31 October 2022

Ukraine Situation Report: Just 13% Of Russia’s Iskander Ballistic Missiles Left, Kyiv’s Intel Chief Claims

DAN PARSONS
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Russia is running perilously low on missiles with which to strike the interior of Ukraine, according to Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence directorate.

In an interview with Ukrainian Pravda that has been translated into English, Budanov said that Russia has a ready supply of Iranian “Shahed” drones, but is buying them in large numbers because its missile stocks are “almost exhausted."

“About 13 percent remains for Iskanders, about 43 percent for Kalibr-PL, Kalibr-NK missiles, and about 45 percent for Kh-101 and Kh-555 missiles,” Budanov told the Ukrainian newspaper. “It is generally very dangerous to fall below 30 percent because it already goes [in]to 'NZ' [reserve stocks]. … Due to the lack of missiles and their low efficiency and accuracy, they were forced to use Iranian drones. They use 'Shahed' en masse here.”

Budanov said Russia is ordering suicide drones from Iran "all of the time" and have used about 330 against Ukrainian targets. Of those, 222 have been shot down, he claims.

The Tweet below reportedly shows an Iranian-made Shahed-131 suicide drone, which the Russians refer to as Geran-1, which was brought down somewhere in Ukraine. The drone’s nose cone has come off, exposing what appears to be a shaped-charge warhead.

“Others, to one degree or another, reached their goals – not always their goals, sometimes somewhere close, but 30% of drones reach their goals,” Budanov said. “A one-time batch delivery is about 300 units.”

Russia is now deploying its second batch of Iranian suicide drones, he said. Ukrainian intelligence officials believe Russia has ordered at least 1,700 drones of all types from Iran, but most of them have not yet been built, much less delivered, Budanov said.

The details that Budanov provided could not be verified independently and should stand as his own assertions.

“While there, he reinforced the US commitment to provide support to Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, including continued intelligence sharing,” an unnamed U.S. official said, according to CNN.

Burns traveled to Kyiv "to discuss the United States’ continued intelligence cooperation with Ukraine, and reinforce Washington’s support in the war against Russia," an anonymous U.S. official told The Times.

Before diving into the most recent details of the war, catch up on our previous rolling coverage here.

The Latest

Reuters reviewed more than 1,000 pages of Russian documents found in an abandoned command post in Balakliia, Ukraine. The records show disarray in the Russian ranks, poorly trained and equipped troops, and widespread anxiety over the presence of U.S.-supplied Ukrainian High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) in the area, according to Reuters Special Correspondent Mari Saito.

Russian troops reportedly attempted to burn sensitive documents before retreating from the command post but were unsuccessful. The photos below show the boiler in which Russian troops tried to incinerate intelligence before being overrun.

Russians stationed in the area where the command bunker was located were delivered drones without operational software. In July, they learned that Ukrainian HIMARS was in range of their positions. The launchers delivered precision strikes, the aftermath of which was shown in the video below in September.

One of the documents recorded that the leader of a "flamethrower" company from the Russian-occupied territory of Luhansk had eight troops with convictions that included rape and sexual assault. In current Russian military parlance, "flamethrower" typically refers to thermobaric weapons, such as the TOS-1A thermobaric multiple rocket launch system, which you can read more about here.

There have been multiple accounts of Russia recruiting convicts for service in Ukraine, including soliciting volunteers for the Wagner Group from inside prison. One such member of the Wagner private military contractor group was wounded and interrogated by Ukrainian forces, as seen in the video below. The man says that just 12 of the original 50 members of the man’s unit remained alive when the video was shot.

As interesting and informative as first-hand accounts and videos of the conflict are to outsiders, posting too much information online can be disastrous for troops on the ground. The video below shows a building full of Russian-allied Chechen troops showing off their accommodations. They show off their equipment, cheer, and even play the piano. The footage, which includes exterior shots of the building, was enough for Ukrainian forces to geolocate the unit’s position and hit them with HIMARS.

According to the U.K. Ministry of Defense, Russia is blaming a rash of railway explosions on anti-war partisans in Belarus and inside Russia. Most recently, on Oct. 24, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region announced that a blast damaged the main rail link between Russia and Belarus near the village of Novozybkovo, approximately 15km from the Russia-Belarus border. The incident is part of a “wider trend of dissident attacks against railways in Russia and Belarus,” the U.K. MoD said in its latest assessment of the war.

“The Russia military primarily relies on rail transport for deploying forces to Ukraine, but with a network extending to over 33,000km, largely transiting isolated areas, the system is extremely challenging to secure against physical threats,” the U.K. MoD said.

The photos in the Tweet below reportedly show Ukrainian personnel training to use American-supplied patrol boats. In June, the Pentagon announced that 18 patrol boats of various types would be included in another aid package for Ukraine's armed forces, as you can read more about here.

The pictures, which may all be of the same boat, show mounted .50 caliber M2 and 7.62x51mm M240 machine guns and a 40mm Mk 19 Mod 3 automatic grenade launcher. The Tweet indicates that the individuals in the images have also received items from the non-profit Come Back Alive foundation.


A rare Russian BMP-1AM "Basurmanin" modernized IFV was captured by the Ukrainian army. However, we can also observe that a Ukrainian soldier is carrying an even rarer ex-Russian TBG-7VL thermobaric RPG-7 projectile based on the PG-7VL.

On the Ukrainian side, the video in the Tweet below shows not just a rare example of a 9A83 transporter-erector-launcher and radar (TELAR) associated with the S-300V1 surface-to-air missile system, but also of it in action.

Intense combat footage emerged from the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard in action on the Eastern front. The troops are seen fighting at close ranges with small arms, recoilless rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and machine guns. At one point, they are seen fighting from a position in what appears to be a children’s playground.

TV Zvezda, the official television channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense, has shown interesting footage, stills from which are seen in the Tweets below, of Su-34 Fullback combat jet operations at Baltimor Air Base. Baltimor is in Russia's Voronezh region, which borders Ukraine.

One Su-34 seen in the footage has an array of red stars painted on its side, each of which reportedly represents 10 combat sorties. This would mean that the jet has flown 240 total combat sorties, though this apparently includes missions flown over Syria, according to TV Zvezda.

The Polish Senate, the upper house of the country's Parliament, adopted a resolution today declaring the Russian government to be running a "terrorist state." The resolution included examples of credible reports of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, forced deportations of civilians, deliberate targeting of civilian areas, and more.

As Russian officials continue to claim, without evidence, that Ukraine is planning to detonate a dirty bomb on its own soil, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said today that NATO allies “reject this transparently false allegation.” You can read more about these evidenceless accusations here.

“Russia often accuses others of what they intend to do themselves,” he said. “We have seen this pattern before. From Syria to Ukraine. Russia must not use false pretexts for further escalation. The world is watching closely."

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