The joint forces operation’s command hides from OSCE observers the facts of presence of prohibited weapons at the contact line, as well as near civil infrastructure. Deputy commander of the Operational Command colonel Eduard Basurin at the briefing in Donetsk reported details on October 18th.
“Over the past week, we revealed numerous facts of the work of mobile electronic warfare groups from the 305th and 20th AFU EW battalions. Their work was detected along the entire line of contact, most often in the areas of Gnutovo, Lebedinskoye, Pavlopol, Starognatovka, Bogdanovka, Konstantinovka, Avdeyevka, Krasnogorovka, Karlovka, Chermalyk, Opytnoye and Karlovka.
In the area of Petrovskoye, Ukrainian militants attacked OSCE SMM drones with small arms twice, and therefore observers were forced to stop monitoring due to the loss of one of the UAVs,” Basurin stated.
The intelligence notes the deployment of twenty artillery systems, sixteen tanks and sixty-nine armored combat vehicles in violation of the Minsk agreements near residential buildings and in the territory of municipal facilities: Novotroitskoye — self-propelled artillery system 2S1 Gvozdika, BMP and BTR-60; Beryozovoye — BTR-70; Viktorovka — BMP-2, MTLB, BMP-2 and BTR-70; Dzerzhinsk — BTR-80, Verkhnetoretskoye — BTR-60; Novobakhmutovka — BTR-4; Konstantinovka — 16 tanks and 12 self-propelled artillery system 2S1 Gvozdika; Luganskoye, Opytnoye and Belaya Gora — 49 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers; Katerinovka — BRDM and BMP; Selidovo — 4 MLRS BM-21 Grad; Khlebodarovka — towed howitzer D-20; Druzhkovka — anti-tank gun MT-12 Rapira and self-propelled guns Akatsiya; Artyomovsk — Tunguska anti-aircraft rocket-gun system; Kamenka — two BTR-70 and five infantry fighting vehicles.