Struggling Russians ‘plant mines’ and dig in for a long war

Russian forces are digging in to positions around Kyiv as its troops elsewhere have been accused of deploying mines in a sign that they are trying to keep territory they have gained rather than pushing forward.

The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said that Russian troops were strengthening their positions around the periphery of the Ukrainian capital and in other parts of the country.

Satellite images taken by the US company Maxar showed troops digging trenches and fortifications around military equipment northwest of Kyiv.

The warning of a change in Russia’s tactics came as a suspected cruise missile attack destroyed the Retroville “lifestyle” centre in the west of the city. At least eight people are believed to have died.

Russians are “generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward positions for an indefinite time”, the institute said.

The Ukrainian General Staff of the Armed Forces reported that the Kremlin was preparing its population for a “long war” in Ukraine and implementing draconian mobilisation measures, including deploying members of the youth military organisation, who are aged between 17 and 18.

It also claimed that for the first time there was Russian mine activity in the “Siversky operational direction”, taken by analysts to mean near the northern city of Chernihiv.

A military source said that deploying mines was part of Russia’s new “defensive posture”.

The tactic allows troops to attack cities knowing that any counterattack would have to negotiate minefields or be channelled between them, which would make them easier to hit. “It indicates that they are in it for the long haul,” the source said.

The National Security and Defence Council released a public service announcement telling Ukrainian citizens not to touch PFM-1s, or “butterfly mines”. The mines are fired from mortars or released by aircraft and glide to the ground. They only explode on later contact.

Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian MP, accused Russia yesterday of “scattering cassette bombs with PFM-1 petal mines across Ukraine”. She tweeted: “Geneva convention specifically prohibits this.”

Anti-personnel landmines such as the PFM-1 resemble toys so children like to pick them up, Justin Crump, a military analyst, said. He said that although marked minefields were allowed under international law, and had been used to “good effect” by Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region, there was “no real knowledge” of where scatterable mines ended up.

“This is a tool in Russia’s terror arsenal and they were put to good use in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Grozny in 1999/2000. The people fleeing that city ended up caught in a minefield where many died during the escape,” he said.

Photographs on social media have shown how Ukraine’s military has used mines. One image showed a Russian T-72 main battle tank that appeared to have been blown up after venturing into a Ukrainian minefield. Another showed a damaged Russian Tor-M2 surface-to-air missile system after it was thought to have been driven over a mine.

George Barros, a researcher with the Institute for the Study of War, said he believed that the Russians were unlikely to complete the encirclement of Kyiv without a “substantial operational pause to regroup and scrounge enough combat power” and that Moscow’s forces were focusing on keeping hold of their gains.

“The Russians are stalled out on both the east and west approaches to Kyiv and are facing intensifying chronic logistical and force-generation problems,” he said.

“They’ve lost the initiative and Russian forces’ new employment of landmines near Chernihiv as defensive measures indicate the Russian operational focus is increasingly shifting on keeping their gains as opposed to projecting forward [at least near Chernihiv].”

He said that the Russians were “scraping the bottom of the barrel” by bringing in forces from bases in Abkhazia, Armenia and elsewhere.

The Russians were also thought to be sending support units into direct combat operations and using combined formations to offset their lack of manpower.

In Luhansk Russian forces have been spotted using outdated equipment, including in one case an old MosinNagant rifle. Barros said the Russians were unlikely to generate meaningful new combat power without an overhaul of its “campaign design”.

Francis Tusa, a defence analyst, said that the terrain in northern Ukraine could be one reason Russia’s advance had been slow because it has more marshes and forests, making it harder for tanks to navigate.

“The land in the south is better for tanks because it is Ukraine’s agricultural heartland and pretty flat,” he said. “This was the area where the Wehrmacht had the most impressive advances when they attacked in 1941 because the terrain was most conducive to blitzkrieg.”

On Friday Denys Monastyrsky, the Ukrainian interior minister, said it would take years to defuse the unexploded ordnance once the Russian invasion was over.

“A huge number of shells and mines have been fired at Ukraine, and a large part haven’t exploded,” he said. “They remain under the rubble and pose a real threat. It will take years, not months, to defuse them.”

In addition to the unexploded Russian ordnance, Ukrainian troops have planted land mines at bridges, airports and other key locations to prevent the Russians using them.

When the bomb dropped in Kyiv’s Retroville district, Vasyl Hayduchenko was eating a late-night sandwich and looking out of the window of his flat in a smart new block overlooking a shopping centre.

The fireball came first and then the noise and then, as he threw himself across the room for cover, the blast wave that took out his windows and all the others on his side of the building.

 “Even a month ago I could never have believed such a thing could happen, if you had told me,” he said as he stared out over the wreckage today. A loud bang and plume of smoke briefly caused the onlookers to flinch, but it was just rescue workers blowing up an unexploded part of the missile. “Death, fighting, explosions — it’s all happening here, right in my country.”

There has been random shelling of residential neighbourhoods in Kyiv in the past week, but videos of the attack on the Retroville “lifestyle” centre in the west of the city suggested it had been hit by a cruise missile. That would imply a targeted strike.

One possible military target showed itself during the morning not long before the controlled explosion, when a missile streaked into the air from the ground not far away. Videos posted online from before the strike on Sunday night also appeared to show Grad-type missiles being released nearby.

Residents also said that they had seen a mobile missile launcher in the area.

That would not make the centre a legitimate target, but Russian forces have never been famed for their accuracy.

Russia said that it was targeting rocket launchers near by. “The areas near the shopping centre were used as a large base for storing rocket munitions and for reloading multiple rocket launchers,” Igor Konashenkov, a defence ministry spokesman, told reporters.

“High-precision long-range weapons on the night of March 21 destroyed a battery of Ukrainian multiple rocket launchers and a store of ammunition in a non-functioning shopping centre.”

The mall was only opened a year and a half ago, and was a symbol of the “new” Kyiv, in which modern housing, supermarkets and restaurants are slowly supplanting the grey architecture of the Soviet era. The mall, a ten-storey business centre next to a low-rise building containing a gym and children’s play area as well as a supermarket and upmarket boutiques, was the centrepiece of a local redevelopment also containing modern apartment blocks like Hayduchenko’s.

The building was destroyed in the blast. All that was left was a skeleton of its stanchions and floors, the glass walls disappeared.

The gym had also disappeared. In videos from security cameras the blast could be seen to shoot debris hundreds of feet into the air, littering the neighbourhood.

The final toll of dead and injured was unclear by this afternoon, but six body bags lay at the mall forecourt in the morning, and the authorities said they thought at least eight people had been killed.

Hayduchenko, 35, who runs his own ecommerce business, had moved into his new flat a year before. When the war started he moved his wife and daughter out of the city for safety, but the complex was still full of people.

The explosion shook buildings three miles away, a sign of what is to come for the city if the Russians turn more to missile attacks. Their ground force assault on the west side, where the front is just a mile and a half from Retroville, and on the east side have broadly drawn to a halt.

“This is the second time in a few days there has been shelling in this area,” said Oleg Lopatin, 49, a builder. “We know the fighting is not far away from here, but on that front it’s been quiet. The shelling sounded much nearer earlier in the war, so maybe our forces are pushing the Russians back.”