“Painful question.” The situation with the construction of fortifications is complex, confusing and colorful – People’s Deputy

“The issue of fortification is painful. This is the first. The situation with the construction of fortifications is very complex, very confusing and very colorful. There are places where they are effectively built; there are places where fortifications are erected chaotically and inexplicably,” Rakhmanin said on Radio NV.

The People’s Deputy also said that the DSST is simultaneously responsible for the construction of fortifications in Ukraine (State Special Service of Transport – Ed.), engineering troops under the command of the Support Forces, local administrations and directly units that cause chaos.

“It should be one structure, one decision-making center and one technique, proven by experience, time, which is applied. When we have several different structures responsible for this, which often do not even communicate with each other and use different regulatory frameworks, different sources of funding, are subordinate to different decision-making centers, then the situation will be like this. Why this has not been done until now is also a mystery to me,” Rakhmanin said.

He noted that the issue was raised at the meetings of the Temporary Investigative Commission, which includes his colleague on the committee, Roman Kostenko, but he does not know why the issue of the construction of fortifications was not arranged so that one structure was responsible for it.

““I still don’t understand why we have two different structures – DSST and engineering troops – which in fact perform the same functions, but are subject to completely different decision-making centers and have a completely different vertical,” said the People’s Deputy.

Problems with the construction of fortifications in Ukraine

At the beginning of November, military officer and communications specialist Oleksandr Solonko said that during the construction of fortifications, Ukraine makes systemic mistakes that Russia does not make, in particular, quite often the entrance to fortifications is not disguised, which exposes the military to danger.

On September 20, the head of the Chernihiv City Military Administration, Dmytro Bryzhynskyi, stated that during inspections of the fortifications around the city “some things shocked me as a soldier.”

“It is also about the quality of materials and how these works were performed. After all, the construction of the fortification was paid for from the city budget.”

In an interview with Radio NV at the end of July, the editor-in-chief of Censor NET Yuriy Butusov sharply criticized the construction of fortifications in Ukraine, saying that the military often cannot use them because they are not camouflaged.

The journalist added that “concrete boxes that are placed in an open field” are not only a minus due to the inept spending of billions of hryvnias, “they are also a plus for the enemy, because intermediate positions, for example, near Ocheretyn, are very convenient for enemy assault groups as a temporary border on which they jump.”

On June 10, Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence and a member of the Council’s temporary investigative commission on the purchase of drones and the construction of fortifications, stated that fortifications were often built in Ukraine in places where it is impossible to maintain defense.