The Defense Express information and consulting company writes about this.
Russian publics claim that on the night of May 2, 2024, Ukrainian kamikaze UAVs struck traction and transformer substations on railway tracks in the Oryol and Kursk regions of the Russian Federation. According to them, it was a complex and coordinated attack: at around 11:00 p.m. local time, traction substations near the Ponyri and Sloboda railway stations in the Kursk region were first struck, and 15 minutes later, traction and transformer substations on the Zmiyovka-Glazunovka route in the Kursk region were hit.
“OSINTers from the Oko Hora community emphasize that in this episode, Ukrainian drones hit a railroad that is important for Russian forces in the above-mentioned areas. It is worth emphasizing that the very fact that attack UAVs were used to hit Russia's railroad is in some ways even more interesting and even more unexpected than the strikes on Russian refineries,” the company writes.
The fact is that a traction or transformer substation on a railroad is an even more compact facility than, for example, a primary oil refining unit at any Russian refinery. Accordingly, in order to hit this element of the railroad infrastructure, it is necessary to ensure even higher accuracy of the strike.
“It should be emphasized why traction and transformer stations are important for railroad traffic, and why they could have chosen these targets instead of, for example, simply bombing running meters of track. The fact is that the logic of post-Soviet railroads is based on the fact that if a part of the track is damaged, it can be replaced in a few hours and traffic can be resumed,” the report states.
But if the power and signaling systems, which require traction and transformer stations to operate, suddenly fail, this means a longer paralysis of traffic, which will be achieved with much less effort (by the Ukrainian Defense Forces, in this case), Defense Express explains.
Even if it doesn't look as impressive as we would like, it is really effective. On Russian railways, substations must be located within a maximum of 15-50 kilometers of each other, meaning that the Russians cannot physically block such a large amount of sensitive infrastructure with their air defense.
The concept of a "strategy of a thousand cuts" certainly sounds exciting as one of the possible asymmetric strategies to achieve victory over a stronger enemy. But the nuance is that these figuratively speaking "thousand cuts" must be made in order to see the desired result.