With the pressures of a Ukrainian offensive
and internal unrest gaining steam, Russia’s defenses may be all that stand in the way of a complete unraveling of one of the
greatest geopolitical events of our era. In their hands rests the fate of the front
line, of the war, of Putin, and of perhaps the entire Russian Federation. Therefore Russia’s
defenses in Ukraine are well worth studying. Since the end of 2022, Russian
troops have been digging in. The Ukrainian countryside has become
scarred with hundreds of miles of trenches, lines of concrete dragon’s
teeth, and acres of minefields. These now pose a significant impediment to
Ukraine’s long awaited counter-offensive. From the comfort of our homes, it can
be difficult to properly understand the realities on the ground. So today let
us explore the historical context for these fortifications and bring to life the
True Size of Russian Defenses in Ukraine. as this conflict makes clear quickly getting
supplies to the front line is of utmost importance now you can get your own rapid
delivery of goods using today's sponsor timu timu is a new Online Marketplace where you can
find bargain deals and wholesale prices to save a bunch of money from Top suppliers and Brands
across the world Teemu is the number one free app on the App Store by downloading it new users get
first purchase discounts for even more savings on top of a 100 discount coupon for all users for our
viewers timu is offering a special discount code that lets you get a Nintendo switch OLED for just
259 bucks compared to the original price of 328.99 other deals I loved were the various die sets
and props which I'm always in Need for as a DM even just a solid wood chess set
was great for tokens I could use to decorate a Game of Thrones
style war room I've been planning it sucked into were all the Minifigs they had on
offer especially the custom Warriors from Gondor or Mordor or the set which contained
all the major armies of World War II so start saving today and browse
for more awesome deals by going to teemu.com or downloading the app using
the links in the description enjoy To understand why Russia has
gone to all this trouble, we need to rewind the clock back a few months. By the winter of 2022, Russia
was in a difficult situation. Months of grinding offensives had worn
down Russia’s frontline forces. Around 9,000 armored vehicles had been wrecked and
around 100,000 men were dead or wounded. Among the hardest hit were the elite
troops best-equipped for modern combat. For example, up to half of Russia’s airborne
troops were gone. Shrinking stockpiles, industrial bottlenecks, logistical failures,
outright corruption, and internal squabbles meant sufficient amounts of ammunition and other
vital supplies weren’t reaching the front. To make matters worse, Ukrainian
counterattacks in the fall had unexpectedly routed the Russian right and
left flanks at Kharkiv and Kherson. So, Russian forces did what exposed, exhausted armies
have done historically. They started digging in. From October of 2022 to the present,
Russians have built a vast network of field fortifications in occupied Ukraine
and along the Russo-Ukrainian border. In some places, these fortifications
mark the front lines. But in most places, these defenses are kilometers behind the
active front. In either case, these defenses allow Russia to contest a Ukrainian mechanized
offensive with fewer, lower-quality troops. But how have these Russian defenses
stacked up to the greatest defensive lines of history and have they repeated the
same mistakes which doomed many of them? When making historical analogies, we have
to pick the right points of comparison. Broadly speaking, the most
infamous defensive lines in history have either been pre-war border
fortresses or wartime field fortifications. In origin, form and purpose, Russian
defenses in Ukraine are not like the WWII-era French Maginot Line or the Greek
Metaxas Line. First, these historic lines were primarily built to defend pre-war
borders, not secure wartime conquests. Second, these lines were built around
large, multi-story fortresses armed with heavy artillery batteries. The largest fort
on the Maginot Line could fire 4 metric tons of shells in a single minute. And to build the
5,500 bunkers and pillboxes of the Maginot Line, the French poured 1.5 million cubic meters,
enough to build over 31 Empire State Buildings. The Russians have not built these kinds
of concrete battleships in Ukraine. Third, these lines had exposed flanks
that attackers historically exploited. In April of 1941, the Metaxas line on the
Greek-Bulgarian Border was outflanked by an attack through Yugoslavia. And the strongest
portion of the Maginot Line was infamously bypassed by a German attack through the
Ardennes in May 1940. By contrast, Russian defenses are anchored by the Belarussian border
in the north and the Black Sea in the South. In theory an attacker might be able to outflank
these but such conditions do not currently exist. Thus, in the present day, there is no
easy flank for the Ukrainians to turn. That all being said, there are some similarities.
For instance, segments of Russian lines do resemble portions of one border megaproject –
Germany’s Westwall, better known as the Siegfried Line. Both use similar belts of minefields,
ditches, and concrete anti-tank obstacles. Although nominally built as a border defense,
the Westwall was still part of Germany’s offensive strategy in the late 1930s, freeing
up troops once needed for border defense duty for offensive action. Russia’s current lines
likely serve a similar strategic purpose. In design and function, current Russian defenses
are really field fortifications more similar to the Hindenburg Line of World War I or Rommel’s
“Devils Garden” of the North African Campaign. For context, let us briefly examine both of these. In the latter half of World War I, Germany was on
the defensive on the Western Front. Under growing pressure, the newly appointed German supreme
commander, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, would order the construction of a series of
defensive lines. British troops would nickname these the “Hindenburg Line.” Built around the
concept of a defense in depth, they used deep belts of wire to stop infantry,
primitive minefields to stop tanks, and strongpoints with concrete pillboxes
to stop bullets and artillery shells. Any breakthrough would be met with an
immediate counterattack by German reserves. Jumping forward about 25 years, both sides
of the North African campaign in World War 2 built and fought over literal lines
in the sand. Perhaps the most fiercely contested were the Devil’s Gardens at El
Alamein. With his army literally out of gas, Afrika Korps commander Erwin Rommel had to
halt his offensive in July 1942 and dig in. When Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army attacked
in October, they would face a network of mutually supporting strongpoints guarded by integrated
anti-tank guns like the infamous “88” which were in turn surrounded by the nearly half
a million landmines that gave the Devil’s Gardens their name. Behind the lines, German and
Italian tanks waited, ready to counterattack. These and other historic field fortifications
share critical similarities with Russian defenses: First, these defenses secured gains made
by an invading army, allowing them to take an operational pause to gather strength and
supplies before launching further offensives. Second, with strong defenses, fewer
troops could hold a given piece of ground, allowing commanders to build larger reserves for
decisive counterattacks or future offensives. Third, these defensive lines
used obstacles like barbed wire, land mines, and anti-tank ditches to
slow and disrupt attacking enemy forces. Fourth, most of the frontline defenders occupied
entrenched strongpoints, preferably high ground, in villages, or near critical
transit routes. When possible, these strongpoints were linked by trenches.
Finally, these defenses also relied on counterattacks by mobile reserves to
defeat enemy footholds and breakthroughs. With this context in mind, let’s now take
a closer look at our current example. Russia has built defenses along the length
of the territory it occupies in Ukraine, as well as along a roughly 400-mile long
strip of the Russo-Ukrainian border. But the most extensive defenses are on the
nearly 250 mile-long front anchored by the Dnieper River and the Russia-Ukraine border. Without natural obstacles like major rivers, Russian commanders have opted to shore up their
lines using man-made obstacles and entrenchments Although described as a “line”,
Russian defenses in Ukraine are not an extended line of linked trenches, like
something from the Western Front of WWI. Behind the actual front lines, Russian commanders
have laid down defensive clusters that control towns, block key roads, secure bridges. Russian
defenses are also multilayered. Some areas are defended by multiple defensive lines. And key
roads are blocked by successive strongpoints. Ukrainian forces will therefore have
to breach and breakthrough multiple Russian lines as they push deeper
into Russian-occupied territory. Let’s take a closer look at how
these defenses have been laid out. Now we should note, there is no such thing as a
typical Russian defensive position in Ukraine. Differences in terrain and strategic
priorities mean some areas are more heavily fortified than others. Different
groups, including the Russian military, PMCs, and local authorities have also built
defenses – to varying degrees of success. However, given the sheer scale of the frontlines,
some indicative battlefields do exist. For our purposes we have chosen a section of the
line about 18 kilometers east of Bakhmut near the village of Vyskryva which has many of the features
seen in Russian fortifications in the region. Like many Russian defenses in Ukraine,
it controls a road Ukrainian forces might advance down. Now on a map like this, it can be
somewhat deceptive to think that just a few dots indicate an area which is thinly defended.
This is not the case. But to understand the reality of the situation on the ground, let
us render the battlefield in its True Size. This is what Russian Defenses
in Ukraine really look like… Our rendered battlefield is about 5
square kilometers or 3 square miles. In pre-war settings, someone could make the
crossing by car in about 3 minutes whilst following rural speed limits (90 km/h) while
a bicyclist (25 km/h) could make the crossing in about 15 minutes and a pedestrian (5 km/h)
could make the crossing in about 60 minutes. While at war however, an attacker
could take weeks if not months or even years to make the crossing with
progress measured in mere meters. But to understand why, we can now explain how
the Russians have fortified their position. Defenses in this sector are
layered, with rows of obstacles blocking movement down roads and across
fields towards dug-in fighting positions. The outer layer consists of various
anti-tank features including hedgehogs, dragon’s teeth, and large ditches. Interspersed
between these are invisible minefields which together form a formidable thicket
of obstacles for would-be attackers. Let us now inspect each of these in turn. In the outermost layer you can see two bands of
concrete dragon’s teeth. These simple anti-tank obstacles are laid out in long lines of 2 or more
rows that can run for miles across open terrain. On the WWII-era Siegfried Line, these
obstacles were cast in place by laborers with concrete molds. The Russians
have opted for a faster technique. Hundreds of thousands of pre-fabricated pieces have been ordered from factories in
Belarus, Russia, and occupied Ukraine. These pieces are then trucked into place
and dropped off by trucks with cranes. While this technique allows defenses to be
rapidly installed, it has some serious tradeoffs. First, it means the dragon’s teeth have to
be built relatively lightly. Some may even be hollow. Subcontracting also seems to have
led to uneven quality control. For instance, despite allegedly being built of high-grade
concrete, some are already falling apart. Furthermore, unlike the partially
buried Siegfried Line teeth, the Russian obstacles have been placed on
the surface. And their convenient lifting eyes could make it fairly easy for Ukrainie
attackers to simply drag them out of the way. Yet so long as they are not displaced, vehicles
will nonetheless still struggle to pass them. Another location where anti-tank obstacles
may be easy to remove are along the roads where steel hedgehogs have typically been placed. However this is intentional as the Russian’s
do still plan on using these highways for their own movements and as such have opted for more
maneuverable pieces. Yet we should not discount the idea that such hedgehogs can still pose quite
the impediment to vehicles in the thick of combat. The next layer of anti-tank defenses are
a series of ditches which, in this case, are offset about 100 meters from the
prior layers of manufactured traps. These holes in the ground are each about 3-4
meters wide and 1-2 meters deep. Primitive yet effective, they will prove sufficient to stop
or at least slow tracked and wheeled vehicles. In order to quickly dig these large ditches,
the Russians have turned to specialized earthmovers like the MDK-3. This model is
a combat engineering vehicle developed by the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Operating
in reverse it excavates large amounts of material at an average of 50 to 100 meters
per hour depending on soil conditions. Returning to our 5 km wide battlefield, we
might estimate that a single crew operating at about 100 meters per hour, 8 hours a day
would take roughly 1-2 weeks to complete the excavations in this sector. Though of course
some additional time is needed for refueling, maintenance, and other delays. Yet given that
the Russians have had months to prepare it is no surprise that they have so widely adopted this
simple but effective form of defensive earthwork. Yet at this point you might be thinking that these
defenses seem annoying but not necessarily deadly. Indeed, on their own, such obstacles could easily
be neutralized by combat engineers and specialized vehicles. To prevent this, Russian forces have
laid vast fields of mines in the open space around their obstacle belts, creating an unseen
threat to attackers. For our simulation we have only been able to represent a few possible
locations. In reality they could be anywhere. It is these invisible killers which are
likely to take a heavy toll on Ukrainians who are not able to detect, avoid or
destroy them upon the advance. Sadly, the same can be said of all those who return to
this battlefield long after the war has ended. But mine and anti-tank features alone will
not be able to stop a determined offensive. As the military maxim goes: “an obstacle
isn’t an obstacle unless it’s defended.” To this end and to their credit the Russians have
generally tried to build an integrated defense which places the obstacles we have reviewed at
a logical distance from their manned frontline positions. Which in this case, is a series
of infantry trenches and vehicle revetments. Regarding their placement, it seems that
these have been located along a ridgeline with high-ground advantages over the fields ahead. The outermost anti-tank obstacles are about
500 meters ahead of the entrenched defensive positions. This puts them well within the
effective range of Light Machine Guns and RPGs. The last anti-tank ditch is about 300
meters away and is thus within range of assault rifles and 40mm grenade launchers.
Without proper support, Ukrainian dismounts trying to breach the obstacles could find
themselves pinned down by withering fire. Once more we should note that Russian trenches
are not long, unbroken lines that go on for miles. Rather they tend to be platoon- or company-size
strong points that overlook or directly control critical terrain. In this section of
the line, Russian engineers have dug a company-sized position on a piece of
high ground that commands the road. Most of the strongpoint is composed of simple trenches deep enough for a man to
stand in without being exposed. Some trenches have been dug by hand, but the
rapid construction of these trenches is mostly owed to specialized digging machines like the
BTM-3. Also dating back to the cold war era, it is a rather robust machine capable of excavating
around 800 meters of man-sized trench in one hour. Once the bulk of the earth has been removed,
additional work can be done to improve the functionality of the trench section. This includes
adding structural elements to prevent erosion, planking to mitigate mud and
improve movement in wet conditions, sandbags for added protection, carve
outs for observation or firing positions, ladders and step boxes for popping
out over the lip, and more. Overall these simple, open-topped trenches are
effective force multipliers which provide good protection from direct fire weapons like rifles. However they are vulnerable to indirect
fire from mortars and artillery. Their impact though has been somewhat mitigated by
the practice of adopting zig-zag pattern trenches which can help block lateral explosions and direct
fire weaponry. However during heavy bombardments, each seven-man squad has a dugout
within which they may seek shelter. These are often deeper, more fortified positions
which can also double as places to rest, eat, and sleep while on the front. As such soldiers
will often personalize them to meet their needs. Given enough time these dugouts
can almost start to feel like home. Zooming back out of this position, we can see
that our defenders here appear to be tasked with covering about 800 meters of the line. This
can be a tall order for a Russian company to hold. After wartime reorganization,
full-strength Russian motor rifle companies only have about 75 men – and few
formations currently are at full strength. This makes the firepower of supporting tanks and
the company’s own vehicles even more important. To this end, just as the strength of the
infantry has been improved using trenches, such vehicles have also seen their effectiveness
increased by the creation of revetments. These are holes dug into the ground
which allow vehicles to fire from hull-down positions, presenting a much
smaller target to Ukrainian attackers. Zooming back out once more we can see how
this Russian company does not stand alone. Besides it are several other
positions which cover their flanks. To the rear are additional
positions for HQ and reserve units… and atop a nearby hill are additional emplacements
dating back to before the war which have a commanding view of this battlefield. From here
spotting and fire support can be provided. Beyond this simulated area are even more layers
of defenses with mechanized reserves backed by artillery ready to pounce on any Ukrainians
attempting a breakthrough. I’ll let all this soak in as the scope of modern warfare can
often be difficult to grasp in our minds. Returning to our strategic view, we are now
reminded that everything we have just described is represented by a few symbols on a map. As we
continue to zoom out you can now hopefully grasp the sheer scope of Russia’s defenses not just
in the region but across the entire warfront. Without a doubt, taking on these
fortifications is an uphill fight. This is something which those tasked with
planning out and certainly carrying out the offensive are well aware of but which
many of us at home fail to grasp as we scroll through the headlines wondering
what is taking the offensive so long. In this episode I hope we
have provided a grounded, True Size view of what the Ukrainians
are actually facing in this war. But the task is not impossible.
Many, even more formidable defenses, have been overcome in the past. So join us next
time as we explore how victory can be achieved. If you enjoyed this content, please
consider supporting us on Patreon where we post downloads of all our art, share
script previews, and run polls for new content. A big thanks to the current Patrons for funding
the channel and to the researchers, writers, and artists for making this episode possible. Be sure to like and subscribe for more content
and check out these other related episodes. See you in the next one.
Cool, but irrelevant.
We're talking about the defensive lines UKRAINE HASN'T EVEN REACHED YET.
Arguments about the state of Russian military and society will age as well as this video has.
I subscribe to this channel for various reasons, mostly ancient historical... but here we have a detailed and interesting analysis of Russia's current defensive lines in Ukraine.
Agree or disagree with the points made... up to you... but I hope you find it informative and thought-provoking.
Doubt this counteroffensive will even reach the first lines of defense, they seems to be pretty stuck at the Russian forward positions...
Invicta doing modern wars now like Kings & Generals? 😳
Pretty good analysis.
The lines can be overcome. By being overwhelmed. It would take much larger forces than have been sent forward so far. That they can is not the same as they will. I am not suggesting either way will happen.
I think this is a good point to mention what happened to all those T55's. They are in hull down dug outs like explained for 'support vehicles'. I've seen people say they (T55) will be decent as 'pill boxes'. This is approaching the actual use which is dug in. They can still be moved to another (perhaps prepared) position. A mobile pill box.