Seg\u00fan un an\u00e1lisis elaborado por periodistas de investigaci\u00f3n rusos, analizando informaci\u00f3n de distintas fuentes, aunque no existen datos oficiales, deducen que los problemas de las tropas rusas en el campo de batalla provienen, entre otras cosas, de un sistema de comunicaciones de baja calidad, que no puede garantizar el comando y control en forma completa y segura. Esto ya habr\u00eda ocasionado importantes bajas y una detenci\u00f3n en el avance de las tropas, a pesar de su superioridad.<\/p>\n
(RFE\/RL<\/a>) \u2014 \u201cWe have no communication. We don\u2019t have walkie-talkies. Nothing,\u201d a bedraggled Russian soldier tells his interrogators in another of the videos published by Ukrainian defenders this month posted to YouTube.<\/p>\n A mere three weeks into the war, such statements, along with intercepted chatter, captured equipment, and images of cheap, handheld transceivers, suggest that an inability to communicate \u2014 up and down the chain of command and across branches of the Russian military \u2014 are impeding Moscow\u2019s war plans.<\/p>\n And while military fortunes can swing quickly, in even major offensives like the one launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24 to \u201cdemilitarize\u201d and subdue Ukraine, many Western military experts suggest that the Kremlin and its planners\u00a0botched key aspects<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0of the early weeks of the invasion.<\/p>\n In Russia\u2019s case, the predicament has been on display over the first 24 days of this war through statements by captive troops, tapped conversations and other clues posted by Ukrainian intelligence or others eager to highlight perceived weaknesses in the much larger invading forces, and reports suggesting an unsecured call might have aided Ukrainian forces in targeting at least one of four Russian generals who have reportedly been killed in the conflict.<\/p>\n Evidence suggests that some of the roots of the Russian communication lapses lie in mismanaged development and procurement processes for things like tactical military radios, undertrained and underdeployed specialists, and the challenges of operating on foreign soil, where the enemy controls not only cellular networks but also wired communications that frequently serve as a reliable backup channel.<\/p>\n One of the results has been varying complexity among the systems used by troops for voice and data communications, multiplying challenges particularly because they involve mixed air, land, and naval forces. In such cases, all troops are forced to use a system that\u2019s common to the least advanced among them.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re forming a mixed formation and part of the formation is comprised of older vehicles like the 90th [Guards Tank] Division approach into Kyiv we saw recently,\u201d said Stanimir Dobrev, an independent military expert who specializes in telecommunications, \u201cyou have to resort to the lowest common denominator.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, mixing so-called open and encrypted systems makes them only as strong as their weakest link.<\/p>\n Some of those Russian forces\u2019 older equipment, Dobrev said, \u201ccan be decrypted almost in real time and thus it\u2019s not useful to add the extra layer of complexity to operate the equipment when there\u2019s little benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n He says those and other factors potentially point to why Russia\u2019s ground offensive has bogged down, and air operations become less effective over time, as targets identified and communicated to Russia\u2019s air force early on have moved.<\/p>\n \u2018Lessons Learned\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n Russia\u2019s five-day war in Georgia in August 2008, over two breakaway Georgian regions Moscow has since occupied, laid bare some of the Russian armed forces\u2019 most pressing battleground problems: tactical communications.<\/p>\n Some units were unable to communicate with the command structure, mobile phones and even \u201ccourier mail<\/a><\/strong>\u201d was used instead of military radios, and in one extreme example an air force officer flew by helicopter to hand out orders personally.<\/p>\n A deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Yevgeny Meychik, responded in 2009 with an announcement that, under orders from Russia\u2019s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, the Defense Ministry would thoroughly revise its approach to the military command-and-control system \u2014 \u201cand particularly the communications systems.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u00a0pledged<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that \u201cby the end of 2011, we plan to bring a radio station to every serviceman, to every combat vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n But while Meychik\u2019s plan presupposed use of the main tactical-level army radio system at the time, known as Akveduk, the Defense Ministry instead opted to pursue the development of a wholly new, sixth-generation system that came to be known as Azart. An upstart manufacturer, Angstrem, one of whose owners had been an adviser to Medvedev, was chosen for the project.<\/p>\n By early 2012, boasting that Russia had employed the NATO concept of \u201clessons learned,\u201d Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin\u00a0appeared<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0with one of the Azart handsets and declared, \u201cThis connection works!\u201d<\/p>\n Years of\u00a0promises<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and many unmet deadlines to deliver the phones, dubbed \u201cgreen crocodiles\u201d by troops because of their half-meter-long antennas, followed,\u00a0their use<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics notwithstanding.<\/p>\n Thirteen years later, despite more repeated promises, thousands of the Azart phones are in the hands of Russian troops.<\/p>\n But it is hard to describe the process as a success.<\/p>\n It has been the subject of multiple criminal investigations, including an ongoing one\u00a0focused<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0on a deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Colonel General Khalil Arslanov.<\/p>\n Reviews on radio forums like\u00a0Radioscanner.ru<\/a><\/strong>, while impossible to independently corroborate, appear to suggest the Azarts are unpopular among troops.<\/p>\n Military expert Vladimir Orlov\u00a0described<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0the use of Azart phones among Russian troops deployed to Syria and said that \u201coutside the bases of the Russian armed forces in Syria, everyone uses mobile phones and Chinese \u2018balalaikas,’\u201d a reference to civilian walkie-talkies manufactured by China\u2019s Baofeng.<\/p>\n Moreover, the most generous estimate of the total number of Azart handsets deployed is only around 60,000, based on the 18 billion rubles ($171 million at the current rate) allocated for their purchase and the estimated cost of around 300,000 rubles per device. That is only around one-third the number of Russian troops thought by NATO and Ukraine to have been deployed in Ukraine.<\/p>\n Knock-On Problems<\/strong><\/p>\n Analyst Dobrev points to the Russian military\u2019s failure to ensure modern and secure communication channels as a major stumbling block.<\/p>\n But he emphasizes the importance of the knock-on effect of such a problem \u2014 poor coordination among the various ground, sea, and air forces involved in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n And he says that the Russian military\u2019s failure to implement a modern, automated command-and-control system is another problem.<\/p>\n \u201cBy 2020 it was planned to equip just 45 brigades of the Russian ground forces with such a system, but Russia hasn\u2019t managed the task,\u201d Dobrev said. \u201cThe situation is even worse with the coordination between ground forces and the air force,\u201d which, he says, operates on its own command-and-control system.<\/p>\n The resulting problems in coordination present another problem, Dobrev says, that seems to have manifested itself as the war ground on. \u201cAt the beginning of the war, the Russian Air Force acted quite successfully because the positions of the enemy were known to it,\u201d he said. \u201cNow this doesn\u2019t always work.\u201d<\/p>\n He pointed to documents that appear to show the Russian Air Force operating by making sorties to designated targets with little or no ability to communicate with ground forces who, for instance, might otherwise request a change of targets or air support.<\/p>\n Dobrev also says that forward detachments in the early days of the war appeared to have outrun their communications support. \u201cThe Russian battalion tactical groups immediately went a much greater distance from the border [and] at the same time, we didn\u2019t see equipment that could provide secure communication with the command post along with them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He says repeater cars and new communication towers need to be installed along the way, and their set-up and use require experienced operators. \u201cIndirectly, this indicates that the Russian offensive groups didn\u2019t expect to stay on the road for a long time,\u201d Dobrev said.<\/p>\n He and other observers also note that clear signs have emerged of interception of communication between Russian special services and other troops that should otherwise be on encrypted channels.<\/p>\n Christo Grozev, of the open-source sleuthing group Bellingcat,\u00a0cited<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0a \u201csuper expensive cryptophone system\u201d introduced by Russia in 2021 seemingly being intercepted because it requires a 3G or 4G cellular network to operate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cellular networks are still controlled by Ukraine, which means that for the Ukrainian military they remain a relatively secure means of communication from eavesdropping,\u201d Dobrev said.<\/p>\n Not so for Russians using those same networks, or, obviously, Ukrainian fixed lines.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the absence of special, secure army communications, many soldiers and officers succumb to the temptation to use ordinary phones,\u201d Dobrev said, \u201cthey simply take out Ukrainian SIM cards and call Russia, allowing the Ukrainian military and intelligence not only to easily intercept the content of the conversations, but also to determine the location of the caller.\u201d<\/p>\n The BBC\u00a0reported<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in the first days of the war that audio messages purportedly including Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov suggested that a commander in his guards corps was traveling to Moscow on the eve of the war to obtain \u201cclean Ukrainian SIM cards,\u201d presumably leaving communications with those devices vulnerable to Ukrainian high-tech eavesdropping.<\/p>\n