In today's summary:
- Ukrainian troops retreated from their last positions in the center of Bakhmut;
- President Zelensky spoke about the reasons for the desperate struggle for Bakhmut;
- The Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to gain a foothold on the left bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region;
- Prigozhin stated that the Wagner PMC would no longer take prisoners in Bakhmut;
- Ukrainian drones (air and sea) attacked Sevastopol, the Belgorod region and the Moscow region;
- Armed Forces of Ukraine remotely mine Donetsk;
- The Ukrainians are trying to artisanally counteract Russian attempts to jam Starlink Internet terminals;
- Polish and Slovak MiG-29 fighters transferred to Ukraine are used as a source of spare parts;
- The Czech Republic transferred 12 more T-72M4 CZ tanks to the Ukrainian Armed Forces;
- The service of the son of the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov in the Wagner PMC is becoming more and more suspicious;
- Russian military police kidnapped a resident of the Amur region.
The situation at the front
Ukrainian forces completely abandoned the center of Bakhmut and withdrew to the west of the railway junction. This was reported by Bild journalist Julian Röpke, based on the geolocation of the video of the hostilities. Russian forces appear to be continuing their offensive.
The commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Alexander Syrsky, wrote on Sunday, April 23, that he had traveled around the entire line of contact in the Bakhmut direction. “The Russians are suffering heavy losses, we are destroying their personnel and offensive potential,” says Syrsky.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are preparing a counteroffensive and are not going to surrender Bakhmut, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with Al Arabiya TV channel. “We cannot leave Bakhmut because it [will help] expand the front and give Russian troops and Wagner PMCs a chance to seize more of our lands,” Zelensky said. It is noted that if Russia takes Bakhmut, this will open the way to two larger cities in the Donetsk region: Kramatorsk and Slavyansk.
Russian forces are preparing a new offensive against Ugledar, said Alexei Dmitrashkovsky, head of the joint press center of the Tauride Defense Forces. According to him, the city is being bombed from the air.
According to the MilitaryLand.net resource, the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to gain a foothold on the left bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region. Z-channels write that at the end of last week, Ukrainian forces intensified in the floodplain of the Dnieper south of Potemkin Island: landing groups of up to 30 people are landing there. It is also alleged that Russia continues to control part of Antonovsky Island, adjacent to the destroyed bridge of the same name, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine have moved to the west, towards Kruglik Island. It is worth noting that many researchers, such as Nathan Ruser , say that the area on the maps on the left bank of the Dnieper, which is marked as controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, is in fact a swampy floodplain of the river without roads and cannot serve as a springboard for a full-fledged offensive.
Yevgeny Prigozhin said that Wagner PMC mercenaries would no longer take prisoners. The reason for this was an audio recording published in the telegram channel “Unloading Wagner”, which is close to the PMC, with allegedly intercepting the conversation of the Ukrainian military, from which it follows that they are going to shoot the captured mercenary.
Mutual shelling
Four Ukrainian UAVs immediately attacked the Belgorod region on the night of April 24. According to local media, drones were noticed in the Belgorod region and the Shebekinsky urban district. One of them was reportedly shot down, after which it exploded because it was filled with explosives. Another UAV fell by itself and also exploded.
The “Governor” of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, reported that on the night of April 24, the city was attacked by two naval drones, one of which was destroyed by anti-submarine and sabotage defense forces (PPDO), and the second exploded on its own. According to Razvozhaev, no one was hurt; windows in four houses were shattered by the blast. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, there were three drones.
Naval analyst H.I. Sutton notes , based on satellite imagery, that since previous attacks by Ukrainian maritime drones, the Russians have managed to fortify the entrance to the bay where the ships of the Black Sea Fleet are stationed with booms and barges, as a result of which not a single Ukrainian drone on this time he did not penetrate deep into the bay.
Near Noginsk, Moscow region, two crashed Ukrainian drones were found , including a UJ-22 Airborne stuffed with explosives. In February 2023, a similar drone flew to Kolomna.
Aleksey Rogozin, head of the ANO Center for the Development of Transport Technologies, son of the former director of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, wrote that qualified aviation engineers are able to ensure the flight of drones for 500 km or more and that jamming GPS signals cannot be considered a universal way to interfere with UAVs:
“Taking into account the fact that the absence of GPS on the line of contact is a given, all normal developers both here and there find solutions for non-satellite navigation. The cheapest solution is an inertial system. If there is no GPS (or rather GNSS) for several tens of seconds, the inertial of the drone’s autopilot does not have time to accumulate a critical number of errors, and when a signal appears, it is corrected <…> But there are other [solutions]: from star sensors to processing using technical vision ( neural networks) geo-underlying information”.
In the report of the Russian Ministry of Defense dated April 24, it is reported that over the past day, Russian forces shot down 38 Ukrainian UAVs in the territory of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. A total of 3,834 Ukrainian drones are said to have been shot down since the start of the war.
Ukrainian Armed Forces shelled Donetsk with MFOM AT2 rockets filled with anti-tank mines. This is stated in the message of the representative office of the "DPR" in the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC). It is also alleged that the Armed Forces of Ukraine fired at Makiivka, as a result of which two women were killed and one more was wounded.
Commercial Chinese UAVs Mugin-5 Pro, modified by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, attacked an oil depot in Rovenky, Luhansk region. According to the representative office of the "LPR" in the JCCC, one tank was damaged.
As a result of a night strike by Russian forces on Kramatorsk, a transport stop was destroyed and windows at a school were shattered.
Armaments and military equipment
Ukrainian troops are looking for makeshift solutions to counter Russian attempts to interfere with the operation of Starlink Internet terminals using electronic warfare systems. In particular, the terminals are placed in signal-impervious "Faraday cages" or in specially dug holes , which makes them inaccessible to Russian GPS jamming systems.
The Economist writes that "many" of the MiG-29 fighters transferred to Ukraine by Poland and Slovakia are not in flight condition and are being used as a source of spare parts. The publication clarifies that these countries have delivered eight MiG-29s to Kyiv in recent weeks.
The Czech Republic has handed over 12 more T-72M4 CZ tanks (modernization of the T-72M1) to Ukraine, ČT24 TV channel reports . In total, the Czech army was armed with 86 T-72M1 tanks, more than 50 of them have already been sent to Ukraine.
Peskov's son in PMC Wagner
One of the founders of PMC Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said that the son of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Nikolai Peskov (aka Chowles), took part in the SVO. According to him, Peskov Jr. served as a loader in the Wagner crew of the Uragan MLRS.
The well-known Telegram channel of the Cheka-OGPU questioned this information. According to the channel, Peskov's Tesla Model X car, which he always drove himself, moved around Moscow throughout 2022, familiar men claim that he did not leave anywhere for a long time and did not change his usual way of life. Former and current artillerymen of the Wagner PMC, interviewed by the Cheka-OGPU, said they had not seen Nikolai Peskov in the combat zone.
Later, "exclusive footage with Nikolai Peskov at the front" appeared on the channel of TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. And pro-government political scientist Sergei Markov published a photo with the alleged oath of Nikolai Peskov (Chowles) and wrote that now sending children to war with Ukraine would become “popular with the Russian elite.”
However, it quickly became clear that those same shots of Solovyov had previously been published under the guise of an interview with a “resident of Cheboksary”. And the photo posted by Markov shows the son of the former President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, being sworn into the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Peskov Jr. himself said in an interview with KP that he fought as part of the Wagner PMC and that his father helped him get to the front.
Military police abducted a resident of the Amur region
The Telegram channel “We Can Explain” published a video dated April 19, in which the military police detain a young man. According to the channel, this is a 30-year-old resident of the city of Svobodny, Amur Region, named Miroslav. In September, he received a summons to mobilize, which he ignored. Subsequently, it turned out that the summons was sent erroneously. As it turned out, now Miroslav is at the training ground in the village of Yekaterinoslavka.
On the main events of the war on April 21 – in the previous report: " Fights for the 'road of life' in Bakhmut, Russia is bombing Belgorod, 'Mike' and 'Nick' signed up for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. What's happening on the front lines ."