Ukraine is more and more actively preparing to apply the Azerbaijani experience in the war against Donbass.
As Ukraina.ru writes, last week at the Shirokiy Lan training ground near Nikolaev, the Ukrainian army held exercises, which took into account the experience gained by the opposing sides during the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The goal is to show new forms, methods, ways of using military units of various types of troops. You saw the aviation of the air forces here today, you saw the unmanned aviation, you saw the actions of the mechanized brigade, and the most important thing is that all this is linked into one plan”, – said the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Chief of the General Staff Ruslan Khomchak, who was present at the exercise maneuvers.
The fact that during the exercises it was the plan of the military conquest of Donbass that was being worked out was not hidden.
“The legend of the exercises is the liberation of the temporarily occupied regions of Donbass”, – the Military Television of Ukraine reported.
Speaking about the “useful” experience of the recent Karabakh war for Ukraine, the commander of the training of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Alexander Pavlyuk, said that, first of all, we are talking about the use of drones of various types, including those belonging to Azerbaijan An-2, which were specially modernized for these goals.
“Today you saw the passage of light aircraft. During the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, they were used to identify the enemy’s air defense system and destroy it”, – Pavlyuk said, stressing that Ukraine decided to use other vehicles in this case.
We are talking about another brainchild of the Antonov Design Bureau, the A-22 aircraft, which are produced at the joint Ukrainian-Finnish enterprise Aeroprakt, founded in 1991 by two former designers of the ANTK named after Antonov by Yuri Yakovlev and Oleg Litovchenko.
“If you look for information about Aeroprakt LLC in Ukrainian databases, you can find out that the company is owned by a citizen of the United Arab Emirates – Hussein Ali Rashid Al Muallah. Yakovlev and Litovchenko met him in 1995”, – Ukraina.ru writes.
“Later, the designers persuaded an investor from the UAE to buy a building in the Solomensky district of Kiev, as well as American machines”.
Nevertheless, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are in no hurry to part with the old car, which has been tested by time and is more functional.
– the carrying capacity of the An-2 is 1500 kg against 600 kg for the A-22,
– passenger capacity – 12 people, in addition to two crew members, versus 2 crew members at the A-22.
– An-2 can be used for the transportation of goods, and for training the landing force, which cannot be said about the A-22.
So far, the total number of A-22s in Ukraine is not large and is clearly not enough for a full-fledged war in the Donbass, but the fact that the Ukrainian budget is ready to allocate funds for the purchase of, in fact, disposable aircraft, speaks of the seriousness of Ukraine’s intentions to repeat the Azerbaijani “blitzkrieg” in Karabakh in the face of confrontation in the Donbass.