Where are Moscow’s forces concentrated in Ukraine? Simple, just follow the mobiles: this map shows the concentration of Russian sim cards on the fighting line. And it coincides with the guidelines of the new offensive launched by the Kremlin. In this conflict all the soldiers carry smartphones, because they do not give up keeping in touch with families and friends but also looking for news on the situation of the clashes. A habit that the Russian commanders tried to thwart, fearing that cell phones could betray the coordinates of the departments and provide valuable information to the enemy. In many videos, however, we see the military on the front line using their devices to communicate with the artillery or other departments: they were forced to do so because the radios did not work. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are exploiting the spread of telephones among the soldiers of the territorial defense, those enlisted after the beginning of the invasion, in order to make up for the lack of communication equipment.
The era of mass telephony on the battlefield has resulted in unprecedented situations. Captured soldiers who were allowed to call family members to warn them that they had ended up as prisoners. A video shows an atrocious scene: a Ukrainian soldier who took the cell phone found on the corpse of a Russian and phoned her mother to tell her “we killed your son”.
In this case, the examination of Russian sims allows you to get an idea of what Von Clausewitz called “the center of gravity of operations”. Mobile phones – and therefore soldiers – are more numerous in the Izyum area, the starting point of the most important maneuver which appears in a dark red color. The other group is in the Donbass: they are the men who go to the assault from the Lugansk secessionist Republic and in recent days have passed the town of Popasna. Finally, the Southern Front, with the clashes on the Black Sea coast around the mouth of the great Dnieper River. Here the map drawn by the sim cards offers a surprising result: the troops do not seem to be positioned only on the defensive line around Kherson, the city that marked the highest point of Moscow’s advance in this sector and that the Kiev army attempted to recapture, but they also head to Kryvj Rih, a city much further inland. The sign of a maneuver that aims to cut the links of the Ukrainian army in the Donbass.