World News
The story of the 56 km armored convoy sent by Russia for the occupation of Kiev
On the third day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on December 26, 2022, a huge 15.5-kilometer convoy of armored military vehicles was reflected in satellite images.
That same morning, 67-year-old Volodymyr Sherbinin was in front of a grocery store in the north of Kyiv as hundreds of military vehicles were on their way to the city. Both the satellites and Sherbin were witnessing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and overthrow the government as well.
48 hours later, on February 29, 2022, the length of the convoy extended to a colossal 56 kilometers.
But instead of taking direct action to achieve victory, they waited for weeks. Then one night they disappeared.
So what happened so that such a large convoy could not reach Kyiv?
The BBC team spoke with a large number of people who all contacted the convoy, including military personnel, national and international intelligence services, civilians, veterans, and people from the area defense. The team also gained access to some Russian maps and documents. All these documents pointed to the convoy’s plan and shed a striking light on why it had failed.
The story begins on Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus.
Vladislav, 23, of the 80th Air Assault Brigade of Ukraine, saw bright lights in the night sky when he went outside to smoke his first cigarette of the day.
“I remember watching the lights coming out of the forest. At first, I thought these were car headlights. But then I realized that these are Grad missiles. It was firing towards us.”
Deep in the forest, located in the forbidden zone in Chornobyl, a team from Vladislav’s unit was on patrol when the first Russian vehicles crossed the border with Ukraine.
“The whole world was shaking. Have you ever been in a tank in your life? There is no such sound. It’s a very powerful thing.”
Vladislav and his 80th Brigade blew up the bridge connecting Chornobyl to the next big city, Ivankiv, as planned in case of any attack.
The Russians would have to spend time building a mobile bridge, which would have given Vladislav and his troops time to retreat to Kyiv.
“I was surprised at first, I thought why didn’t we stop them in Chornobyl? But we had to find out who our enemy was. That’s what we did.”
Being so close to the Belarusian border, the Ukrainians could not risk opening fire and starting another conflict. Their priority was to understand Russia’s war plan before deporting its troops to the front.
Putin’s master plan
According to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, contrary to many media reports at the time, the 56-kilometer convoy included ten separate tactical battalions.
A Russian document reached by the BBC had a timeline for the attack. After the first battalion crossed into Ukraine at 04:00 on 24 February, it was ordered to advance directly to Kyiv to arrive at 14:55.
The attack relied heavily on two elements: stealth and speed.
According to RUSI, defense research thinks tank in the UK, Russian soldiers, who kept their plans to attack the capital secret, could outnumber the Ukrainian forces north of Kyiv by 1 in 12.
However, Putin’s secrecy has come at a price. His trick was so successful that even most of his commanders did not receive any orders until 24 hours before the invasion.
On a tactical level, this left them vulnerable. They had no food, no fuel, and no maps. They also did not have the proper means of communication. Their ammunition was insufficient. They were caught unprepared even for winter conditions.
The Russians, who used the wrong tires and were surrounded by snow, got stuck in the mud. Civilians close to Ivankiv say Russian soldiers asked Ukrainian farmers to help them get their tanks out of the mud.
Russian vehicles had to use asphalt roads to avoid the soft ground, which required thousands of vehicles to gather in a single row.
However, limited communication between the battalions soon caused traffic jams.
As one field military expert said, “You never go into enemy territory in a long queue. Never.”
Based on witness statements and intelligence data from the Ukrainian army, we were able to map the route the convoy traveled from February 24 to the end of March. As the troops avoided traveling between the fields, the convoy route ended on the main roads north of Kyiv.
When the queue reached a length of 56 km, it contained around a thousand tanks, 2,400 mechanized infantry vehicles, and 10,000 personnel, as well as dozens of supply trucks carrying food, fuel, oil, and ammunition.
united resistance
Having run out of food and fuel during their hold north of Kyiv, the Russians also underestimated their enemies.
Volodymyr Sherbi and his friends, most of whom are retired, had prepared for the arrival of the convoy to their hometown of Bucha for three days.
Armed with machine guns, locals removed entire road signs, built checkpoints, and prepared hundreds of Molotov cocktails.
Finally, Russian tanks entered the city on Sunday morning.
For about thirty minutes, Sherbinin and the others engaged in tanks with whatever they had.
“We set fire to two vehicles and thus we were able to slow down the convoy,” Şerbin explains.
But then came the retaliation.
30-year-old Maksim Şokoropar said, “When they saw us throwing bottles, they started shooting. “I was a bartender, I had no military training,” he says.
By the end of that half hour, everyone in Şerbinin’s team had been shot and taken to the hospital.
However, Şerbinin continued to fight even from the infirmary. He cross-checked footage of the convoy he received of civilians from all over Kyiv and kept in touch with the Ukrainian authorities.
On the other end of the line was Roman Pohorilil, 23-year-old Irpin’s deputy governor.
“We didn’t sleep for three days. We were working with one person on the municipal telephone line. As we received calls about the convoy, we also received information about saboteurs who marked the route that the convoy should follow.”
Pohorilil is a counselor by day and an open-source intelligence specialist by night. Pohorilil, the co-founder of the website DeepState, gathered social media and intelligence data, geolocated this data, and then republished it on his site.
“The Russians were posting videos on social media on their way to Kyiv. We reposted the videos to reveal his moves. They were just playing to the stands, but they were caught doing it.”
But Pohorilil says that the most important thing during the attack on Kyiv was a sense of a united Ukraine.
“Everyone was doing something in some way. I admit that the first days are very hectic. But there were retired soldiers helping civilians. Everyone wanted to defend their city.”
Hundreds of attacks on the convoy were carried out in all towns and villages in the Kyiv region by dozens of them, from civilians armed with homemade weapons to mechanized infantry and artillery.
Outdated tactics
In stark contrast to the Ukrainians, the Russian forces have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to make dynamic decisions on the ground.
Vladislav of the 80th Brigade said, “The Russians all carried large metal boxes with the words ‘secret’ on them. Once we ambushed and confiscated one of these boxes. We found maps showing all of their routes. After that, we learned all his strategies.”
Putin’s secrecy meant that Russian commanders on the ground had no idea of the scope of the war plan.
Unfortunately, the navigation tools were also out of date. A year after the invasion, the BBC team continued to find maps dating back to the 1960s and 1970s on vehicles left behind by the Russians. Many towns that were not on those maps now exist today. We also found semaphore flags, a very old way of communicating between troops.
One of the successful tactics of the Ukrainian resistance was to blow up the bridges and embankments in front of the convoy. Thus, the Russians were asked to change their route. Relying on old maps and having difficulties communicating with their bases, Russian troops were paralyzed many times by indecision.
A few satellite images show that Russian vehicles are just circling, so to speak.
The Russians withdrew after four weeks
Pressured by Ukrainian airstrikes and artillery, the Russian convoy finally had to stop just outside the Kyiv city limit. For the civilians living in the settlements around the troops stationed in the area, this situation was quite scary.
“They looted everywhere, they emptied all the shops,” Vladislav said. They also used civilians as human shields.”
What is happening in many villages and towns to the north and west of Kyiv is still being investigated by numerous authorities, including the International Criminal Court.
Vladislav said that while he was at a checkpoint, shots were fired from the Russian convoy and said, “Civilians were caught in the middle of a war. It was terrible,” he says.
After four long weeks, the Russians finally began to retreat.
Two of the largest remaining battalions were defeated near Hostomel Airport. 370 trucks abandoned in the village of Zdvizhivka were also destroyed by artillery fire.
The Ukrainian army continued to push back the Russian troops until 19 March. Then the Russians withdrew completely from Kyiv.
Despite speculation that there will be a new attack on Kyiv, most experts agree that this is unlikely due to the absence of a large-scale deployment of Russian troops to the Belarusian border.
Russia continues to advance towards the industrial center of Donbas in the east and to attack the regions of Kherson, Melitopol, and Zaporizhia in the south.
(Source: BBC)
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