Russian troops are building a defense line in eastern Ukraine. The director of the Wagner mercenary company has told about it Yevgeny Prigozhin. The fortress is called the Wagner line.
The line is supposed to be up to 200 kilometers long, although at this stage only a few kilometers have been built.
Military professor at the National Defense University Janne Mäkitalo according to the line consists of two double rows of concrete cones and an anti-tank trench.
The concrete cones, which are meant to block the advance of armored vehicles, are about 90 centimeters high and are about four meters apart.
According to Mäkitalo, the cones would not pose any kind of obstacle to the Ukrainian armored forces. The armor can simply move the cones aside, because they are not embedded in the ground, but only laid out on the field.
– When the Salpa line was built in Finland during the peacetime, the barrier stones had to be 1.4 – 1.8 meters in size, and a third of them had to be sunk into the ground so that they would stay firmly in place even if the armor tried to topple them, Mäkitalo says.
Of course, the cones can also be shot to pieces with direct fire, arc fire or bombing from the air, he continues.
No protection for infantry
Mäkitalo marvels at the actions of the Russian builders, because armored barriers are of no use if infantry firing positions are not prepared behind them.
From them, the infantry could prevent the clearing of obstacles with the fire of light weapons and anti-tank weapons.
In order for the barrier lines to be useful to the defender, they should be built in a sawtooth pattern, and at the direction changes, an infantry protection position should be made. However, the Wagner line is made in a straight line on the field, Mäkitalo wonders.
Trenching and mining
One part of the line is a two-meter-deep trench, for which the builders have brought a Soviet-made MDK-3 type excavator. The device was developed specifically for armored trenches.
– If armor barriers were technology from the 30s and 40s, this excavator represents grave digging technology from the 50s, Mäkitalo says.
According to him, the tanks will of course have to stop at the edge of the trench, but the slowness of the attacker’s progress caused by it and the concrete barriers before it is only a few minutes or a few tens of minutes, if the attacker’s actions are not prevented.
An armored trench can be quickly filled with, for example, bridge drums or, for example, tree trunks. In addition, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have bridge armored vehicles and bridge vehicles that can spread a trench across a bridge in minutes.
It is also likely that Russia intends to mine the Wagner line with anti-personnel and anti-personnel mines. According to Mäkitalo, this is also not a significant obstacle to the attacker’s activities. Mines can be cleared out in the same way as concrete cones.
The meaning of the Wagner line
Military professor Janne Mäkitalo considers the military significance of the Wagner line negligible, even if it is built for the entire planned 200 kilometer distance.
In the West, it was noticed a long time ago that the construction of large armored formations does not achieve such a benefit that would be in any way related to the amount of work required by a huge construction project.
Experts have wondered why the line is being built in the southern part of the Luhansk region, when Russia would, as it were, hand over the northern part of Luhansk to Ukraine. According to Mäkitalo, the Wagner line does not provide such protection that the Russian troops would be safer behind the line.
Mäkitalo guesses that the purpose is to give some kind of spiritual help to poorly trained Russian soldiers who do not understand the weakness of the line. He points out that the line is being built in the area of the Southern Army Corps.
– Maybe there is an active local commander who wants a back and cover, who will mentally support these Ukrainian and Russian mobilisers who were forcibly taken from Donetsk.
It seems that there are ordinary workers building the line, and no specially equipped mercenaries. “Professional soldiers do understand how little value an armored team has in practice,” says Mäkitalo.
You can discuss the topic until Saturday 29 October. until 11 p.m.
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