Communication Breakdown: How Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Bogged Down

Some of those Russian forces’ older equipment, Dobrev said, “can be decrypted almost in real time and thus it’s not useful to add the extra layer of complexity to operate the equipment when there’s little benefit.”

He says those and other factors potentially point to why Russia’s ground offensive has bogged down, and air operations become less effective over time, as targets identified and communicated to Russia’s air force early on have moved.

‘Lessons Learned’?
Russia’s five-day war in Georgia in August 2008, over two breakaway Georgian regions Moscow has since occupied, laid bare some of the Russian armed forces’ most pressing battleground problems: tactical communications.

Some units were unable to communicate with the command structure. Mobile phones and even “courier mail” were used instead of military radios. And in one extreme example, an air force officer flew by helicopter to hand out orders personally.

A deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Yevgeny Meychik, responded in 2009 with an announcement that, under orders from Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, the Defense Ministry would thoroughly revise its approach to the military command-and-control system — “and particularly the communications systems.”

He pledged that “by the end of 2011, we plan to bring a radio station to every serviceman, to every combat vehicle.”

But while Meychik’s plan presupposed use of the main tactical-level army radio system at the time, known as Akveduk, the Defense Ministry instead opted to pursue the development of a wholly new, sixth-generation system that came to be known as Azart. An upstart manufacturer, Angstrem, one of whose owners had been an adviser to Medvedev, was chosen for the project.

By early 2012, boasting that Russia had employed the NATO concept of “lessons learned,” Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin appeared with one of the Azart handsets and declared, “This connection works!”

Years of promises and many unmet deadlines to deliver the phones, dubbed “green crocodiles” by troops because of their half-meter-long antennas, followed, their use at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics notwithstanding.

Thirteen years later, despite more repeated promises, thousands of the Azart phones are in the hands of Russian troops.

But it is hard to describe the process as a success.

It has been the subject of multiple criminal investigations, including an ongoing one focused on a deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Colonel General Khalil Arslanov.

Reviews on radio forums like Radioscanner.ru, while impossible to independently corroborate, appear to suggest the Azarts are unpopular among troops.

Military expert Vladimir Orlov described the use of Azart phones among Russian troops deployed to Syria and said that “outside the bases of the Russian armed forces in Syria, everyone uses mobile phones and Chinese ‘balalaikas,’” a reference to civilian walkie-talkies manufactured by China’s Baofeng.

Moreover, the most generous estimate of the total number of Azart handsets deployed is only around 60,000, based on the 18 billion rubles ($171 million at the current rate) allocated for their purchase and the estimated cost of around 300,000 rubles per device. That is only around one-third the number of Russian troops thought by NATO and Ukraine to have been deployed in Ukraine.

Knock-on Problems
Analyst Dobrev points to the Russian military’s failure to ensure modern and secure communication channels as a major stumbling block.

But he emphasizes the importance of the knock-on effect of such a problem — poor coordination among the various ground, sea, and air forces involved in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And he says that the Russian military’s failure to implement a modern, automated command-and-control system is another problem.

“By 2020, it was planned to equip just 45 brigades of the Russian ground forces with such a system, but Russia hasn’t managed the task,” Dobrev said. “The situation is even worse with the coordination between ground forces and the air force,” which, he says, operates on its own command-and-control system.

The resulting problems in coordination present another problem, Dobrev says, that seems to have manifested itself as the war ground on.

“At the beginning of the war, the Russian Air Force acted quite successfully because the positions of the enemy were known to it,” he said. “Now this doesn’t always work.”

He pointed to documents that appear to show the Russian Air Force operating by making sorties to designated targets with little or no ability to communicate with ground forces who, for instance, might otherwise request a change of targets or air support.

Dobrev also says that forward detachments in the early days of the war appeared to have outrun their communications support.

“The Russian battalion tactical groups immediately went a much greater distance from the border, [and] at the same time, we didn’t see equipment that could provide secure communication with the command post along with them,” he said.

He says repeater cars and new communication towers need to be installed along the way, and their set-up and use require experienced operators. “Indirectly, this indicates that the Russian offensive groups didn’t expect to stay on the road for a long time,” Dobrev said.

He and other observers also note that clear signs have emerged of interception of communication between Russian special services and other troops that should otherwise be on encrypted channels.

Christo Grozev, of the open-source sleuthing group Bellingcat, cited a “super expensive cryptophone system” introduced by Russia in 2021 seemingly being intercepted because it requires a 3G or 4G cellular network to operate.

“The cellular networks are still controlled by Ukraine, which means that for the Ukrainian military they remain a relatively secure means of communication from eavesdropping,” Dobrev said.

Not so for Russians using those same networks, or, obviously, Ukrainian fixed lines.

“In the absence of special, secure army communications, many soldiers and officers succumb to the temptation to use ordinary phones,” Dobrev said, “they simply take out Ukrainian SIM cards and call Russia, allowing the Ukrainian military and intelligence not only to easily intercept the content of the conversations, but also to determine the location of the caller.”

The BBC reported in the first days of the war that audio messages purportedly including Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov suggested that a commander in his guards corps was traveling to Moscow on the eve of the war to obtain “clean Ukrainian SIM cards,” presumably leaving communications with those devices vulnerable to Ukrainian high-tech eavesdropping.

More recently, The New York Times quoted U.S. military sources as saying many Russian generals talk on unsecured phones and radios, and in at least one case Ukrainians geolocated a call and killed him in an attack on his location.

Written by Andy Heil based on reporting by Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov of RFE/RL’s Russian Service. Sergei Dobrynin is one of the leading investigative journalists in Russia. Mark Krutov is a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Russian Service. This article is reprinted with permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).