Failure to communicate costly for Ukrainians
While army tries to modernize, efforts in coordination lag
SLOVIANSK, Ukraine — In the waning days of the battle for the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk, a Ukrainian national guard sergeant had a problem: His platoon’s flank was exposed and he needed to tell his men the Russians were approaching.
But he couldn’t. For 15 soldiers spread across a defensive line stretching roughly 200 yards, he had only two radios. And no matter how much he yelled into the surrounding forest over the din of artillery, there was no response.
By the time the sergeant, who goes by his nom de guerre, “General,” managed to run to his men’s position, three of them had been killed.
“We did not have a connection to each other,” he said. “We came up to the right flank and the guys who stayed there were already dead.”
As government leaders in Kyiv clamor for more hightech, longer-range weapons to compete with Russia’s superior firepower, shortcomings on a much smaller but just as important scale are undermining the ability of Ukrainian forces to defend what territory they hold in the east and retake what they have lost.
The breakdown in communication that General’s platoon suffered last month is not an anomaly for Ukrainian forces fighting in the east; it is a widespread issue across the front lines and touches nearly every aspect of the war including battlefield coordination.
The New York Times recently interviewed nearly two dozen Ukrainian soldiers who all pointed to similar problems: Russians jammed their radios constantly; they did not have enough communication gear; and they often had difficulty getting through to a commander to call for artillery support. Talking to units stationed nearby was also an issue, they said, which has led to Ukrainian forces occasionally firing on one another.
“The ability to coordinate different types of forces on the battlefield is essential, but both sides struggle with communications and effective command and control ,” said Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Virginia.
In 2014, when Russianbacked separatists formed two breakaway republics in the Donbas, the Ukrainian armed forces, built on the model of a Soviet-era military, had to modernize quickly.
In the years since, Ukrainian units have procured small, commercial, off-the-shelf drones, and some larger, more modern ones, and they have developed app-based mapping programs that can be used on computer tablets to help direct artillery fire.
But missing was any broader modernization, leaving the Ukrainian armed forces in transition — still anchored to Soviet-era ways even as they sought needed upgrades on the battlefield. That meant brigades of around 4,000 troops still fought independently of one another and the important aspects of battlefield decision-making remained largely aspirational for many units.
The grinding war in the east has slowly bled the Ukrainian military of manpower, with officials estimating up to 200 casualties a day. As a result, the front lines are increasingly defended by a constant rotation of less well-trained troops. Those forces, often from the national guard and territorial defense, are placed into the larger brigades, and are quickly told to dig in and defend.
Soldiers in those units said they were usually isolated, with little way to communicate with one another as well as with the commander who controls much-needed artillery and tanks. When these replacement units arrived on the front lines, they knew little about nearby forces and referred to them simply as “neighbors.”
“It appears to me that the communication is a bit lopsided, because when we go to carry out some task, we can’t count on artillery support,” said Kostya, a soldier in a territorial defense unit who had recently rotated off the front. His company of about 100 men suffered around 30 casualties on their first day at the front.
Asked about communications problems, the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Front-line Ukrainian troops are often unable to communicate with the artillery units supporting them with howitzers and multiple rocket launchers. That prompts those artillery units to often rely on their own drones and often U.S.-supplied intelligence, said soldiers and U.S. defense officials. This disconnect has left soldiers on the front lines increasingly on their own, prone to taking casualties, and has made some artillery batteries slow to react to Russian breaches along the front line.
“What artillery shall we ask for support?” one soldier said after coming off the front near the eastern city of Bakhmut, requesting that he not be identified for security reasons. Adding that “we don’t have communications,” and that his side’s artillery “shot two times, and we were hit 300 more times.”
This breakdown between troops and units, where a shared understanding of what is happening on the battlefield is difficult for any standing military, has been exacerbated by Russia’s technologically superior military. Not only can Moscow’s troops unleash far more artillery fire, but they also have proved effective at jamming communications. The General said that his two off-the-shelf radios were jammed constantly.
Troops in more specialized units have been issued U.S.-supplied encrypted radios and can speak to one another unhindered, one soldier said, but the radio’s high output means the Russians can find where they’re broadcasting from.
“This is why we stopped communicating and only communicated the necessary minimum, such as if an evacuation was needed or an urgent help,” the soldier, who goes by the name Raccoon, added. Only about a quarter of the secure radios that Ukraine needs have been sent by the United States and other allies, a Western adviser in Ukraine said, requesting anonymity.
Soldiers say the most reliable equipment they have received, though in small quantities, has been Starlink satellite internet, enabled by a small square-like antenna that can be connected to act much like any Wi-Fi network.
But even the presence of satellite internet, which so far the Russians have not been able to jam, has not been a cure-all. The murky images from the front have sometimes turned deadly, with Ukrainian forces mistakenly turning their weapons on one another.