A week into a mission of vengeance targeting war criminals in the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, a quartet of Ukrainian formations—the 36th Marine Brigade, 47th Mechanized Brigade and 82nd and 95th Air Assault Brigades—have turned a short stretch of highway in Russia’s Kursk Oblast into a “road of death,” according to Anton Gerashchenko, a former advisor to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs.
On Oct. 10, Russian marines from the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade overran a team of Ukrainian drone operators in Zelenyi Shlyakh, a tiny hamlet on the western edge of a Ukrainian-held salient in Kursk. The Russians stripped the Ukrainians, ordered them to lie face-down on the ground and then shot them, killing all nine.
In the days that followed, a powerful Ukrainian force began deliberately hunting down and ambushing groups of 155th Naval Infantry Brigade marines—and taking no prisoners. On Oct. 18, 95th Air Assault Brigade paratroopers cornered a clutch of 155th Naval Infantry Brigade armored personnel carriers—and dismantled it with drones, tanks, missiles and mines, reportedly destroying three APCs and killing 30 Russians. “The teleportation of the enemy to Hell took place in a complex way,” the Ukrainian air assault branch boasted.
The Ukrainian mission of revenge escalated in the last week. The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade, fresh from a six-week period of rest and retraining, attacked Russian marines in Novoivanovka, a few hundred feet north of Zelenyi Shlyakh. Fighting in teams, the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s M-1 tanks and M-2 fighting vehicles peppered Russian positions with the 120-millimeter cannons and 25-millimeter autocannons.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian marines attacked from the south, rolling into Zelenyi Shlyakh in a long column of T-64 tanks and M-113 APCs—and blasting Russian vehicles while on the move. Ukrainian paratroopers attacked from the west, killing seven 155th Naval Infantry Brigade sappers laying mines along one of the roads threading through Zelenyi Shlyakh.
The result, two weeks after Russian marines murdered those nine Ukrainian drone operators, is “a graveyard of destroyed Russian equipment worth tens of millions of dollars” on the main road through Zelenyi Shlyakh, according to Gerashchenko. Analysts have spotted at least 17 destroyed Russian armored trucks, APCs and tanks in and around Zelenyi Shlyakh.
The avenging Ukrainians don’t seem to have lost any armored vehicles in their recent counterattacks, but that’s not to say they’re not taking casualties. A team of nine marines from the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade got in over their heads just west of Zelenyi Shlyakh on Sunday and had to call in artillery fire on their own position as Russian forces closed in. “Miraculously, all nine survived, managed to escape and even evacuated the wounded along the way,” Estonian analyst WarTranslated noted.
As punishment for its war crimes, the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade is getting destroyed by a highly motivated Ukrainian force. But help is coming for the beleaguered marines and other Russian troops in Kursk. The first of potentially thousands of North Korean reinforcements are expected to arrive in the oblast any day now.
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