Video Above: Video Analysis: What Will Russia’s Attack on Ukraine Look Like? Tanks? Even Hypersonics?
By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven
As of Feb 28th, CNN is now reporting that the first round of talks has completed, and that there may be a possibility of further discussions. That being said, the network is also reporting that intense fighting continues.
Regardless of whether the now completed first round of “talks” generate an effect, the fighting continues and the massive, multi-pronged Ukraine invasion is indeed multi-domain, as Pentagon officials have confirmed that Russian forces did in fact conduct an amphibious assault from the Sea of Azov.
Russian Amphibious Assault
“We did observe the amphibious assault from the Sea of Azov to the west of Mariupol. Those forces put ashore do continue to advance as we said some were splitting – they were splitting more towards the north east. And of course the Russians are continuing to try to advance on Kherson,” a senior DoD official told reporters Feb 26 before the “talks were announced.”
The official said the assault used only four vehicles, troop and weapons-carrying Landing Ship Tanks came ashore from the Sea of Azov, just across the Crimean Peninsula from the Black Sea.
“They actually have a little bit more than 10 LSTs in the Black Sea at least at last count. But we don’t believe they used them all to conduct this particular assault. Our assessment was that they used four of their landing ships to conduct this assault,” the official said.
Some of the LST may have been the Ivan Gren class amphibious transport LSTs which first entered the Russian Navy in 2018, according to an interesting report in NAVALNEWs.
“The class’ 135-meter vessels have a displacement of 5,000–6,000 tons and can transport up to 13 main battle tanks, 36 armored personnel carriers, and 300 marines. The last two ships of the project, Vladimir Andreev and Vasily Trushin, will have a displacement of around 9000 tons in order to have a double carrying capacity,” the NAVALNEWS report suggests.
The ships are reportedly armed with close-in-weapons systems and 9K38 “Igla” man-portable surface-to-air missions and powered by 5200HP diesel DRRA-3700 engines.
“We don’t know how much naval infantry was on each one, we just don’t have a perfect count. But I’m comfortable in saying, as I said yesterday, that this would involve several thousand naval infantry troops. But I can’t be more specific than that,” the official said.
Kris Osborn is the defense editor for the National Interest and President of Warrior Maven – the Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
