Ukraine Update: Shell Games

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the ukrainian war intelligence update for wednesday the 9th of february 2022 and as always it is being recorded on the day prior on the 8th of february just a heads up for those of you who prefer an audio only format we're going to be uploading this episode as an audio only podcast in addition to the video format so for those of you who prefer the audio only there you go but just keep in mind that we're going to be talking a lot about stuff that really requires a map to kind of explain what's going on so if you wanted to download the slides and just have those separately that's available to you as well so let's move into the european theater update as far as the general situation europe goes really the biggest news as of late has been the united states deploying b-52s to the united kingdom the us has recently announced that they will be forward deploying an unknown number of b-52 stratofortress strategic bombers to bases in the united kingdom this move while frightening to some is completely expected and right out of the cold war playbook much like we mentioned last time moving around strategic assets like bombers is a political posturing move that russia expects and seeing as russia herself has not only ford deployed her own bombers but has actively been flying them around on her western front the us moving some bombers to forward locations in the uk is again completely par for the course and a proportional response to russian aviation activities in the region over the past few weeks likewise i briefly wanted to mention that the royal navy has been quite busy shadowing a quite a number of russian ships that have now made their way down to the med which we will talk about in just a bit in a continuation from last time the nations of norway finland and poland have made it very clear that civil defense is certainly a hot topic for them they're not the only nations doing this pretty much every nation in europe is doing some kind of civil defense running drills uh educating the public things like that with regards to the tensions that have now really swept through the entirety of the continent belarus has also had quite a lot of strong rhetoric coming out lately regarding russian exercises and things like that in the region lukashenko has talked a lot about belarusian defenses and they've made declarations that uh belarus is going to be buying a lot of the military hardware that russia has been showcasing during their joint exercises together and swiveling back to ukraine uh ukraine has been preparing for the worst most certainly and has begun the military training of civilians who want to take part in their defense people who would normally be considered to be non-combatants have already been observed taking part in crude small arms training such as the elderly women and even some suspiciously young teenagers this points very strongly to this fight if it happens being more horrific than we can possibly imagine this isn't iraq or syria or afghanistan this is a european nation with over 44 million people in it including about 40 000 americans so yeah that's really all i've got to say on that for now moving on to the high seas we come to the north atlantic and as an update from last time literally as we were uploading the last brief russia declared that they will not be conducting their exercise within ireland's economic exclusion zone so the exercise area that we showed last time is no longer in effect however we do not know where russia has moved the exercise to i haven't had time to run that down today it is likely that if russia does intend on conducting operations in the vicinity of undersea cables they will probably just do it anyway and keep any surface support vessels out of ireland's waters while their gucci directorate submarines do their special secret squirrel stuff on the sea floor wherever they want as far as significant naval surface operations we will speak to that in a moment because the ships involved are now in the mediterranean sea so let's head down south the waters of the mediterranean are teeming with steel as we continue to see naval forces build up in the region the flotilla of russian landing ships that we have been monitoring has made it through the med and has been in port tardis syria for the past couple of days taking on fuel and supplies and getting their uh transit through the dardanelles and the bosphorus all uh copacetic with turkey by the time this brief goes out all six ships will have transited but right now at the time of recording the minsk the core 11 the kaliningrad have gone through as of february 8th and the other three the gorniak the publishers and the murganov will be heading through tomorrow on february 9th but right now in the black sea coastal observers and maritime tracker watchers have observed the russian intelligence collection ship ivan quarters hanging out just outside the 12 nautical mile territorial waters of ukraine in the vicinity of odessa the chorus is known to do this all the time so it's not really out of the ordinary but she is an intelligence collection signals interception ships so she's probably hanging out and picking up various signals intelligence from the ukrainian forces which have undoubtedly been fortifying the city over the past few months if russia does intend to head for the odessa area with an amphibious assault pre-soaking the area and collecting as much intelligence as possible is most certainly going to be a high priority back down in the med three carrier strike groups from western powers have been conducting joint exercises in an impressive show of force the us harry s truman carrier strike group the french charles de gaulle carrier strike group and the italian kevor carrier strike group have been sailing in formation or in close proximity to each other for about a week now as a way of projecting power and letting russia know that the west owns the med when it comes to aerial strike capability and generally dominates the region on the naval front not to be outdone russia is also flexing her muscle in the med by bringing in a second slava class heavy guided missile cruiser the marshall ustanov the ustanov is being escorted by the destroyer kulakov and the frigate kazastanov these ships caused a bit of a stir as they passed by the british isles on their way down with the royal navy showing her teeth in the form of significant aviation operations in the vicinity of the russian ships as well as the maneuvering of various capital ships to let the russians know that their presence was unwelcome dustinoff compliments her sistership the variag and her escorts who have also been hanging out in the med for some time now and are currently located off the coast of syria this is interesting to note because it has been kind of a while since two slava cruisers have been observed together in the med moving to the overall strategic view of ukraine not much has changed on the front as far as icons goes but we'll have to jump into each front so let's do that now on the northeastern front an unidentified communications unit has been observed to be set up just outside the city of belgrade with various communications equipment being observed most likely an r416gm and an r419l1 set up for narrowband tactical communications the unit remains unidentified but it is most likely attached in some form to the third motorized rifle division which has been in the area for some time moving up to course the 26th tank regiment has arrived and also at least one battalion from the 79th mlrs brigade has arrived as well moving to the eastern front we have observed limited combat actions in the areas designated on the slide quite a few different areas over the past couple of days let us remember that there is currently a ceasefire on right now as there has been for a while which explains the lack of major combat operations on the eastern front but as literally everyone knows cease fires in eastern ukraine in recent years have carried less weight than one might imagine from a viewpoint of western traditional warfare so even though there's a ceasefire going on there have been skirmishes every day for the past few years so just like what has been normal for the past few years we've seen limited skirmishes all along the line nothing out of the ordinary some might say there's been a slight increase in kinetic actions along the front but really it's kind of hard to tell of course we want to remember that just because we don't see anything significant doesn't mean that nothing is happening the absence of an observation does not mean an absence in its entirety right and since military deception is already a staple of the eastern front and has been for years the world will keep a sharp eye for any indications that this party might be getting started moving down to the southern front really the only thing to mention is again the ivan coors kind of hanging out there collecting intelligence presumably on the city of odessa as well as the reinforcements that continue to stream in to the crimean peninsula i also wanted to open up an additional front just so that we have this slide for later uh this is what we're going to be calling the western front along ukraine's southwestern border with moldova and we've gotten a few questions about this because people aren't quite sure what's going on with moldova so really the short version of this is that it's real it's not really moldova it's actually a breakaway republic so as you can see kind of on the slide there that little thin strip of land between moldova and ukraine is actually a breakaway republic it's the they call themselves the nation of transnistria nobody in the international community has actually recognized it as an independent nation uh except for other breakaway republics like a couple of republics in georgia i think have recognized transnistria now this is important to note because this breakaway republic is heartily supported by russia and as of the past couple of years we have seen about 5 000 troops or numbers indicating about 5 000 troops russian troops being stationed somewhere in uh transnistria probably the capital uh their their self-declared capital of tirispol so something to keep an eye on it's not like we're considering a lot of military actions coming from transnistria however this is yet another thing that ukraine is going to have to think about especially when it comes to defending the port city of odessa and moving back up to the northwestern front we have the 98th guards airborne division taking part in exercises in the town of brest on the belarussian border with poland they've been hanging out there for a while now just wanted to have them on the slide because it's an airborne unit and it's something that they've been conducting a lot of uh training operations in the area so who knows it's good to know that they're in the area though we also continue to see russian forces pouring into belarus and concentrating in much the same locations as before with gomel rachista and yeltsk being major locations for staging activity as a side note we're also noticing interesting tradecraft being practiced by russian forces some units are moved around to new locations which could be for legitimate staging like they're just trying to get to their final locations uh but this also could be to confuse western observers like us who are constantly trying to figure out the shell game right but we also have decently poor tradecraft such as some russian units not really doing much to camouflage their positions such as these aircraft stationed at lunanet's airfield again everything can be deception we always have to deal with when it comes to russia the attitude of well if we see it it's what they allow to be seen sometimes that's the case sometimes it's not sometimes it's good tradecrafts sometimes it's poor tradecraft sometimes it's poor tradecraft that is masquerading as a slip up to get you to think a certain way about a thing so we have to remember russian doctrine is very heavily invested in military deception and this is no exception and this brings us to bufgorka camp in belarus like i mentioned trying to track russian units is a grand shell game especially with temporary camps and bases popping up all over belarus or old bases being revitalized and being reused again or just new places popping up such as this one that we think we found today in the vicinity of the belarussian town of bufgorka this is the area that we've identified as housing the camp and using some open source sar imagery we can discover why sar imagery is kind of important and why we've talked about it before using this overlay we can clearly see a line of hard returns here along the tree line as well as in the field adjacent to this cluster of buildings to the northwest understandably this is a bit hard to see so we can make this sar data a bit more transparent and overlay it on top of the actual satellite imagery and we can see just a little bit better now remember this is basically kindergarten level imagery analysis but it's the best we've got available to us we're not the nga and we don't have fancy military satellites we're basically using european agricultural satellites to find russian armored columns at the moment and for this image specifically we're using the vertical transmit and receive polarization version of the sentinel one sar imagery which in this case helps us punch through the overhead vegetation to get strong radar returns off the hard armor of the vehicles hidden below so yeah we can clearly see that there's a lot of activity in this field along this tree line where vehicles are trying to be hidden uh in in the tree line there's a classic military tactic as well as some vehicles out there in the open or some kind of encampment we also have a possible ecp there don't really know what that is but it's a pretty hard return and looking at several star images we can see that it's probably some kind of vehicle cluster there as well so yeah the resolution is not great but open source satellite imagery can be used to do some pretty cool stuff like exposing the positions of russian armor in belarus in places they're not supposed to be and this can also be used everywhere else around the world because this imagery data is available for more or less the entire planet very useful bit of back pocket information so that's all we've got for today the shell game continues as we try to find more russian units hiding out in places they're not supposed to be so thank you all for your support it really does help a lot your support is really the only thing keeping our heads above water at this point so thank you again for that and even though this ukraine situation might not have as direct or dire consequences to the united states as it does for the nation of ukraine or even europe for that matter it does matter as we've pointed out before if nothing more than on a cyber front so hopefully we can learn some lessons we can continue showing some tips and tricks that can be used not just to help understand this ukraine situation but for any other situation that might pop up in the future so thanks again and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade