August 17 — Day 904 — Back at it and Kursk
Hi all!
I’d been debating for the past few months on whether to keep on blogging about the war. I was inclined to quit because of other commitments (regular work, family, the Mariupol book etc.) and the feeling that, really, there are others doing the same thing out there, and what’s the point of being another voice in the din? Besides, if you read Kyiv Post, about 70–80 percent of what I would put in a blog, shows up in my articles.
But I’m fresh back from vacation and I keep getting notes from readers asking me when I’m going to get back to it, and once the Ukrainians invaded Russia the notes clearly started coming a bit faster, and there a few things that I’ve noticed that might be worth passing on to others interested in how the war is going.
NOTE: Also, FB seemed to delay publishing my posts, sometimes for weeks for some people. This time the text seems to have disappeared. No idea. But anyway, fighting FB was another reason I was disinclined to write reviews. But the heck with them and here goes.
As these things tend to expand once I get writing, I’m going to try to keep to a single, relatively narrow subject. We’ll see how that goes.
Also, for those who are interested, I’ll try and link more to KP pieces I might have blogged about, but honestly pass on the information perfectly well, so out of laziness it’s easier for me to post the link than rewrite the news story.
Finally, as a charter member of the Mr. Picky historical point of order club, I do however feel obliged to repeat, the mainstream media is wrong. Kursk and the Ukrainian army isn’t the first time since WW2 an attacking foreign army fought the Russian army (i.e. under Kremlin orders) in Russian territory.
Two words: Damansky Ostrov (Остров Даманский).
Or, as the present owners call it today, “Rare Treasure Island”. (珍宝岛)
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37504
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37451
The UAF on the offensive — then and now
The historians are going to record that Ukraine’s Kursk operation was more than anything else a demonstrable and verifiable case of an army and generalship at war that is learning from its mistakes.
Now, this is not to imply the UAF is now doing AARs at the battalion task force level. They’re still not, pretty much. Nor is it to give you the idea that your generic Ukrainian combat brigade plans and combines arms to execute missions like a US heavy brigade or a US Marine MAU. The Ukrainians fight a lot more on the fly.
There is all manner of griping about the quality of commanders particularly at the (analog) division and corps level, and if I am honest the UAF has a long, long way to go before its NCOs and junior officers understand and enforce the discipline of the British infantry.
But, those qualifications out of the way, here is a partial laundry list of the military competence boxes the UAF has demonstrably ticked, that they did not during the 2023 summer offensive in Zaporizhzhia. The progress is undeniable.
- The Ukrainian military leadership kept the timing and location of the attack a complete secret, from troops, allies and the Russians.
Last year, everyone and their brother knew where the assault was coming, in many cases right down to the specific roads. This translated to operational surprise.
- Ukainain special forces units preceded the assault and were deep in the Russian rear area when the offensive came. Based on Russian response the Russian police, special forces, FSB, Rosgvardia, stool pigeon network and gossipy grandmothers had no idea the Ukrainians were there.
We have seen deep strikes against Russian reinforcements dispatched to the front ambushed by Ukrainian special ops boys, we have almost incontrovertible video evidence of operators overrunning Russian defensive positions and capturing prisoners, and we have pretty solid photo or reliable source text evidence of Russian reinforcements hitting ambushes way behind lines they thought were friendly.
If you read the Russian mil-bloggers and propaganda, it’s like they see Ukrainian behind-the-lines guys in every haystack and village garage. Last year, none of this took place, as far as I saw.
- Ukrainian “small air war” units pretty clearly won a decisive victory against Russian forces in the early hours of the offensive by targeting and taking out of action — either by jamming or by crashing FPV drones into them — Russian reconnaissance drones that the Russians used to track Ukrainian forces and hit them with they own drones or artillery. It seems like, it was just about all of them.
The osint business is a little like cockroaches: for every confirmed piece of evidence, assuming you guess the trend right, there are several more that didn’t get recorded but you can bet they’re real. Based on that principle (which I have found to be more than a little reliable) my guess is the Ukrainians probably shot down or otherwise disabled between 50–100 Russian observation drones in the first few days of the offensive.
Accounts on both sides are pretty much all saying that in the southern Kursk region, the Ukrainian drone operators achieved close to total air superiority for at least a week, and drone operations still are heavily in their favor. Meanwhile, the Russians were operationally blinded.
It’s not really fair to General Zaluzhny and the Ukrainian command team that ran the Zaporizhzhia operation because drone tactics and technology, and numbers, weren’t comparable with what the UAF was capable of fielding in August 2024.
This year, my opinion, the Russian command for the first 48–96 hours of the operation appears to have been close to physically unable to put observation drones over the battlefield in any useful way. More than a week later, judging by the frantic driving about and blame gaming and limp fire support I am seeing, it looks very much like the Russian army still has a very poor picture of where the Ukrainians are and what they’re doing. There is heavy evidence supporting this, including, anecdotally, a couple of soldiers on the front line I’m in communications with.
- Ukrainian combat engineers were ready for Russian defensive obstacles and they overcame Russian trenches, bunkers, minefields and so forth lickety-split.
This is opposite from 2023, when the Ukrainian attack bogged down because it couldn’t get through Russian defenses quickly.
In the Kursk case, from the evidence, the Ukrainians managed to break gaps in the Russian barrier system using tactics that mostly were conventional, but are far from easy to execute. There is hard evidence of foot reconnaissance identifying obstacle systems and taking parts of them down, of tactical bridges being tied to advancing armor, and of mine-clearing vehicles driving up to fields and throwing rope charges across them to blow a usable gap.
I assume they also used drones to reconnoiter mine belts, that’s for sure, and possibly they also used drones to disable mines in some places.
Anyone with experience in combined arms fighting knows how hard this all is. There are all manner of ways things can go wrong: the location of the minefield might not get passed on correctly, the enemy fires might not be suppressed and then the gap-crossing vehicles get blown up, the lieutenant leading the column might get lost, the ops comms section might send the wrong call sign to the wrong place, the ground recon teams get spotted and ambushed, or once the good guy engineers made the gap, the bad guys might reseed the minefield by hand or maybe with drones. Your guys attack too fast and drive into the bombardment that’s supposed to protect them. The list never ends. All that and more went wrong for the Ukrainians in summer 2023.
In 2024, honest Injun, I’m looking for evidence of problems, the overwhelming weight of accounts is that that phase of the operation went right. The Russians are certainly admitting it and some of them are really angry: all those rubles spent on a fortification belt and for what? So once again, if you want evidence of (at least some) combined arms competence on the part of the UAF, there you go.
- The UAF very clearly anticipated the way the Russians would respond to the encroachment. We have seen repeated cases of Russian reserve units driving towards the battlefield only to get smacked with UAF long-range fires, by the evidence usually HIMARS rockets.
In Zaporizhzhia last year, for whatever reason, we saw nothing like this. In 2023, generally, it was a slugfest with the Ukrainians (it looks to me) taking their best, hardest shot at Russian defenses and intending to break Russian forces by firepower dominance on the battlefield. The Russians slugged back, and frankly during that offensive they were quicker on their feet, and interdicting Ukrainian strikes against oncoming Russian reinforcements, you didn’t see them.
This time, in Kursk Oblast, aside from some border troops installations that clearly the UAF artillery just leveled once things kicked off, the main destruction of Russian troop formations seems to be taking place as much behind the front lines as upon them. We all saw the video of the truck convoy that got eviscerated. As I write this, at least two or three key bridges over the Seym River (remember that name sports fans, I promise you you’ll be hearing a lot of it in coming weeks) have been knocked down, effectively isolating Russian forces to the south from possible reinforcement from the north.
Cold War geeks will of course recognize all this as a successful (for Ukraine) implementation of deep battle doctrine.
A sidebar to this success is, hitting Russian units well behind the front line wouldn’t be possible, unless Ukraine had some way to see them, which is why the points about Ukrainian special operators and drones preceded this one.
But the more significant implication, at least in my view, is that we have absolutely incontrovertible evidence that UAF staff planners were able to sit down, decide where the Russians might send their reserves, figure out what tools they had to deal with that, and then push the orders and planning down the command chain, so that when the Ukrainian drone or super duper special ops trooper spotted a column of trucks 30 km. behind Russian lines heading south, a HIMARS unit was queued and ready to firing on that very fleeting, moving target.
Like clearing complex obstacles, those are not easy strikes to pull off because there’s so much that can go wrong. These kind of engagements and the discipline you need to pull them off, in the US military are a standard a high-quality regular unit would be expected to manage most of the time — in training. A National Guard unit, in intense training, particularly before it got all the kinks in personnel and communications ironed out, might fail at this kind of long range engagement as often as it succeeded.
The UAF is doing it in war. This would be an impressive staff and planning achievement even for a decent NATO force. For those of us that know the UAF well, it borders on the unbelievable, you kind of ask yourself, how in the world did General Syrsky get his kill chains to manage that?
- For the first time in the war, the UAF managed to break the morale of company-sized Russian combat units, and for the first time in the war, we have seen something approaching massed Russian troop surrenders
Again, the tactics the Ukrainians used to get that result were pretty conventional. They found isolated Russian formations, pushed combat units around them to surround them, cut communications, seeded news cycles with reports calculated to jam up roads rearward with civilians refugees, picked on units that didn’t have the stuff to shoot back and flattened their positions with artillery, killed off leaders where possible, and then approached those isolated units and asked them if they really thought fighting on made sense.
This is a game plan for decisive assault on a prepared defensive position dating, at least, back to German Blitzkrieg. If you are thorough or think reading history is fun, what the Ukrainians have been up to last week had more than a little in common with the Imperial Stosstruppen from WWI. Heck, if you look at the unit designators, the speartip formation leading the Ukrainian offensive — 82nd Brigade — is literally the Ukrainian military’s best-armed and most firepower-heavy brigade, and it was built from the ground up for executing overwhelming, breakthrough attacks and exploitations. It’s not new what the Ukrainians did. The new bit is that THEY did it.
That we have seen, my estimate, somewhere between 1,000–2,000 Russian soldiers throw in the towel after they found themselves in the path of that, is of course in part a function of the fact that rank and file was conscripts inherently led by officers who had managed to avoid deployment to a real war in Ukraine. Given the way Russian media works, when the Ukrainian attack came, it mostly hit Russian units made up of soldiers of officers who not only weren’t mentally prepared for combat, they probably firmly believed the war was elsewhere, they were lucky to have “peacetime” duty, and their job was doing normal Russian army stuff like filling out paperwork, figuring out ways to filch army property, or painting rocks.
The substantial presence of the Chechnya-drawn Akhmat unit, whose primary job has always been intimidating and if necessary attacking civilians, including friendly ones, is another indicator of how unprepared to fight Russian forces in Kursk region were when they got hit. Thus far, typically, the Russian high command commits Akhmat either to intimidate Ukrainian civilians or Russian combat units with iffy morale.
Some historian will, no doubt, someday find out why it is that in 2023, the Ukrainian army attacked in a place where defenses were manned by blooded professional troops backed by spetsnaz teams, zeroed in artillery and air support.
But for now, once again just being objective, we have just seen the Ukrainians identify a soft spot on the Russian defenses, run their operation so that the Russian soldiers sitting in that soft spot are put into a very difficult situation both physically and mentally, and then ruthlessly rip it open. There is some precedent for this, we saw a similar process during the Kharkiv offensive in Sep. 2022. Some of you may remember, General Syrsky was directly in charge of that op as well.
Russian firepower, so far in Kursk anyway, isn’t firing on all cylinders
Some of you may have noticed that even though the Russian propaganda streams since about day 2 of the offensive promised overwhelming retaliation by Russia’s air forces, objectively, we aren’t seeing it.
The contrast with summer 2023 is glaring: in that attack once the Ukrainians got turned back by Russian ground defenses, the Russians brought in helicopter gunships to blow up abandoned Ukrainian vehicles, including otherwise functional Leopard 2 tanks with busted tracks.
In August 2024, so far, we’ve seen very few (like less than 10 a day) confirmed Russian air strikes in the Kursk sector, basically zero reports from the Ukrainian side that Russian “big” air is a problem, and even the Russian military has admitted it’s lost attack helicopters (2 or 3, it looks like) that approached Ukrainian forces too closely. It seems pretty likely the Ukrainians got their first Su-34 jet in Kursk sector a couple of days ago.
There is a video out there where the Russians appear to have been so desperate to demonstrate the Russian Air Force would show the Ukrainians what for, that they dumped out to the internet some cool nocturnal video of some Ka gunships blowing up a column of trucks, and then the Ukrainian internet in about a millisecond pointed out those were Russia-manufacture trucks and the video was nice evidence of Russian helicopters blowing up a Russian vehicle column in a blue-on-blue engagement.
Same deal with Russian artillery. Sources all around the clock, including ones I’m in communications with directly, are saying that the Russians are shelling much less than usual and when they do shoot they seem to miss. One gunner I get messages from from time to time, said the Russian artillery looked, and I quote, “emasculated” to him.
How much this is due to lack of guns in sector (partially confirmed), Ukrainian targeting of Russian ammo depots in sector (widely confirmed, at times with big explosions on video), Russian drone density being too low to find targets (as we have seen, not by accident, or by Ukrainian camouflage and misdirection tactics (we’ll have until the end of the war to find out how many fake, dummy weapons both sides are blowing up in air and artillery strikes) to is hard to say.
I have seen a single anecdotal report, again from my gunner source, where his unit pulled into a farm and just spent the night there because they were tired. It was a calcuated risk and in that case it took the Russians about 10 hours to find them and send shells in their direction.
Ten hours target detection to rounds impacting is workable in static warfare. But in fluid, mobile combat like we’re seeing in Kursk region right now, that’s not nearly good enough and that in a nutshell is why the Ukrainians still are advancing.
That’s probably more than enough for today. If all goes well next time I’ll take a crack at what I’m guessing the Ukrainians are up to in Kursk. I’m pretty sure now so we’ll see in about a week.
Stefan, a wonderful update and summary of observations of the Battle of Kursk. It is terrific to see you back here. I greatly value your observations on the war and have missed them!
Thank you for being back, and for the detailed analysis of what was well done in the opening, a summary I havent seen elsewhere.