Video captures an anti-tank ditch swallowing a vehicle, showing one of the dangers complicating Ukraine's assault

• A video has surfaced showing a vehicle following into an anti-tank ditch.
• The footage highlights one of the challenges of Ukraine's counteroffensive.
• Ukraine is facing a complicated layered defense, but it is pushing forward.

Ukraine's armored assaults on the Russian lines are facing all kinds of threats, from deadly minefields to artillery to troubling trench traps, and newly surfaced video footage shows exactly why that last one is such a problem.

The apparent drone footage shows an anti-tank ditch along what may be the first line of Russia's extensive layered defense swallow a military vehicle that is driven into it. Behind the ditch is what appears to be a line of additional barriers that look like the pyramid-shaped concrete obstacles known as dragon's teeth.

The video is said to have been taken by the Russian side.

Although it was not initially clear where the video was taken, open-source intel accounts were able to later geolocate the video to somewhere around Verbove in the Zaporizhzhia region, where a major Ukrainian ground attack is underway. Ukrainian media reports Kyiv's forces have been engaging the Russians with artillery amid the intensified fighting.

Anti-tank trenches have a history that goes back to World War I and the introduction of the tank. Unlike infantry trenches, these traps have to be wide enough and deep enough to consume an advancing vehicle.

A recent report by war experts who traveled to Ukraine estimated the ditches may be up to 19-feet wide and 13-feet deep.

These frustrating traps for tanks and vehicles can be entirely man-made earthworks or some combination involving natural features. Getting past them requires either putting down a makeshift bridge or demolishing the sides to create a path through.

The video that surfaced on social media of the vehicle falling into the anti-tank ditch was short on available details, including the type of vehicle involved, whether it was manned, or whether or not this was an accident.

It's simply unclear.

What is clear, though, is that the Ukrainian offensive is facing a daunting layered defense that Russia spent months building as Ukraine sought tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and other weapons from its Western partners, and that defense features far more than just anti-tank trenches.

"Russian engineering has proven to be one of the stronger branches of the Russian military," Royal United Services Institute land warfare experts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote in a report on Russian meatgrinder tactics in May. "Russian engineers," they wrote, "have been constructing complex obstacles and field fortifications across the front."

These defenses and fortifications, they explained, include "concrete reinforced trenches and command bunkers, wire-entanglements, hedgehogs, anti-tank ditches, and complex minefields."

And that doesn't even include the threats posed by Russian artillery, air assets, and combat infantry.

The Ukrainian armed forces are believed to be executing a big counteroffensive push against the Russian lines that some suspect may be the main offensive push at the moment. There has been significant movement along the front lines, but it remains to be seen if this is the main act.