Blocked By Mines, Ukrainian Troops Are Flinging Explosive Line-Charges

Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive started with a bang—literally. Four days after the first Ukrainian probes along the front line stretching more than 100 miles across Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk Oblasts, a powerful Ukrainian force launched an assault across a Russian minefield just south of Mala Tomachka in Zaporizhzhia.

Combat engineers from the 33rd Mechanized Brigade and 47th Assault Brigade one of the first shots—lobbing at least one mine-clearing line-charge across the minefield. A MCLC—that’s pronounced “micklick”—is a rocket-propelled rope of high-explosives that can blast a path through mines and other obstacles.

The MCLC or MCLCs the Ukrainians fired south of Mala Tomachka on June 8 didn’t save the 33rd and 47th Brigades from disaster. An assault force including Leopard 2A6 tanks and M-2A2 infantry fighting vehicles followed behind Leopard 2R and BMR-2 mineplows—and tried to breach the minefield.

Russian scouts had spotted the Ukrainians and called in helicopters and artillery. Missiles, shells and mines immobilized a Leopard 2, more than a dozen M-2s and a trio of mineplows. Their crews bailed out, dragging their dead and wounded as they retreated with a rescue force riding in M-2s.

Without the air support, the Russians may well have lost the battle, one Russian blogger stressed. “The brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine, trained at the NATO training grounds, having passed the minefields, would probably have quickly turned into battle formation and moved on our allies,” they wrote.

The Mala Tomachka battle underscores the importance of mine-clearing in the current phase of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. The Ukrainian assault failed, but it would’ve failed faster without the line-charges.

MCLCs alone don’t win battles. But the absence of MCLCs might mean losing a battle. “An example of one of the non-sexy pieces of engineering equipment … critical for breaching,” is how Mark Hertling, a retired U.S. Army general, described the explosive charges.

If anything, the Ukrainian engineers in the Mala Tomachka fight used too few MCLCs. A recent video from a Ukrainian attack near Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, reportedly depicts engineers simultaneously firing several M-58s.

Line-charges have been around since at least World War II. The Soviet army introduced its vehicle-mounted UR-77 in 1977. The U.S. Army debuted its M-58 in 1988.

The line-charges broadly are similar. Each clears a lane around 300 feet long. The charges both are compatible with an array of ground-based launchers, including towed trailers and special armored engineering vehicles such as the American Assault Breacher.

In Soviet doctrine, which the Russian army still follows—and which still shapes Ukrainian doctrine, too—MCLCs belong to engineer battalions, which form movement support detachments to support front-line tactical groups. These detachments “primarily are used in the attack for mine- and obstacle-breaching,” Lester Grau and Charles Bartles explained in their definitive The Russian Way of War.

The problem with MCLCs is that they’re basically long coils of unprotected high-explosives. Hit an undeployed M-58 or UR-77 with a few autocannon rounds or artillery fragments, and it might explode like a giant firework.

It’s not for no reason that, when the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division organized its fast-moving armored “thunder run” into Baghdad in April 2003, the attacking battalion made the hard choice to ditch its M-58.

The line-charge “was ultimately left behind out of concern the enemy might get lucky and blow it up,” U.S. Marine Corps major Jonathan Peterson noted in a 2017 thesis.

By the same token, there’s evidence that desperate Russian forces in southern Ukraine recently packed line-charges into an old MT-LB armored tractor in order to transform the vehicle into an ISIS-style improved explosive device.

There are other non-doctrinal uses for MCLCs. They’re powerful—and controversial—demolition tools even in the absence of enemy mines. The Russians and Ukrainians both have fired line-charges across city blocks in order to blast out entrenched enemy troops. MCLCs obviously are indiscriminate, and kill civilians as readily as they do the enemy infantry.

Neither army is about to give up their line-charges, however. Indeed, the U.S. government just pledged to Ukraine a fresh batch of MCLCs. The Ukrainians’ failure south of Mala Tomachka lingers over the arms package, however. As effective as line-charges are at clearing mines and other obstacles, they can’t protect an assault force from air and artillery attacks.

To give their MCLCs a chance to work, the Ukrainians need stiffer air-defenses and artillery counterbatteries.