Heavy fog is punishing Ukraine’s drones in the key city of Pokrovsk, where Russians are attacking on motorbikes and cars

• Fog covers Russia’s attack on Pokrovsk, which Ukraine guards with drones.

• The impact of bad weather on the front line shows how UAVs can suffer from poor visibility.

• Russian troops are taking advantage of the weather conditions by advancing rapidly on motorcycles and cars.

Dense fog threatens the fall of a critical Ukrainian city. Advance of Russian troops on foot, by motorcycle and by civilian vehicles.

Pokrovsk, a railway town in Donetsk that previously housed about 60,000 people focal points of war While Moscow is almost tormented two year campaign to clamp down on the transport hub.

Like many other front-line strongholds, Ukrainian forces in the city rely heavily on drone surveillance to detect and counter repeated ground attacks; This is now Russia’s typical attack pattern.

However, the heavy fog that settled in Pokrovsk in recent days suppressed this tactic.

A lot Ukrainian dronesIt relies on optical cameras for both reconnaissance and attack purposes and can perform poorly in low visibility conditions. Some are equipped with more expensive thermal cameras, but even these can be obscured by dense fog.

Under bad weather conditions, Russian troops are rapidly advancing towards Pokrovsk with renewed aggression.

“There are currently more than 300 Russians in the city,” Ukraine’s 7th Air Assault Corps wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

Just two weeks ago, Ukraine’s forecast was around: 200 Russian soldiers In Pokrovsk.

Kremlin forces combined the advantage of dense fog with “light equipment” to attack the southern flank of Pokrovsk, the 7th Air Assault Corps wrote in its update on Tuesday.

Russian troops regularly use civilian vehicles such as motorcycles or cars to carry out attacks; It hopes their smaller, faster frames could help them evade detection or attack by first-person view drones.

On Monday, Russian Telegram channels began broadcasting a video showing about two dozen Russian soldiers advancing through thick gray fog on a variety of motorcycles and civilian cars.

Although it is unclear when the video was shot, Business Insider was able to confirm the location of the clip as the main road leading south to Pokrovsk.

A convoy moving freely at this location indicates that Russia is moving much deeper than widely used Ukrainian monitoring tools such as DeepState UA have previously confirmed.

Another video showing a Russian vehicle driving unopposed along the Pokrovsk E50 highway, marked as the border of the region previously seized by Russia, shows the Kremlin making further gains.

Ukraine says outnumbered 8 to 1

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that Russia had “increased the number and scale of attacks” in Pokrovsk.

“The situation there is difficult, especially with the weather conditions conducive to attacks.” he said in a statement.

Moscow’s goal will probably be to surround Pokrovsk. With Russian troops on three sides of the city, Ukraine was given a nine-mile-long corridor to the north to supply its troops in the settlement.

Kiev’s forces are already facing poor conditions here. Zelenskyy said in late October that Russian soldiers probably outnumbered Ukrainians in Pokrovsk by eight to one.

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi said: New York Post On Sunday it was said that Russia had deployed possibly 150,000 troops to take Pokrovsk. The Kremlin is believed to have deployed a total of 700,000 to 750,000 troops in Ukraine.

Pokrovsk is strategically important for Ukraine because it is seen as a “gateway” buffer for the rest of the country’s Donetsk fortress belt.

The loss of the currently protected city…fallen city AvdiivkaThis could damage the morale of Ukraine, which has focused on the problematic solution for more than a year.

Russia’s renewed advance on Pokrovsk could also highlight the challenges facing Ukraine’s cheap drones, which have become the war’s biggest killer and have sparked a race among the world’s militaries to build their own drone arsenals.

While Kiev forces have frequently advocated for more funding for drones, they have also warned against trusting drones. too many in crewless systems.

“You can’t fly these drones in foggy weather because you can’t see anything.” Oleksandr ChernyavskyA drone prototyping expert for Ukraine’s 241st Territorial Defense Brigade previously told Business Insider.

“But the artillery doesn’t care about the fog. If they have the coordinates, they will shoot and destroy everything living in this area, no problem,” he added.

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