1/ Nearly five years after the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian soldiers still don't have secure tactical communications. A review of videos published by the Russian MOD shows soldiers invariably using cheap self-purchased Chinese digital and unencrypted analogue radios. ⬇️
2/ 'Mine Division' complains about the deplorable state of Russian tactical communications on the battlefields of Ukraine, publishing a gallery of video stills showing what soldiers in the field are using.
3/ The radios seen in the videos are a combination of what the Russian call 'tuts' (cheap digital radios made by the Chinese company TYT) and 'bafiks' (even cheaper analog radios made by Baofeng, which are readily interceptable by Ukrainian forces). The author writes: 3/ "On the issue of "state" 😱 "tactical communications of the Russian Armed Forces": all videos were taken from the official channel of the Russian Ministry of Defence @mod_russia for the period from 16 October to 30 October 2026, in which tactical radio stations appeared… 4/ …you can see them 👀 😱 in the screenshots. It's worth adding the reason for the absolute predominance of "tuts" (even though analog "bafiks" are also present) 🫣 are still encountered (I emphasise – these are official videos of the Russian Ministry of Defence))… 5/ …namely, that this is the cheapest (and most primitive) DMR standard radio (civilian!!! —which has now become the de facto “main standard” for “tactical communications” (quotation marks are quite appropriate here) of the Russian Armed Forces)… 6/ …and all of them (absolutely all of them!—are either purchased by military personnel or “acquired” through “in-house means”; the Russian Ministry of Defence’s “main tactical radio station for the Special Military Operation” (“Tukta”) was never actually procured—… 7/ …once again, everything was “scraped together” one way or another...). 8/ "In fact, the Russian Federation has NO tactical communications system; what we have in its place are “crutches” suitable only for “Papuan wars” [i.e. colonial wars against primitives]—the first serious and professional adversary will “wipe the floor” with all of this... 10/ "So what’s all this about “readiness for war with NATO”???" 11/ The Russian MOD has spent tens of billions of rubles on projects to provide its troops with secure digital radios, such as the R-168 Akveduk tactical radios and the R-187P1 Azart sixth-generation radios.
12/ However, rampant corruption has resulted in relatively few of these actually getting into soldiers' hands. Some radios were found to be Chinese models falsely relabelled as Russian, in a substitution scam of the kind of that is common in Russian military procurement. 13/ This scam alone cost the Russian MOD 2.2 billion rubles ($28.5 million). Another 6.7 billion rubles ($87 million) was stolen by General Khalil Arslanov, the former head of the Main Communications Directorate, for which he was jailed for 17 years.
14/ The thread below describes the history of these and other similar scams in Russia's military communications programmes. The net result has been widespread inefficiencies and insecurity in its tactical communications, with no resolution in sight. /end bsky.app
1/ Why has Russia failed so abysmally at providing secure battlefield communications to its troops in Ukraine? The answer, concludes Russian warblogger Oleg Tsarev, is that the military communications budget has been looted for years by corrupt generals and contractors. ⬇️
Source: t.me