In war, surprise is possibly the most effective tactic for wearing down enemy defenses. In Ukraine we had seen everything, from helmets with antennas to surprise, even lures in the form of drones, optical illusions or even hide under the ground. The latest: Russia has found a way to appear among the Ukrainian forces “out of nowhere.”
The wear. Ukraine has described a quiet but profound change in the Russian tactical pattern: it begins with a hum and small infiltration equipment who, hidden and guided by drones, slip between the lines to sow chaos rather than to gain visible territory. They are micro-units of a few men camouflaged, treated, according to Ukrainian forcesas expendable material, that break through uncovered points of a 1,300-kilometer front that is impossible to seal continuously with exhausted and scarce troops.
Your mission is variable: capture positions and hold them until reinforcements, or degrade defense revealing Ukrainian drone nodes, or laying mines directly inside the positions. What was recently contingent is now becoming the norm, especially in Donetsk, where Ukrainian operators admit that the pressure of these incursions allows Moscow to go deeper through accumulation and saturation.
Geometry of surprise. The value of infiltration lies not so much in the surface gained as in the friction that forces kyiv to redistribute forces to put out simultaneous fires. an officer told Insider how, not being able to cover a few kilometers of front, he came to have to contain intrusions in fourteen points at a time.
It must be understood that drone guidance allows the Russian command reposition the infiltratorsdiscreetly accumulate them at one point and then activate an action that forces troop diversions. There are even cases of infiltrators without rifles, carrying just an anti-tank mine to detonate it inside a Ukrainian site. This logic makes the line blurred and forces kyiv to expend attention, cohesion and reserve, erosion as a product of the multiplication of these micro-threats.
Asymmetric human cost. It happens that Ukrainian operators they point out that Russian losses on these stocks are enormous, although apparently irrelevant to Moscowwhich has a flow of men willing to die in specific assaults. Some infiltrators leave on foot for kilometers, hiding in trees or abandoned houses.
Many die under artillery or drones, but saturation is what nuclear: “there are hundreds of Russians ready to die every day,” summarized an operator. By responding with drones, Ukraine in turn exposes launching positions that Russia locates to counterattack, closing a detection-fire loop. This same family of tactics (infiltration, probing, human waves) was already documented in the east of the country and replicated even with North Korean troops in Kursk, also used as a low-value shock mass.
Historical precedents. All these Russian infiltrations described by Ukraine remind us of the logic of the German Stosstruppen from 1917-1918: avoid the strong front, look for joints, infiltrate micro-groups with the mission of opening local holes and forcing the enemy to disorganize its defense by reaction. The difference is the sensor ecosystem: then success depended on smoke, fog and surprise.
Today, the surprise is rather algorithmic and systemic by drones that correct the human trajectory in real time. The urban assaults in the first chechen war (small, mobile shock groups, with tactical autonomy to pierce nodes) also resonate with the current pattern: they do not seek to conquer the map but rather to collapse the adversary’s response architecture by forcing repeated local oversaturation until the system breaks.
Recent parallels. The USSR had already used reduced cells to degrade defenses in Afghanistan: minimum teams penetrating to hunt radars, commands or soft logistics before the major blow. In Syria (and later in Donbas itself 2014-2015) the Russian “assault probes” consisted in human probes “low value” to force the enemy to reveal fires, ATGM positions or drone nests.
What you see today in Donetsk is more or less the industrialized evolution of that same idea under a shortage of Ukrainian personnel and saturation of Russian sensors. As then, the objective is not so much to “win” the infiltrated point but to force the enemy to expend ammunition, focus and mass, which in a long war context transfers the advantage to the actor with greater tolerance for attrition.
Invisible micro-war. If you also want, here, more than technological innovation, It’s behavioral: The density and rhythm of micro-incursions, invisible until the last moment with the arrival of the drone’s buzz that indicates that the tactic has been activated, generate a gradual change in pressure that is not measured in kilometers gained but in the adversary’s ability to absorb tension and anxiety without collapsing.
Thus, under the conditions of a protracted war and lack of personnel, any crack is exploitable, and under continuous surveillance, the cost of reacting reveals the enemy positions. It is, in the end, a war of small wounds that never close, where each infiltration does not seek to resolve the front, but rather to reopen it indefinitely.
Image | picturedesk, Рюмин Александр, Picryl
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