More Ukrainian Brigades Roll Into Russia’s Kursk Oblast As Ukrainian Artillery Blocks Russian Reinforcements
After four days, five Ukrainian brigades control 400 square miles of Russia.
David Axe
Forbes
Aug 9, 2024
Four days into Ukraine’s surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast, just across Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, the number of confirmed Ukrainian brigades in and around the invasion zone has grown to at least five: four army mechanized brigades and one brigade from the independent air assault force.
Altogether, these units could oversee as many as 10,000 troops and 600 armored vehicles. Additional artillery, air-defense, drone and reconnaissance units are playing critical supporting roles.
To put into perspective the scale of the Ukrainian force in and around Kursk, recall that Kyiv formed a corps with a dozen new brigades to lead its southern counteroffensive in the summer of 2023.
So far, the Kursk corps is less than half the size of the counteroffensive corps. But it appears to be growing as analysts scour social media, scrutinize official media releases and verify the presence of additional brigades.
In four days, the five brigades have partially or fully occupied around 400 square miles of Kursk Oblast and captured scores of Russian troops. While it’s still possible the brigades don’t intend to stay in Russia, there are currently no signs of them slowing their attacks. “We can only hope that Ukraine has a well-prepared plan and that this operation translates into more than just a significant PR victory with positive political implications,” mused Artur Rehi, an Estonian soldier and analyst. It was evident, in the early hours of the Ukrainian assault across the border on Tuesday, that at least three brigades were directly involved or performing a supporting role: the army’s 22nd and 88th Mechanized Brigades as well as the 80th Air Assault Brigade.
And then, on Thursday, the army’s 116th Mechanized Brigade posted a video—shot by its Khorne drone group—depicting the brigade’s tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling toward Kursk. “Our vehicles moving on Russian soil like it’s our homeland,” the drone team crowed. A day later, the 61st Mechanized Brigade announced itself in a dramatic video that the unit’s 99th Mechanized Battalion posted online from the Russian town of Sudzha, the locus of the Ukrainian operation.
Taken together, the five confirmed brigades in the Kursk corps are an eclectic group operating a diverse mix of ex-Soviet, ex-European and ex-American armored vehicles including American-supplied Stryker wheeled infantry fighting vehicles, Polish-made PT-91 tanks and a dizzying
array of artillery: ex-Soviet 2S3, ex-British AS-90 and ex-Italian M-109L howitzers as well as RM-70 rocket launchers from the Czech Republic.
The 49th Artillery Brigade, operating additional AS-90s and other howitzers, has staged near Sumy, in northern Ukraine around 30 miles from the Kursk battlefield. But it’s evident the 27th Artillery Brigade is in the area, too.
We can assume this because the 27th Artillery Brigade is the sole operator of Ukraine’s American-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System wheeled launchers, which fire M30/31 GPS-guided rockets out to a distance of more than 50 miles. The HIMARS have apparently been busy around Kursk.
On Friday, the Khorne drone group showed Ukrainian media a video depicting what appears to be a HIMARS attack on a column of Russian troops rolling toward Kursk, likely intending to reinforce the collapsing Russian line in the oblast.
The rockets rained down on the battalion-sized column—hundreds of troops in dozens of vehicles—as it passed through the Russian town of Rylsk, 30 miles west of Sudzha. Images from the aftermath of the attack show seven destroyed trucks and a lot of dead soldiers.
The bombardment of Rylsk helps explain how the Ukrainians have managed to advance so far, so quickly. It seems artillery is preventing fresh Russian troops from reaching the battlefield.
The artillery interdiction mitigates one of the main dangers to the Ukrainian operation. “The primary concern at the moment is the risk of Russia isolating Ukrainian units on the front,” Rehi explained.
But the Russians can’t isolate the Ukrainians if they can’t get through the Ukrainian artillery in order to attack the supply lines of the main Ukrainian force. And every day of delay cements the Ukrainians’ gains as more units—most recently, the 61st and 116th Mechanized Brigades—roll into Kursk.
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.