The militants of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) terrorist organization that controls occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast in the east of Ukraine are carrying out a media operation to cover up the presence of Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems in Ukraine’s far-eastern Donbas region. This was a conclusion made by volunteers of InformNapalm while analyzing a video disseminated by the press service of the terrorists.

Over the past 5 years of the ongoing Russian aggression in the Donbas, volunteers of the InformNapalm international intelligence community have discovered and published facts of the use of 50 types of peculiar weapons and equipment belonging to the Russian army which were supplied from the Russian Federation. A significant part of these types of hardware are signals intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic warfare (EW) stations:

R-330Zh Zhitel,

R-378B Borisoglebsk-2,

Torn,

R-381T2 Taran,

RB-341V Leer-3,

R-934UM,

SPR-2M Rtut-BM,

RB -636AM2 Svet-KU,

1RL243 Rubicon

and other types.

From time to time, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) observers in the Donbas also record in their reports the presence of the Russian EW and SIGINT stations in the occupied territories of Ukraine:

Apparently, the Russian military decided that while they cannot ultimately hide the use of their equipment, then they would create mock-ups similar to their equipment as ostensibly developed by the “engineers” of the DNR terrorist organization, and present them in propaganda stories.

On 1 December 2019, a DNR press service channel published the video allegedly presenting new models of EW equipment code-named Terrikon M2N, Chameleon, and Triton. The Ukrainian Military Portal also noticed that the militants attempted to outwardly imitate the Russian EW system R-330Zh Zhitel, earlier spotted by the OSCE SMM on a number of occasions.

The terrorists placed the EW equipment on the ZIL-131 chassis, and the transmitting antennas on the old diesel power station ESD-50-VS / 230-MU, while the Russian station R-330Zh Zhitel was repeatedly spotted in Donbas mounted on the KAMAZ 5350 chassis.

In addition, in the same video, the militants also tried to imitate the similarity with another Russian complex, R-378B Borisoglebsk-2, however, instead of MTLBu, they placed antennas on MTLB chassis.

For comparison, below is a photo of the R-330Zh Zhitel and the R-378B Borisoglebsk-2 at the Chebarkul training range, Russia:

The propagandists of the DNR terrorist organization have made the attempt to create a fake story of modern types of EW equipment in the Donbas allegedly made by local militants in an independent way and then successfully used against the Ukrainian Army. In fact, this is a media cover-up operation that includes an attempt to visually imitate some types of the available Russian technology in order to downplay the sightings of the Russian modern EW systems in the occupied part of the Donbas.

Editor’s Note Recently, the OSCE SMM once again spotted a piece of Russian-made advanced electronic warfare just 10 kilometers away from the front-line in Luhansk Oblast on 26 November 2019: Meanwhile, it is not uncommon for the propagandists of the Russian occupation forces in the Donbas to use the forged pieces of military equipment for disinformation proposes. For example, a 2015 video produced by the occupation authorities in Luhansk showed the militants uncovering a storage depot at abandoned Ukrainian positions in Luhansk airport and ostensibly finding there a wooden crate labeled “U.S. Army” that contained what had to be looking like the US FIM-92 Stinger MANPAD. However, the English words on the crate were misspelled and the pieces of metalware rudely welded together only vaguely resembled the real Stinger and were rather based on the MANPAD’s representation in the Battlefield 3 video game.

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Tags: electronic warfare, Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-present)