On July 2, a video appeared of an attack on a Russian reconnaissance facility in Donbas. The video featured a direct hit of two new EW stations. InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community did the fact-checking and analysis of the event. We found the exact coordinates and collected additional information that may be of interest to our readers.

On July 2, an officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who writes on Facebook under the nickname of Dmitriy Müller, published a video of the destruction of two electronic warfare (EW) or signals intelligence (SIGINT) stations of the Russian occupying forces in Donbas.

In the description to the video, he pointed out that a unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, on June 29, 2019, hit and destroyed two TORN-MD reconnaissance stations near the village of Maiorove, Donetsk Oblast.

We conducted a comparative analysis and determined that one of the vehicles in the video has the elements specific to those of the TORN system.

InformNapalm volunteers have also intercepted through their own channels the information about EW stations defeated on June 29. However we have grounds to believe that there were two different stations involved. We are confident that one of them is a modern Russian automated mobile tactical SIGINT system TORN-MD, and the second is the Russian jamming station R-330Zh Zhitel. Both of these systems work in conjunction. TORN is designed to monitor the airwaves, whereas Zhitel jams them. It makes no sense to keep two TORN stations at a single position, this is another consideration corroborating insider findings of InformNapalm sources.

Note that these technical assets are complex systems that can be operated only by highly trained professionals. Therefore, we can assume that regular Russian military personnel could have been destroyed alongside the enemy’s valuable technical assets.

InformNapalm volunteers also geolocated the site of this video and determined the exact coordinates of the fire engagement of these Russian systems:  47°29’50.2″N 37°58’31.6″E.

These systems were spotted in Donbas before

On February 10, 2019, a short-range UAV of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission spotted one TORN SIGINT station mounted on a KamAZ truck chassis positioned near a residential building in Novohryhorivka village, Donetsk Oblast. This was reported in the OSCE report.

From 2015, volunteers of InformNapalm volunteer intelligence community have repeatedly spotted Russian TORN SIGINT stations and R-330Zh Zhitel jamming stations, reporting these incidents with photo evidence and coordinates. The evidence has also been entered in the database of the Russian military presence in Donbas.

As of July 1, 2019, 51 types of military equipment and weapons of the Russian Army have been recorded in the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts and added to our database. In addition, InformNapalm also uncovered and documented the facts of deployment of military personnel from 98 Russian military and other uniformed units from different military districts in military operations in Donbas. They participated in the war on the territory of Ukraine both as advisers and commanders, as well as made parts of battalion task forces or hybrid illegal armed groups of the Russian occupation forces.

Conclusions

The fact-checking conducted by InformNapalm confirms the destruction of the latest Russian military equipment in the Donbas on June 29, the scene of the incident was geolocated, and additional evidence was obtained from our own sources. We have reasons to believe that only one TORN station was defeated (not two as reported in the original news story that went with the video), whereas the second destroyed vehicle was the Russian R-330Zh Zhitel jammer station.

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