(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Something I’ve wondered about, and seen no reporting on: how does Ukraine’s cell network continue to work? I mean, I understand how it continues to work in the West. But in the East? Near the line of control? How? B/c I’d think that Ukraine would have blown up all the cell towers long ago, just to hamstring Russia. And I can’t believe RU are actually competent enough to keep the damn things running under fire ….
The short answer is that both the Ukrainians and the Russians have had reasons for keeping the mobil network up and running. The Russians have also, at times, tried to turn it off in areas they’ve occupied. Both sides use the mobil networks for signals intelligence (SIGINT) capture of the other side’s calls, positions, and movements. They use it for targeting via drones equipped with cell site simulators. On Ukraine’s side of things, they’ve also got a dedicated and hard working cadre of engineers that work exceedingly hard under exceedingly difficult conditions to ensure that cellular towers are quickly repaired, that power is restored to them, so that they just keep running. For those wondering, here’s the link to the cellular network coverage maps for Ukraine’s three mobil providers: Kyivstar Mobil, Lifecell, and Vodafone Mobil.
It’s beginning to become weird, even astonishing, that Russian missile targeting committes still think that their highest-value targets are civilian infrastructure in major cities such as Kyiv, when UA offensive assets are necessarily gathering at mustering points in preparation for the offensive.
Either (1) their tactical intelligence is really fecally bad, and they don’t actually know where to address missile and drone salvoes so as to hit sensitive UA C3 and logistic nodes, or (2) there is bureaucratic resistance by the rocket and aviation forces to adjust their targeting to assist the ground forces.
I think (2) is more likely, but it’s just an intuition.
Leaving aside that Carlo answered his own question, I think there is another answer. Russia’s targeting is intended to force Ukraine to deplete its air defense capabilities and keep those assets around population centers and civilian sites rather than put them farther forward in support of actual military operations, as well as stretching them thin and overworking them. This is part of a larger strategy with the objective of sapping Ukrainians morale by terrorizing the civilian population way behind the front lines. These two objectives overlap. Destruction of morale and will to continue the fight in order to end the terrorism via aerial bombardment combined with depletion of air defense resources. It is important to remember that the re-invasion is genocidal. It seeks to destroy not only as many Ukrainians as necessary to achieve the strategic objective of taking Ukraine and integrating it into the Russkiy Mir, but to destroy everything that makes Ukraine distinctive from Russia. If that means you have to kill or drive everyone off and reduce everything to rubble, then that’s what you do because you can always repopulate with real Russians and rebuild Ukraine into a properly Russian territory.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:
War for Ukraine Day 464: (Some of) You Have Questions, I (May) Have AnswersPost + Comments (64)