Russia Is Equipping Its Regiments For A Big ‘Show’ In Kursk
Russian President Vladimir Putin has given his forces until February to defeat the Ukrainians in Kursk.
David Axe
Forbes
December 2, 2024
A Ukrainian marine corps drone company defending Ukraine’s 250-square-mile salient in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast knocked out 22 Russian vehicles last month.
The most recent losses occurred during a skirmish on Friday. “Three Russian BMD-2s from [airborne] forces charged our positions and, again, were stopped by mines that were placed by my company,” reported Kriegsforscher, a drone operator with that marine corps company. “After that, [they] were destroyed by artillery and [first-person-view] drones.”
The blown-up BMDs accounted for just a small portion of the Russian wreckage Ukrainian troops have scattered across Kursk since a strong Ukrainian force invaded Kursk in early August. According to one close count, the Russian regiments and brigades in Kursk lost 364 pieces of heavy equipment—tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and trucks, mostly—between Aug. 6 and Nov. 26.
Ukrainian losses were lighter: 319 destroyed, abandoned and captured vehicles and other equipment, most of them lost in the early weeks of the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk. Attackers usually suffer greater losses than defenders, so when the Ukrainians shifted from offense to defense in Kursk and the Russians counterattacked, the loss ratio tilted in Ukraine’s favor.
The ratio tilted even more in October and November after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to eliminate the Ukrainian salient—and the Russian counterattacks quickened. The worst is coming as the Russians aim to declare victory in Kursk shortly after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20, signaling a new and potentially chaotic era in U.S. relations with its current allies.
The Friday attacks were “only a warm-up before the show,” warned Kriegsforscher. The coming assaults could look a lot different than past assaults as the Russians scramble to replace the hundreds of vehicles they’ve lost in Kursk. Kriegsforscher predicted there will be fewer tracked vehicles and more wheeled vehicles as Russian factories rush in replacement equipment.
That could mean fewer tanks, BMP and BMD fighting vehicles and MT-LB armored tractors. It could mean more Tigr and Typhoon armored trucks. Wheeled BTR-82 fighting vehicles are already arriving along the front line in greater numbers.
The shift to trucks should come as no surprise. In the 33 months since widening its war on Ukraine, Russia has lost more than 19,000 pieces of heavy equipment—tanks and other tracked
armored vehicles, mostly. The Kremlin has made good its losses by ramping up production of new vehicles while also pulling thousands of older vehicles out of long-term storage.
But stocks of older vehicles are running low. And foreign sanctions are weighing on new production. Russian factories have adapted by shifting to simpler vehicle designs—and further simplifying them. “Solving these issues is now considered by military leadership as one of the priority directions for enhancing combat readiness and reducing combat losses of the troops,” a Russian military journal explained recently.
Complex tracked vehicles are out. Simpler wheeled vehicles are in. The bad news, for the 20,000 Ukrainian defenders of the Kursk salient, is that the 50,000 or 60,000 Russian and North Korean troops around the salient aren’t about to run out of vehicles.
The good news is that the new Russian vehicles are less capable than the old ones they’re replacing. One reason a new Tigr truck weighs just eight tons—half what an old BMP-2 weighs—is that a Tigr has a third as much armor as a BMP-2.
Equally troubling for Russian troops attacking in Kursk, a tracked BMP-2 is much more mobile in dirt, mud and snow than any truck. Trucks will have to stick to the few roads leading into the salient, making their movements predictable for Ukrainian drone operators and artillery gunners.
As the Russian counteroffensive in Kursk escalates, Russian losses could escalate, too. That doesn’t mean the Russians won’t win the battle for Kursk. It does mean, win or lose, they’re likely to suffer catastrophic casualties going forward.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.