In today's summary:
- Heavy fighting continues for Bakhmut and Marinka;
- Under the auspices of PMC Wagner, a new PMC "Wolves" is being created for the mobilized;
- Missing, according to official figures, are 7,000 Ukrainian soldiers;
- "Shaheds" attacked the Zaporozhye and Odessa regions;
- Tula and Bryansk regions were attacked by Ukrainian drones;
- Spiegel: Ukraine received the second of four promised Iris-T air defense systems;
- Ukraine is running out of air defense ammunition, this will be the main topic of the meeting in Ramstein on April 21st.
The situation at the front
Heavy fighting continues for Bakhmut and Marinka, according to the evening summary of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ukrainian army repulsed the attacks in the vicinity of the village of Stupochki, located a few kilometers from Konstantinovka. In Bakhmut itself, according to DeepState, the Russian military is advancing along Levanevsky Street in the northwest of the city. Fighting continues along the railroad . The fighting for Khromovo resumed, through which the road to Chasov Yar goes.
The commander of the 101st Territorial Defense Brigade, Colonel Dmitry Zavorotnyuk, said that during the assaults on Bakhmut, the Russian military uses small infantry groups of 5-6 people. Under the cover of artillery, they approach the Ukrainian fighters and begin shooting battles. According to the colonel, his brigade has a good situation with training, coherence and motivation of the personnel, so that the soldiers are not afraid to engage in contact battles with the enemy and continue to defend the city.
Russian Telegram channels are publishing a video from Bakhmut showing the defeat by several arrivals of a Ukrainian BREM-1 recovery vehicle, which tried to pull out a stuck T-80BVM under a railway bridge in the city center. Apparently, this is the same legendary captured Bunny tank, which, as The Insider wrote in one of the previous reports , subsequently had to be burned. The researcher, who tweets under the nickname @Danspiun, writes that, according to his information, the ARV was damaged but not destroyed as a result of hits, but was unable to pull out the tank.
Meanwhile, there is more and more information about the creation of a new PMC "Wolves" for operations in the Bakhmut region, designed for mobilized. A video with a story about the “sabotage and reconnaissance assault brigade “Wolves”” is circulating on social networks.
The person in the video introduces himself as a fighter of the PMC "Wolves" and says that they are now in the Soledar direction and are covering the fighters of the PMC Wagner. “We are strengthening our positions, we are engaged in engineering reconnaissance, we periodically conduct training with newly arriving fighters. We have a fairly large number of competent, experienced specialists who have gone through more than one conflict,” he says.
Earlier, an officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who maintains a Twitter account under the nickname Tatarigami, reported that the new PMC is manning and undergoing training in order to improve the position of the Russian group in the vicinity of Bakhmut.
It should be noted that on the Ukrainian side there is already a detachment called Da Vinci Wolves, and on the Russian side, according to the former director of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, there is a special detachment of military advisers "Tsar's Wolves", led by himself.
In addition, it became known that the Yakut mobilized were forcibly included in the PMC and taken away to Bakhmut.
Andrey Kartapolov, head of the RF State Duma Defense Committee, denies information from another State Duma deputy, Fedot Tumusov, that six mobilized residents of Yakutia were assigned to PMC Veteran of the 3rd Army Corps and PMC Wagner without their knowledge. He told about this in his Telegram channel Tumusov himself.
Earlier, Oktyabrina Kuleshova, the head of the social policy department of the Megino-Kangalassky ulus, who is responsible for working with the families of the participants in the "special operation", turned to Tumusov. She said that the mobilized from the village of Byuteidyakh and five other residents of the Khangalassky, Verkhoyansk and Srednekolymsky uluses from the 64th brigade “were included without their consent” in two PMCs and taken to Bakhmut.
About what the “training” of recruits is, how they are thrown into suicidal assaults, forgotten in the forests and left to wait for the team without food and medical care, read in The Insider .
Mutual shelling
The day before, several Ukrainian regions were hit by kamikaze drones. According to the Odessa regional administration, 10 drones of the Shahed family were shot down by an air defense system. Fixed hit in the object of recreational infrastructure. Rescue services quickly extinguished the fire. There were no casualties. The Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine stated that in total 12 drones attacked the region.
On April 18, seven more Shahed drones and an Orlan-10 drone were shot down over the Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk regions.
In Volchansk, Kharkiv region, a 50-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman were killed as a result of shells hitting residential buildings. Also, one person died as a result of shelling in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine, using a drone, attacked the building of the military enlistment office of the Novozybkov urban district in the Bryansk region. There were no casualties, the building was partially damaged, windows were broken.
A fallen drone without identification marks was found in a forest belt in the Shchekino district of the Tula region. The Regional Security Committee reported that there was no threat. The Telegram channel Mash claims that a drone with explosives flew towards the Pervomayskaya CHPP and fell near the village of Minino. According to Mash, the drone was planted with the help of electronic warfare.
Losses
The Ukrainian Commissioner for Missing Persons, Oleg Kotenko, said on the air of the telethon that 7,000 Ukrainian soldiers are listed as missing. “There really is such a figure, it is a little more than seven thousand, and we expect that those people whom we are looking for as missing are still in captivity,” Kotenko said. According to him, about 60-65% of the missing are found alive and in captivity.
Pro-Russian Telegram channels are circulating a video of the downing of a Ukrainian Su-25 attack aircraft in the Ugledar direction. The plane was allegedly hit by a Marine with the call sign "Predator". An interview with him was previously published .
Armaments and military equipment
Ukraine is running out of air defense ammunition, this will be the main topic of the meeting in Ramstein on April 21, writes the Financial Times, citing its sources. In Ukraine, they fear that the lack of ammunition for air defense will allow the Russian military to resume massive raids. In the West, it is believed that without proper air defense, the planned Ukrainian counter-offensive could fail.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov confirmed the arrival of the Patriot air defense system. “Today, our beautiful Ukrainian sky is becoming safer because Patriot air defense systems have arrived in Ukraine. Our air defense forces mastered them as quickly as possible,” he wrote.
The Ukrainian military has more and more anti-mine equipment – this time the Danish Minerydningsslange M/97 (MPLC, originally manufactured by Ensign-Bickford Aerospace & Defense).
Germany has handed over to Ukraine the second of four promised IRIS-T SLM anti-aircraft missile systems. Spiegel writes about this, citing his sources. At the same time, the representative of the Air Force of Ukraine, Yuriy Ignat, did not confirm this information, advising to wait for official comments.
The IRIS-T SLM air defense system consists of three vehicles: a launcher on a military truck with space for eight missiles, a radar vehicle and a command vehicle. Anti-aircraft missiles can hit targets at an altitude of up to 20 kilometers and at a distance of up to 40 kilometers.
It is also reported that the German government was in talks with Sweden to acquire wheeled launchers for the IRIS-T system.
The United States has officially announced a new package of military assistance to Ukraine. Its size will be 325 million dollars. It will include ammunition for HIMARS systems, artillery shells, rockets, anti-tank weapons, anti-tank mines, small arms cartridges and spare parts.
About the main events of the war on April 18 – in the previous report: “Putin arrived in the “Northern Military District zone”, Patriot air defense systems were handed over to Ukraine, the FBI became interested in “Girl from Donbass”. What's happening on the front line .