Russians At Kursk Reduced To Attacking In Unarmored Civilian Vans

On the plus side, it is arguably better than attacking on a bicycle. 

But the fact that Russian forces are reduced to mounting assaults on civilian vans is an indication of how depleted Russian armor and other military weaponry are - and how close they must be to completely running out. JL

David Axe reports in Forbes:

Russian infantry piled into the open bed of a UAZ-452 Bukhanka and sped over an open field toward Ukrainian lines in Kursk Oblast. They didn’t get very far. A Ukrainian first-person-view drone zoomed in. The Bukhanka had an anti-drone cage over its cab but not over its bed. The drone exploded among the passengers, immobilizing the van. On average across the 34-month war, the Russians have lost 10 armored vehicles every day. It’s not for no reason the Russians go on the attack in golf carts, motorcycles—and now bicycles and vans as Russian forces increasingly rely on non-military vehicles for military tasks.

A civilian van isn’t the worst possible vehicle for attacking dug-in Ukrainian troops. That dubious honorific probably belongs to the humble bicycle.

 

But that doesn’t mean riding a van into combat won’t get you killed. On or before Thursday, a squad of Russian infantry piled into the open bed of a UAZ-452 Bukhanka and sped over an open field toward Ukrainian lines in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

They didn’t get very far. A Ukrainian first-person-view drone zoomed in. The Bukhanka had an anti-drone cage over its cab but not over its bed. The drone exploded among the passengers, immobilizing the van. One survivor sprinted away. Another Russian, apparently wounded, dragged himself from the burning wreck.

It wasn’t the first three-ton Bukhanka the Ukrainians have targeted in 34 months of hard fighting since Russia widened its war on Ukraine. The analysts at Oryx have counted 122 destroyed, damaged, abandoned and captured UAZ-452s. But most of them were hauling supplies or performing some other support role miles from the front line.

Bukhankas as assault vehicles are a fairly rare phenomenon, but one that could become much more common as the Kremlin grapples with a growing shortage of armored vehicles. On average across the 34-month wider war, the Russians have lost around 10 armored vehicles every day.

Since a yearlong Russian counteroffensive escalated this fall, however, the loss rate increased—a lot. On one catastrophic day in September, analyst Andrew Perpetua tallied more than 180 damaged, destroyed and abandoned Russian vehicles and heavy weapons.

 

No one outside of the Kremlin knows for sure exactly how many new armored vehicles Russian industry produces every month—and exactly how many older vehicles the Russians can recover from long-term storage.

But the combined number is too low to keep Russian regiments and brigades fully equipped. It’s not for no reason the Russians go on the attack in golf carts, motorcycles—and now bicycles and vans.

The consequences for the unfortunate Russians who swap armored fighting vehicles for unarmored vans can be severe. One UAZ-452 that managed to survive a drone strike later ran over an anti-tank mine recently. The mine was lying in water, which suppressed the resulting blast. But the van was still a write-off, and one passenger lost his legs.

“That’s how our heroic cars die,” a former passenger mused. Expect more such heroic deaths as Russian forces increasingly rely on non-military vehicles for military tasks.