Russian air assault forces attacked the Ukrainian garrison in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast on or just before Saturday, rolling eight BMD infantry fighting vehicles along the very same roads—around the village of Viktorovka—they’ve been using since November for assaults on the 250-square-mile salient the Ukrainians carved out of Kursk back in August.
The result was predictable. Ukrainian forces anchored by the 22nd Mechanized Brigade and 17th Heavy Mechanized Brigade destroyed four of the eight BMDs from the Russian 234th Air Assault Regiment. “I really do not understand the point of attacking at the place where they attack for the third month,” mused Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian marine corps drone operator whose company knocked out one of the BMDs.
The repeated vehicular assaults along the same roads by the same Russian regiments, almost all ending in defeat for the Russians, are equally befuddling to the Russian rank and file. In sending vehicles and their crews on pointless “banzai attacks” across the drone-patrolled no-man’s-land in Kursk, Russian commanders gain almost nothing and lose everything, according to one Russian blogger. These stubborn commanders are “geniuses,” the blogger wrote sarcastically.
The predictable and costly assaults help explain the staggering Russian casualties in Kursk as Russia’s wider war grinds toward its fourth year. According to Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky, the 60,000-person Russian-North Korean field army in Kursk has suffered as many as 35,000 casualties trying to eject the 20,000 Ukrainians the oblast.
The Russian counteroffensive in Kursk that began in earnest in November has shrunk, but not eliminated, the Ukrainian-held salient. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin keeps pushing back the deadline for his forces to fully recapture Kursk. After several revisions amid the overall failure of Russian attacks in the oblast, last fall the Kremlin extended the deadline to February—only to later abandon that deadline, too.
Don’t be shocked if the Russians miss whatever the new deadline is. Saturday was a typical day along the Kursk front line. Russian and North Korean troops attacked from 16 directions, according to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies. Just one attack resulted in any Russian gains—around Viktorovka. But the Ukrainian 6th Ranger Regiment still controls most of the village.
Bloodied and surely traumatized, some Russian troops in Kursk once again are resorting to brutal war crimes as a way of venting their frustration and, they must hope, terrorizing their Ukrainian foes. Marines from the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade—one of two Russian marine brigades that have been destroyed and rebuilt several times in the 35 months since Russian widened its war on Ukraine—reportedly decapitated four Ukrainian prisoners and displayed the heads on pikes.
If history is any guide, the Russians’ crimes will fail to demoralize the Ukrainians. Indeed, they tend to have the opposite effect. When the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade stripped and executed nine Ukrainian prisoners in October, it triggered a series of deadly raids by Ukrainian troops deliberately targeting the Russian brigade.
In those retaliatory raids, the Ukrainians took no prisoners.
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