Five Things to Know About Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia’s Kursk Region

• The Kursk battles are fluid and fast-moving, and lines of control aren’t clear.

Reports from both sides tell of combat taking place between mobile formations. Engagements are often quick and deadly with the advantage going to the ambushers.

Azerbaijani military observer Agil Rustamzade said in an interview: “The peculiarity of the Kursk operation is… approximately 1,200 square kilometers [of Russian territory] are a free fire zone, that is, there was no fixed front line and no concentration of forces and resources typical of linear defense. This is what distinguishes this [Kursk] operation from all the others that were carried out in this war.”

Russian forces appear to be doing more of the attacking, but notwithstanding their substantial numbers – as many as 70,000, according to some reports – their focused assaults since late August have been short-range and almost always aimed at capturing an individual village or a section of farmland.

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• The Kursk air war is looking a bit different from the air war elsewhere for the past 30 months

Reports of widespread use of Russian Air Force-dropped glide bombs – a powerful but inaccurate weapon employed by the Kremlin to flatten positions and even entire villages inside Ukraine – have been relatively few during Ukraine’s Kursk operation.  It’s not clear if this is because of Russian shortages of strike aircraft or munitions, or because of Moscow’s reluctance to demolish towns and villages inside Russia.

The Ukrainian Air Force strike jets – usually never a factor in ground battle – have shown up in the Kursk sector and video in early September showed Western-manufactured precision-guided bombs striking Russian “command centers.”

Both sides are flying first-person view (FPV) and tactical bomber drones – and claiming successes – but based on combat reports and video reaching open sources, engagements are less common than in relatively stationary sectors like eastern Donbas or southern Zaporizhzhia. The war’s latest upgrade in FPV drone technology – using a robot aircraft to drop burning white phosphorous on possible enemy positions – has been spotted in use by both sides in the Kursk sector.

In the past, smaller, ground incursions by Ukraine-controlled forces into Russian territory in 2023, the Kremlin quickly concentrated helicopter gunships to patrol roads to force Ukrainian units to take cover and stop moving.

During the battles around Kursk, reports of Russian helicopter activity and attacks against Ukrainian forces have been almost nil.

It’s not clear whether this is down to accumulating losses in Russian helicopter forces and especially qualified pilots, or stronger-than-usual Ukrainian air defenses backing up the Kursk incursion.

• The “Battle of the Seym River Bridges" isn’t over

Russian troops and military equipment deployed near Ukraine’s border in the Kursk region’s southwestern Glushkovo district were partially isolated by Ukraine’s invasion of Russia further eastward.

That Ukrainian push started in mid-August left them in a 20-kilometer by 40-kilometer slice of Russian territory with vulnerable supply, because all the roads into the region cross bridges over the wide and boggy Seym River, and Kyiv, since then, has been systematically destroying the bridges.

As of Monday, according to the Ukrainian geo-location group CyberBoroshno, all three pre-war road bridges and another five Russian military pontoon bridges connecting Glushkovo region with the rest of Russia have been blown up by Ukrainian precision-guided bombs or rockets, and only one floating bridge, near the town of Glushkovo, was still up.

Russia launched a big counterattack out of the isolated region the same day, but instead of trying to fight its way to safety northwards, the Kremlin aimed it at villages captured by the Ukrainians further east. The Russian attacks had some successes, but their supply situation did not improve.

• Russia says everything is going great and the Ukrainians are on the ropes

Russian counterattacks over the past 72 hours have, according to reports from both sides, wrested the town of Snagost and the village of Borki from Ukrainian control.

Russian state media jubilantly reported captured Ukrainian equipment, weapons and prisoners of war. The Kremlin-controlled television channel RT profiled a unit called the 155th Marine Infantry which, the news piece said, overwhelmed Ukrainian defenses thanks to well-trained soldiers and a massive firepower advantage in artillery.

Footage of the battles for the settlement seemed to show the actions were relatively small-scale by the standards of the Russo-Ukrainian war, but that Borki, by Wednesday, was firmly in Russian hands. Equipment purportedly captured by the Russians included captured small arms, grenade launchers and machine guns, and at least two M-113 armored personnel carriers.

A high-profile image pushed by Russian media has been soldiers holding up a Russian national flag and a regimental flag from the 155th Marine Infantry Brigade, in front of a road sign by the town of Snagost. The video is proof of continuing Russian victory, official reports said.

According to Russian media reports on Tuesday and Wednesday, at those locations where Ukrainian forces still were attempting to advance – the village of Olgovka and the town of Glukhovo were named – Russian forces repelled attackers with losses.

Recapture of all Russian territory “temporarily” held by Ukraine is inevitable, and a Sunday state order that all civilians be forcibly evacuated out of the Glukhovo district is, per those media reports, “only a precaution.” 

Kursk Oblast Governor Aleksei Smirnov, in a Wednesday statement, said all government offices and staffers were working normally and that the situation was “firmly under control.” He asked voters to be patient.

During a Tuesday news talk show broadcast on national Russia 1 television, “military expert” Alexander Artamonov said: “In the Kursk region, we were attacked by NATO forces, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the French, and the Poles. They tried to capture Kurchatov and take prisoners. They got a hard ‘No’.”

• The Ukrainians are saying the Kursk operation all in all is going OK

According to statements by top Ukrainian leadership including President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian army is still battling the Russian military for the initiative in the Kursk region but Kyiv’s forces are still gaining new ground daily.

On Tuesday, according to official reports, Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) troops at the spear tip of the second incursion captured more than 30 square kilometers (12 square miles) of Russian territory, forced all Russian forces out of the town of Tetkino, and advanced north to within 3 kilometers (2 miles) of the key road intersection town of Glushkovo.

Geolocated individual unit reports and personal comment to social media by Ukrainian soldiers  generally supported the Kyiv claims of a balanced battle in progress, and contradicted official Russian media reports that Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region had lost the initiative totally and that Russian forces were advancing relentlessly.

Ukrainian army lieutenant Aryem Karakin, in Tuesday comments, said Kyiv’s forces were still advancing against mixed resistance, and that residents of the Russian town of Sudzha, now under Ukrainian control for nearly a month, had mostly adjusted to occupation by Kyiv’s forces and that relations between civilians and soldiers were peaceful. Aside from intermittent explosions in the distance from time to time, the situation in the town is quiet, he wrote in a personal blog.

Drone images published by Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade on Monday showed a Russian armored attack between Olgovka and Liubimovka ending disastrously. In one video published by that unit, a Russian BMP driver appears to panic and runs over former passengers that bailed out of his infantry fighting vehicle after coming under artillery fire.

A subsequent shell stops the BMP and sets it afire, images published by the Ukrainian military information group DeepState on Tuesday showed. The video geo-located to no-man’s land in farm fields east of the Kursk region town of Korenevo.

Some Ukrainian field reports seem to document Russian troops with poor morale and ready to surrender. The outset of Ukraine’s Kursk operation saw the largest mass surrender of the entire war of Russian troops, with estimates ranging from 200 to 800 men.

Ukraine’s 61st Brigade – another unit, like the 22nd, which openly states on unit public information channels that the formation is in combat inside Russia – in content published on Monday, reported that Russian resistance varies in quality, and that across sections of Kursk region in which Ukrainian forces are operating, hundreds of Russian soldiers have stopped fighting and are in hiding in villages and forests.

According to the unit video, 13 Russian soldiers assigned to 155th Marine Infantry Brigade, sought out a Ukrainian unit and gave up fighting after being deployed to the Kursk sector and being left without food or water for five days. The unconfirmed video shows a Russian soldier advancing with a white flag.