Ukrainian troops reportedly surrounded and destroyed a small unit from the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade on the northern edge of Ukraine’s 250-square-mile salient in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast on Friday.
It’s the latest disaster for one of the lead units in Russia’s eight-day-old counteroffensive in the oblast. Anticipating that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will lean on Ukraine to agree to an armistice that freezes the front line in place, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin has ordered his troops to eject Ukrainian troops from Kursk before Trump’s January inauguration.
There are weeks of hard fighting ahead. But so far, the Russians have advanced just a few hundred yards while losing more than 100 vehicles and potentially thousands of troops killed and wounded.
The 2,000-person 810th Naval Infantry Brigade, backed by thousands of North Korean reinforcements, might be the hardest-hit. “The 810th brigade is bleeding right now,” one Russian blogger reported. “Every day [it] is sent on unprepared assaults” against the Ukrainian 95th Air Assault Brigade’s “persistent defense.”
The first two days of attacks on Nov. 7 and 8 cost the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade dearly—and revealed deep dysfunction in the brigade’s chain of command that has contributed to its catastrophic losses.
According to Russian blogger Romanov, the brigade’s officers told the Russian general staff the roads around the village of Pogrebki, on the front line just north of the Kursk salient, were clear of Ukrainian mines. “Logically, after receiving this information, the general staff issued an order to storm the settlement,” Romanov explained.
The roads weren’t clear of mines. The 810th Naval Infantry Brigade’s factory-fresh BTR-82 wheeled fighting vehicles exploded like firecrackers. The vehicles that got through ran into a wall of Ukrainian artillery, missiles, drones and tank fire.
The 95th Air Assault Brigade claimed it and adjacent brigades destroyed 36 Russian vehicles and killed 100 Russian marines in those first two days. Rather than learning from that disastrous experience, the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade continued sending troops on doomed assaults. “Deliberate disinformation [to] the general staff by the command of the 810th Brigade has become a routine practice,” Romanov wrote.
“Russia is advancing, but it’s also spending significant amounts of men and material in the process,” explained Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst with the Black Bird Group. And those advances are modest. The Ukrainians no longer control Pogrebki, but the Russians don’t fully control it, either.
An M-2 Bradley fighting vehicle from the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade shot up Russian BTR-82s in Orlovka, just south of Pogrebki, on Thursday. The same day, the 95th Air Assault Brigade counterattacked in the area and captured some Russian marines.
No one knows for sure what Trump will do—or, more precisely, try to do—once he takes office on Jan. 20. His cabinet picks are a bizarre mix: a television host with modest military experience for defense secretary, a notorious conspiracy theorist for intelligence director.
The still-forming Trump administration may suffer deep dysfunction. How that might shape the war in Ukraine remains to be seen. But one thing is clear, according to Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group. “Anyone who thinks Ukrainians will simply give up hasn’t been paying attention,” Tatarigami wrote.
It helps Ukraine’s ongoing resistance that at least one key Russian brigade is fighting blind on the basis of bad intelligence and worse orders.
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