Russian Engineering troops celebrate a professional holiday
MOSCOW, Jan 21 — RIA Novosti, Andrey Kotz. Today, soldiers, officers and warrant officers of the engineering troops of the Russian Federation celebrate their professional holiday. Many of them met this day on the front line. Engineering troops have been involved in the military from the very first days and solve a variety of tasks. To do this, they have many samples of unique equipment.
Mine MLRS
One of the main reasons for the failure of the summer-autumn offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is the density of minefields in the vicinity of the Russian "Surovikin line". The Kiev regime lost hundreds of pieces of equipment in the Zaporozhye area, including Western tanks.
Destroyed Leopard Tank
Image source: © 114th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade
It turned out that the vaunted Leopards are easily undermined on the old Soviet TM-62. The Armed Forces of Ukraine changed tactics: they began to attack in small infantry groups, defusing mines manually. However, all their efforts were nullified by a new argument of the Russian army — the engineering system of remote mining (ISDM) "Agriculture".
This system was presented during the quarantine year at the Army 2020 forum. It is designed for the operational setting of minefields at a distance of five to 15 kilometers. It consists of an eight-wheeled armored KAMAZ chassis, two transport and launch containers (TPC) with engineering ammunition and a transport and loading vehicle. Each TPC contains 25 shells of 122 mm caliber.
Engineering reconnaissance and fire complex "Agriculture" on the march
Image source: CC BY 4.0 / Ministry of Defense of Russia (cropped) /
"Agriculture" can plant both anti-personnel and anti-tank minefields. In the first case, engineering ammunition with POM-3 fragmentation mines is used. They are equipped with seismic sensors and respond to human footsteps. In the second, shells with PTM-4M mines triggered by a disturbance in the magnetic field created by heavy armored vehicles. It is extremely difficult to deceive such fuses.
Thanks to the ISDM, the engineering troops in the Zaporozhye direction were able to quickly restore defused mines, block the movement of the Armed Forces and create traps.
Engineering reconnaissance and fire complex "Agriculture"
Image source: CC BY-SA 4.0 / Kirill Borisenko (cropped) /
This process is by no means chaotic. The equipment calculates the firing parameters by itself and, without the participation of an operator, draws up forms for installed mines, and then puts new fields on an electronic map.
Moles on tracks
In preparation for the APU offensive, engineering troops equipped hundreds of kilometers of trenches to shelter personnel. They dug, of course, not with their hands. High-speed trenching machines BTM-3 and BTM-4M are widely used in the SVO zone. Their working unit is a steel wheel with buckets, which descends behind and rotates, digging a ditch. In an hour, the BTM tears off a kilometer of trenches one and a half meters deep in ordinary soil, 250 meters in frozen ground. This allows you to quickly build defensive lines for infantry.
High-speed trench machine BTM-3
Image source: CC BY-SA 3.0 / Janez Novak, Ljubljana, Slovenija /
In addition to trenches, anti-tank ditches were dug along the front line. Here, the MDK-3 machine, equipped with a rotary cutter with a thrower, greatly helped the military. It chews through pits up to 3.5 meters deep and 3.7 meters wide at a speed of up to 800 meters per hour.
In some sectors of the front, such fortifications were met by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the most unexpected places for them. As a result, several armored vehicles literally fell into the ground.
The crew of the machine for the excavation of the MDK-3 excavation pit of the Russian Army during the competition of the engineering troops units "Engineering Formula"
Image source: © RIA Novosti / Vladimir Astapkovich
By the way, Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Army a fairly large fleet of MDK-3 produced in 1984-1988. However, Kiev has sold out almost everything. Now there is complete dependence on Western supplies, which did not exist in 2023, because they only expected to advance.
Clean up and neutralize
However, defense is not the only task of military engineers. An important aid in the offensive is the IMR-3M barrier machine. It was developed in 1999 on the chassis of the T-90 tank. The working equipment consists of a universal bulldozer, a telescopic boom, a knife-track minesweeper with an electromagnetic attachment. It is capable of independently overcoming obstacles with anti-burr or anti-bottom mines with contact or non-contact magnetic fuses.
The engineering vehicle of the IMR-3M barrier paves the way during exercises in the Rostov region
Image source: © RIA Novosti / Sergey Pivovarov
IMR-3M also lays column paths, passages in stone and forest rubble. The machines are ready to operate in areas with a high level of radioactive contamination.
In addition, this technique is not defenseless — it is equipped with an anti-aircraft machine gun with a large-caliber machine gun "Cord".
However, the IMR-3M is not yet the most multitasking technique of military engineers. The troops will soon receive a universal armored engineering vehicle (UBIM), which performs the functions of an armored repair and evacuation vehicle, an engineering barrier vehicle and an armored mine clearance vehicle. Also on the chassis of the T-90 tank. In the bow there is a bulldozer blade with a variable position of the wings. A traction winch is used to evacuate damaged equipment. On the starboard side there is an arrow with an excavator bucket with a lifting capacity of eight tons.
In addition, engineers of the engineering troops widely use robotic complexes "Uran-6" in the area of their defense. They were used, in particular, at the Mariupol airport and the Azovstal plant. This six-ton tracked vehicle, controlled remotely, makes passages in minefields. Small dimensions allow you to squeeze in where a massive minesweeper tank will not pass.
A soldier on the territory of Mariupol airport
Image source: © RIA Novosti
The operator is located up to a kilometer away. Four video cameras provide him with an all-round view. Uran-6 has five different trawls at its disposal — a striker, a roller, a milling, as well as a bulldozer blade and a mechanical "paw" grab. Such an arsenal guarantees efficiency on all types of soil.