Late in the evening of 27 September, Ellis, Miko, and Bell conducted a debrief of the ambush survivor. Ellis kept his GRU uniform on and Bell stayed out of sight, so as far as the prisoner knows, she’s still in Soviet hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ambush survivor is Katyushka Alekseev. Bell identifies her accent as working-class St. Petersburg or thereabouts. She was conscripted in mid-1997 as a field laundry technician, then “promoted” to disposable infantry in ’99.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was part of a patrol from the Soviet 124th Motor Rifle Division – or what’s left of it after the mauling it received from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division in mid-July. The 124th’s survivors have settled into Piotrk\u00f3w and consolidated with their higher-echelon HQ and support elements (4th Guards Tank Army). The total garrison in Piotrk\u00f3w, which is about 20km north of Kamiensk, is probably 300-400 combat troops and about the same number of rear-echelon personnel; the latter number includes both support troops and civilian hangers-on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since July, the 124th’s primary duties have been traffic control at the Sulej\u00f3w bridge and patrols of the main road between Piotrk\u00f3w and Opoczno. However, after some big unspecified fight out east (she doesn’t know the details of the Battle of Radom<\/a>), traffic on that route abruptly dried up and the 124th’s focus shifted to areas west of the Pilica River.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 124th has general awareness of multiple marauder bands, mostly Soviet deserters, operating south and west of Piotrk\u00f3w. Alekseev’s squad was providing escort for a 4th GTA staff officer, a Major Okeanov, who was tasked with contacting survivor settlements in the area and determining more about local conditions, including gathering intel on the deserters. Upon further questioning, Alekseev recalls Okeanov being preoccupied with some large sheets of folded paper. She doesn’t know what they were, but it’s pretty clear that she’s brain-fogged enough to not recognize maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okeanov was in the BRDM-2 that was leading the patrol. Whoever ambushed them – Aleklseev assumes it was a group of the deserters – opened the fight with an RPG into the rear of the BRDM as it came around a corner. It lost power and coasted into the trees, on fire. The crew bailed out and got machine-gunned immediately. The MG team then shifted fire to the GAZ-66 that her squad was riding in, killing the driver and gunner. The squad bailed out and took cover in a ruined farmhouse, but they were receiving heavy fire from the MG team and a rifle squad was maneuvering around to their flank. That’s all she remembers of the fight. Her best estimate of enemy numbers is 2 or 3 in the machine gun team, 2 or 3 in the RPG team, and 5 to 8 in the rifle squad. She didn’t see or hear any vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alekseev was in and out of consciousness near the end of the fight. She’s fairly certain she was the only survivor. Once the attackers moved up to secure the bodies, she heard them speaking Russian – several had Kazakh accents (which aligns with Shotkin and most of his inner circle being Kazakh).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only conversation she can specifically recall, other than the usual litany of dudes checking bodies for useful stuff, was:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Put away that knife. Al-Khidr wants us to leave him any who are still breathing. That one, and the guy over there. Leave them alone.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n “Have you ever seen him?”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n “Shit. Don’t say that. No, I haven’t, don’t let Shotkin hear you asking that.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Afterward, Bell points out you that “al-Khidr” sounds Arabic. Shotkin, the local warlord who’s occupying Radomsko, is known to be Kazakh. Very few Kazakhs are fluent in Arabic but many of them (despite Moscow’s wishes) remain Sunni Muslim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a private in a rifle squad, she wouldn’t have had great<\/em> access to intel. However, they did all get general briefings about the situation to the extent that the 4th GTA’s GRU contingent could parse it. They are generally aware that the area south of Piotrk\u00f3w and west of the Pilica River is infested with marauders (she refers to them as “deserters”) from the former Soviet 9th Tank Division, which mutinied in late 1999.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the mutiny, 9th TD’s reported force strength was 1,000 combat troops and a handful of armored vehicles, including 2 tanks. It’s generally believed that none of the splinter bands number more than 100 and they haven’t kept any tanks operational (though some groups may have lesser AFVs). They were stationed in Germany before the war and had been fighting NATO from late 1996, so they had a good amount of salvaged Western equipment as well as some East German gear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s no known organization between the marauder groups. Collectively, they’re believed to exert control as far south as the ruins of Czestochowa. They control at least two bridges across the Pilica but have not expanded or migrated east for some unknown reason. (The PCs know that going farther east would put the marauders into the territory of either the Bracia Wilkow… or the unspecified force which the Bracia Wilkow warned the team about<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Late in the evening of 27 September, Ellis, Miko, and Bell conducted a debrief of the ambush survivor. Ellis kept his GRU uniform on and Bell stayed out of sight, so as far as the prisoner knows, she’s still in Soviet hands. The ambush survivor is Katyushka Alekseev. Bell identifies her accent as working-class St. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaserne-on-the-borderlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1775,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/1775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libellus.de-fenestra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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