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VIDEO

Ukrainian find dead bodies boobytrapped with Russian mines can kill on the frontline
The Sun
4.23M subscribers
Aug 3, 2023 11:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9l3hN-zbGg

When they found the bodies of Russian troops at an abandoned position, something about the corpses looked wrong. “There were three or four of their dead. Two guys were lying on each other, which made us suspicious, because if there had been an explosion they would have been thrown in different directions, but here, one is lying on the other,” said Volodymyr, a 47-year-old sapper with possibly the most dangerous job in Ukraine: clearing landmines at the front.

“We did well by not touching them, because when we reached there with a ‘kitten’, we saw that under them was a PM mine,” he said. The kitten is a folding steel hook that sappers use to dislodge booby traps, nicknamed for its retractable tongs that spring out like cat’s claws. The PM is a Soviet-era anti-personnel mine. “It exploded and blew up both of them, but we stayed safe, thank God.” Occupying Russian troops have sown landmines and booby traps across hundreds of miles of Ukraine’s front, a tactic that Kyiv’s commanders describe as the primary reason why their long-awaited summer counteroffensive has slowed to a crawl. For mine-clearers like Volodymyr, every day brings deadly risk, trying to make the ground safe, first for their fellow soldiers to advance, and eventually for civilians to go home.

“We lose one sapper every day, either wounded or dead. It’s a dangerous job. And whether a whole brigade is advancing or around 12 guys go out on their mission, it’s always the sappers that go first. It’s very dangerous,” he said. The Russians “mine everything. Open doors, boxes and crates, even toys,” he said. Even their own dead: “They know that our med-evac groups lift the wounded and the dead, under which they then find these explosives. And this is very dangerous for us.” Landmines inflicted a colossal toll in the first month of the counteroffensive launched in June, said Oleksandr, an anesthesiologist with the 128 Brigade who treats battlefield wounds at a front-line field hospital.

Since the mines forced commanders to slow the advance, the number of wounded arriving at his hospital has tapered off markedly. But the sappers are still getting killed. “We had cases when five or six wounded people were brought in, and most of them turned out to be sappers. So, there is such a densely mined area, that even one step away from the already cleared route and this may end rather fatally.” Ukraine’s factories have tooled up to make equipment to help keep the sappers safer. In addition to the “kitten” hooks, Volodymyr’s unit has been sent “spider boots,” which lift each foot off the ground on four metal legs, so any blast they set off will not be triggered directly under a sapper’s body. They are made by Ihor Iefymenko at a factory in Kharkiv, based on a modified Canadian prototype.

He told Reuters he pitched the idea to the emergency services after a relative lost a toe to a butterfly mine. Oleksandr, the medic treating sappers at the front, knows the danger won’t end soon. “We would have liked just to wake up one day as if it were a nightmare, a bad dream and we just shrugged it off, washed with cold water and all of it remained somewhere behind. But this is the reality.”

ARTICLE

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence explains how Russian psyops work and how to counteract bots
Ukrainska Pravda
VALENTYNA ROMANENKO
Thursday, 3 August 2023, 23:05
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/3/7414124/

SOURCE: Andrii Yusov, representative of the Main Directorate of Intelligence, live on Ukrainian Radio

QUOTE:
“Starting a ‘dialogue’ with the enemy’s bot is like arguing with a Russian tank. The tank of the invaders deserves only one thing – total destruction, and the bot deserves a ban.”

DETAILS:
Yusov stressed that Russia does not spare money for bot farms specialising in psychological operations. And the further the war unleashed by the Russian Federation continues, the trickier the enemy’s psyops can be, the representative of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence explains.

For the most part, the entry points are subtle. After another Russian shelling of the territory of Ukraine, for example, a message, call or letter from some distant “relative” from the Russian Federation appears: “How are you doing? I read that your city was attacked. Are you all right? “ Yusov gave an example of the psychological work of the Russians.

This kind of psyops as an attempt to influence the psychological state of Ukrainian defenders has not stopped since 2014 and possibly even earlier than that. But it has a wave-like character, the representative of the Main Directorate of Intelligence states.

QUOTE: “Of course, after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, these contacts seem to have become very active, although on the other hand we have a natural massive break in the communication of Ukrainians with their relatives or acquaintances, childhood friends in the territory of the aggressor state.

But recently, after the intensification of the actions of the Ukrainian Security and Defence Forces and the continuation of the offensive, they are again trying to apply this influence. For the most part, this has no results. But the bet is on the fatigue of society, demoralisation, multiple repetition of false propaganda narratives. Like, ‘all this must be stopped,’ ‘the main thing is achieving peace as fast as possible,’ ‘we are brothers,’ ‘America is to blame for everything,’ etc.

Together with the offensive on some sections of the front, which the Russians are trying to continue, they are trying to attack the mind, psyche and hearts of the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and their families.

It is clear that a mother and wife waiting for the return of her son and husband from the front is a vulnerable part of society. The same vulnerable category is the family of our prisoners of war. The enemy is actively trying to exploit these weaknesses, but mostly without success.”

REFERENCE:
PSYOP – Psychological Operations. The purpose of PSYOPS is to influence the mood of different groups of society. PSYOP components: propaganda, disinformation, concealment of some information and inflation and exaggeration of another, etc.