to maintain it. When a damaged Russian tank flattened a stretch of razor wire outside Pokrovsk during a failed assault back in March, nearby Ukrainian forces immediately deployed a radio-controlled wheeled robot to lay out fresh coils of wire.
Read more:
A Single Ukrainian Drone Killed 10 Russians Riding In An Unprotected Truck. That Kind of Thing Is Normal Now.
To understand why, and how, Russia is losing so many people in Ukraine, observe what happened when an apparent Russian reconnaissance group probed Ukrainian lines around the ruins of Toretsk in eastern Ukraine in recent days.