Moscow is currently raiding other sectors of the front for troops. It will probably take some time – weeks or even months – before the Kursk defenses are ready for a counterattack.
After almost two weeks of operations by the Ukrainian army on Russian territory, reports from the Kremlin and reports from the Ukrainian front confirm that Russia is still struggling to organize a coherent defense of the Kursk region against Kyiv’s forces, which still clearly hold the initiative.
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Russian defenses appear to be concentrated on roads that Ukrainians are most likely to use. Units not normally deployed on the front lines, including infantry units of the Spetsnaz special forces or the Akhmat paramilitary police, were initially deployed to hold back Ukrainian units.
A week after the start of the offensive, the Kremlin ordered, according to open sources, to send at least half a dozen lightly armed volunteer and irregular infantry units – which are usually used for patrolling or securing the rear in the Donetsk region and fight against Ukrainian tank units there – to the Kursk region as well.
According to open-source intelligence (OSINT) reports, the availability of regular Russian troops with heavy weapons, including artillery and tanks, is limited.
Reports have confirmed the presence of elements of the 810th Marine Infantry Brigade and the 272nd Motorized Rifle Regiment. Both units have suffered repeated heavy losses over the past two and a half years and now consist largely of poorly trained replacement troops.
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There has long been speculation about who is behind the operation. Both Ukraine and Russia deny any involvement.
They will probably be used to occupy bases to block further Ukrainian advances rather than for counterattacks.
According to unconfirmed reports, Moscow’s generals have requested up to two paratrooper regiments from the Kherson sector, two motorized rifle regiments from the Zaporizhia sector, one motorized rifle regiment from the Kharkiv sector, and hundreds of conscripts from Russia’s Southern Military District in the Caucasus to reinforce the Kursk region.
Kyiv has not commented officially, but according to Russian sources, Ukraine has deployed up to eight well-equipped combat brigades, supported by at least two brigades of heavy artillery, to the Kursk region. The Kyiv Post was able to confirm the presence of at least four brigades.
Even if all Russian troops were on their way to the Kursk region and actually arrived there with all their firepower, this would only be approximately equal to the troop strength of Ukraine.
When reinforcements arrive from Moscow, Russian units in the Kursk sector will be forced to fight under a complicated and seemingly cumbersome command structure headed by Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, under orders issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 12. The FSB is supposed to coordinate the operations of the army, civilian institutions and local police in an “anti-terrorist operation.”
Sending Putin’s former security official Alexander Dyumin to coordinate military action could help, but as often happens in Russia, the situation could also degenerate into a turf war between the heads of the armed forces.
The Russian defensive obstacles and tactics that kept Kyiv’s forces at bay last year have not had much effect this time.
Russian forces have reportedly prepared defensive lines, including minefields, anti-tank ditches, bunker and trench networks similar to those that brought Kyiv’s counteroffensive to a bloody end in the southern Zaporizhia sector in 2023. In the Kursk region in August 2024, they seemed to do little to thwart attacks by Ukrainian forces.
Ukrainian ground and air reconnaissance appeared to be finding covered routes into and through Russian defenses, and by the time the main offensive began, Ukrainian engineer units equipped with Western mine-clearing equipment had already cleared paths for the rapidly advancing Ukrainian assault forces. Field reports said this success was due to careful reconnaissance by Ukrainian drones and infantry, combined with thorough obstacle clearance exercises by combat engineers.
In 2023, Ukrainian assault units got stuck in minefields and were then shot to pieces by Russian artillery, anti-tank missile teams and attack helicopters.
Russian attack helicopters with anti-tank missiles, which repeatedly destroyed Ukrainian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in June 2023, have so far successfully avoided the Kursk battlefield. On Tuesday, August 13, the advanced positioning of the powerful Ukrainian air defenses led to the shooting down of a Russian Su-34 fighter jet.
Since the beginning of 2024, the FPV drone has been Kyiv’s main defensive weapon – not least thanks to an almost complete halt in artillery ammunition deliveries to Ukraine between Europe and the USA. During the Kursk offensive, the Ukrainian army used large-scale drone swarms for the first time, another factor that Russian strategists had not planned for.
In 2024, Ukraine’s electronic counter-drone system targeted Russian reconnaissance drones – particularly the Orlan-10, Super-Cam and Zala UAVs – which are priority targets for jamming and destruction operations. Often, cheap Ukrainian drones are guided with explosive charges to crash into a multi-million-dollar Russian unmanned spy aircraft.
This tactic has limited the Russian army’s use of artillery or airstrikes against Ukrainian units, as their observation drones are effectively jammed or shot down. Without the eyes of their drones, Russian gunners and pilots cannot find targets to fire at. A Ukrainian artillery officer stationed in Kursk told the Kyiv Post that this has rendered much of Russia’s artillery almost completely ineffective.
Both the official Russian media and military bloggers report that the Kremlin’s first attempts to ambush advancing Ukrainian troop columns with small, well-trained special forces were temporarily detected by Ukrainian drones and subsequently ambushed themselves.
Conventional Russian units attempting to reinforce their special operations forces have at times been fired upon by long-range HIMARS missiles – a NATO-inspired tactic rarely attempted by the Ukrainian military in 2023. On August 9, a salvo of the US-made precision missiles, filmed by Ukrainian drones, struck a column of Russian trucks near the town of Rylsk, destroying more than a dozen vehicles and killing or wounding more than 300 Russian soldiers.
- How can Russia’s inadequate response be explained?
From the Ukrainian perspective, Russian resistance to the first foreign invasion in 80 years is weak and difficult to understand.
By all accounts except official Russian figures – which deny this – Operation Kursk has brought more Russian prisoners of war to the Ukrainian military than any other two-week period of combat since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The exact number of Russian soldiers who surrendered to Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region is still unclear. Most analysts estimate the number to be in the hundreds, with some unconfirmed reports putting the number at over 1,000.
Interviews with prisoners of war and reports from Ukrainian soldiers indicate that isolated Russian units consisting of young conscripts repeatedly agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to Kiev forces after hours of resistance and moderate losses.
Ukrainian media have compared the apparent rapid collapse of Russian troops’ morale to the fierce defence of the Ukrainian Air Force’s city of Mariupol or the towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, where Ukrainian units fought for months under massive Russian bombardment and suffered heavy losses.
The reactions of Russian civilians to this foreign invasion have also attracted great attention and surprise in the Ukrainian media. On the fourth day of the Kursk operation, the Ukrainian Internet was full of reports that residents of Russian towns such as Sudzha were hiding in their homes or seeing Ukrainian tank units driving past.
A report from the city by Ukrainian television channel TSN on Tuesday drew a sharp contrast between the passive reaction of the Russian population to the foreign troops in their city and that in Ukrainian cities such as Kherson or Melitopol, where hundreds of unarmed residents protested in front of Russian combat units, in some cases for weeks, demanding that the invaders go home.
- Kursk 2024 is not the first invasion since World War II
Contrary to what most major news agencies claim, Ukraine’s current Kursk operation is not technically the first invasion of Russian territory by conventional forces since the Nazis in World War II.
This ignores the fighting between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China for control of Damansky Island, a low-lying small island in the Ussuri River, a waterway that separates the two countries in Manchuria.
On March 2, 1969, Chinese forces crossed the Ussuri River in small boats to attack and ambush the Soviet border troops stationed on the island. Both countries claimed the 0.74-square-kilometer wetland, which Beijing called Zhenbao (Rare Treasure Island). Over the next two weeks, fighting escalated and both sides sent heavy reinforcements. The Red Army (Soviet Union) eventually prevailed over the People’s Liberation Army of China after using tanks, artillery, and dozens of aircraft for air strikes.
Both sides reportedly suffered hundreds of casualties before Chinese troops withdrew. At the time, Kremlin-controlled media claimed that the Soviet Union would always protect its territory, using force if necessary. Moscow retained physical control of Damansky/Zhenbao until 1991, when Moscow officially handed the island over to the People’s Republic as part of the Sino-Soviet border agreement.
Not many people know this:
The last time the Kremlin attempted a major “anti-terrorist” operation on its own territory was in Chechnya between 1990 and 2000. Russian forces outnumbered their opponents by about eight times and had overwhelming firepower superiority over an enemy that had neither artillery nor air power.
Ukrainian nationalist partisan units, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), fought hundreds of battles against Soviet forces in the Carpathian Mountains for years after the end of World War II. Ukrainian fighters viewed the Red Army as foreign invaders on sovereign Ukrainian territory. The Moscow army and police had effectively suppressed the Ukrainian guerrilla movement by 1950. Ukrainians captured by Soviet forces were prosecuted as Soviet citizens and held criminally responsible for illegal attacks on Soviet institutions and officials.
