‘Catastrophic.’ With Mines, Drones, Artillery And Tanks, Ukrainian Troops Wreck 90 Russian Vehicles Across Four Square Miles Of Kursk.
Russia’s long offensive is faltering.
David Axe
Forbes
Dec 7, 2024
A four-square-mile patch of Kursk Oblast in western Russia is a graveyard for Russian vehicles—and a harbinger of a looming catastrophe for the Kremlin as its yearlong offensive in Ukraine begins to falter.
Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian marine corps drone operator supporting the 20,000-strong Ukrainian force that has held a 20-by-12-mile salient in Kursk since August, tallied around 90 wrecked and abandoned Russian vehicles just in his two-by-two-mile sector on the northwest edge of the salient.
That’s an entire brigade’s worth of vehicles. Ukrainian losses in the same sector have been much lighter: just 20 or so.
A four-to-one loss ratio in favor of Ukraine isn’t unusual. In fact, it’s only slightly higher than the overall 3:1 loss ratio for the whole 34-month wider war on Ukraine: 14,500 destroyed Russian vehicles against 5,200 destroyed Ukrainian vehicles.
What’s notable, and ominous for the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is when and where the Russian armed forces lost all those vehicles. They’re what the Russians have left behind in two waves of unsuccessful attacks on the Ukrainian salient in Kursk over a period of six weeks starting in early November.
A year after Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive ground to a halt and Russia launched its own new offensive, Kursk has arguably become the locus of the fighting—although, to be clear, fierce battles continue to rage in and around Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, Vovchansk, Kurakhove, Vuhledar and other cities and towns in eastern Ukraine.
Putin has given his forces until February to eliminate the Ukrainian salient in Kursk, and for good reason. The Russian regime anticipates the Jan. 20 inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will mark a new and volatile era in U.S. relations with Ukraine.
Trump has pledged to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine while also leaning on Kyiv to accept peace terms favoring Moscow. Some of Trump’s closest advisors have openly disparaged Ukraine. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reasserted Ukraine’s independence in a social media post on Nov. 16, billionaire Elon Musk—who spent $250 million boosting Trump’s campaign—mocked Zelensky for having an “amazing” “sense of humor.”
Whatever happens after Jan. 20, Putin wants to be fully in control of Russian territory as the politics play out. It’s for that reason the Kremlin massed 60,000 Russian and North Korean
troops and some of the Russia-North Korea alliance’s best heavy weapons in Kursk—and began hurling them at the salient two days after Trump was elected on Nov. 5.
The initial wave of Russian assaults ran into a wall of Ukrainian mines, drones, tanks and artillery on and around a road threading past the hamlet of Zelenyi Shylakh, the site of a recent Russian war crime. The attacks slowed as November turned to December, but only so the Russian regiments and brigades could receive replacement troops and vehicles. “It’s only a warm up before the show,” Kriegsforscher noted on Nov. 29.
The second Russian wave crashed against the salient starting on Saturday. It was no more successful than the wave that preceded it. Kriegforscher’s drone team alone claimed it knocked out 10 Russian vehicles.
The human toll has been equally staggering. The Russians have been losing between 1,200 and 2,000 troops killed and wounded every day for weeks, exceeding by a large margin the roughly 30,000 fresh troops the Kremlin mobilizes every month. Without those thousands of North Korean reinforcements, the Russian military would be shrinking by potentially thousands of people a week.
While Russian forces have recently advanced short distances on the northern edge of the Kursk salient as well as in eastern Ukraine, these modest gains belie the Russians’ increasingly precarious position. “I personally see these advances as largely a failure of the Russian military,” analyst Andrew Perpetua wrote. “They are dumping entire divisions directly into combat and advancing a few [kilometers] while sustaining absolutely catastrophic casualties.”
“The way Russia is using their forces is unsustainable,” Perpetua observed.
Whether and when the Russian field armies in eastern Ukraine and Kursk may collapse is difficult to predict. That they’re on track for eventual collapse is apparent. And when armies fail, they tend to fail quickly and totally—just ask Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, whose own army is in full retreat just a few days after opposition groups launched a coordinated offensive.
If anything could reverse Russia’s fading fortunes, it would be an abrupt end of U.S. aid to Ukraine early next year. Kyiv has been struggling to boost military recruitment, stiffen its forces’ defensive earthworks, reform archaic command staffs and boost the output of Ukrainian arms factories.
A new round of U.S. aid totaling $61 billion this year has helped the Ukrainians fight on despite these internal crises. But “Ukraine absolutely must fix those issues before this aid package runs out,” Perpetua warned. “Because there may never be another.”
The Ukrainians have as many reasons to be optimistic as the Russians have reasons to be pessimistic, however. Internal reforms might take effect. U.S. aid could continue to flow, albeit probably under new and stricter terms. The Trump administration may soon learn what other Western governments already understand: that Putin’s regime isn’t genuinely interested in a lasting peace.
Meanwhile, the Russians could continue losing people and vehicles at rates they can’t sustain, all for slight territorial gains that aren’t remotely worth the cost.
David Axe is a journalist and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. He joined Forbes in 2020, and currently focuses on Ukraine.