Was talking with my friend last night and he said he has been unable to get in touch with his mechanic friend.Talking to my buddy last night who is friends with a mechanic in the Russian military.
He was talking to his friend on some app called Pingle messenger, never heard of it before but they figured out how to communicate through restrictions with it.
Apparently before he left his base near Moscow they were converting civillian pickups they had taken from citizens to improvised artillery vehicles.
Once at his new posting at Valuyki in July he was tasked with repairing immobilized and damaged equipment.
Basically they have no new parts and have to manufacture or scavenge what they can from donor vehicles, something like they had to do in Somalia.
They were pretty much just making the units movable and able to fire but electronic and radio systems for jamming, radar lock alarms and fire contol are not being repaired due to lack of parts, so as long as the optics allow the gunner to manually target they are good to go.
He also said he believes the lack of radio communication is the reason the Russians are having so many friendly fire incidents.
When he was asked about drones he was saying that many of the mobile jamming units the Russians use are tuned to known Nato drone frequencies, this would explain why the switchblade drones the US supplied were not a factor but civilian models of drones are able to hover and drop bomblettes on the drone jammers themselves.
Apparently they are also having problems with contaminated fuel since from what he said was that 6 out of 10 undamaged units have plugged fuel filters, water in the fuel tanks and some have even had up to 6 inches of dirt in the bottom of the fuel tanks.
Commanders were complaining it was taking them too long to repair the equipment that far from the front and transfered his entire unit closer to the front.
Apparently they are running short of barrels for the artillery pieces and have 23 artillery peices sitting at the base waiting for new barrels.
He is now posted in the Luhansk Oblast at a base near Lotcove or something like that and said that it is like hell there with Ukrainian shelling the base frequently but away from the repair end of the base, so he said there was some relief in that.
He is supposed to get back in contact with him Monday night, anyone have any questions I can forward. ,
He mentioned that this was uncharacteristic for him to miss a call and not reach out.
I started looking into any news from his last known area in Luhansk Oblast and got the correct spelling from a map I found it is not Lotcove it is Lotykove.
Stumbled across this.
They say 50 Russians died in the attack.
Also found an article with a link to an apparent video.
https://ukrainetoday.org/2022/08/21...ccupiers-large-repair-base-in-luhansk-region/
Link to video on Telegram.
https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/5147
Picture of the garages at the base two days later, taken from someone in the area on Facebook..
Should I let my friend know or wait a while longer, he has been worried for almost two weeks.
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