In April 2022, Russian forces attacked Marinka, a front-line town in eastern Ukraine, west of Donetsk. After 20 months of bloody fighting that leveled Marinka, once home to 9,000 people, the Russians fully occupied the town back in December.
That opened a route toward Kurakhiv, a Ukrainian stronghold eight miles to the west along the O0510 road. But actually reaching Kurakhiv—along the road or via the fields to the south—has proved difficult for the Russian army’s 150th Motor Rifle Division and adjacent units.
On or just before Thursday, a Russian formation rolled out along the fields—and got “dismantle[d] … for spare parts,” the Ukrainian 79th Air Assault Brigade boasted.
Buried mines disabled three tanks. Drones and, it seems, anti-tank missiles finished them off. Two armored personnel carriers were damaged. Drones destroyed at least one motorcycle and then chased down and killed six Russian soldiers.
One Russian survivor sought shelter in the ruins of a battle-damaged building—only to get pulverized by a Ukrainian air force fighter lobbing a satellite-guided bomb, according to Anton Gerashchenko, a former advisor to Ukraine’s minister of the interior.
“The column did not reach the Ukrainian positions,” Gerashchenko noted.
The Russians’ defeat isn’t unusual. Most Russian attacks along this axis don’t get very far. The Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies tallied 14 attacks in the area on Thursday and 12 on Wednesday.
What is unusual is the mix of forces the Russians deployed. According to the 79th Air Assault Brigade, the Russian formation included brand-new T-72B3M tanks with all the latest gadgets—anti-drone cage armor, radio jammers and mine-clearing rollers—plus an assortment of armored personnel carriers as well as soldiers riding on motorcycles.
In that sense, the assault group included the best and worst of the Russian military as its wider invasion of Ukraine grinds toward its 29th month.
The 47-ton, three-person T-72B3M is one of just two tank types in production in Russia. The other is the heavier T-90M. Russian industry manufactures between 500 and 600 new T-72s and T-90s a year. That’s a lot more tanks than any other country produces in a year, but far too few to make good the roughly 1,200 tanks Russian forces lose in Ukraine every year.
To make up the gap between tank production and tank losses, the Kremlin has been pulling old tanks—T-54/55s from the 1950s, T-62s from the ’60s and older T-72s and T-80s from the ’70s and ’80s—out of long-term storage.
As old models account for a growing proportion of the Russians’ 3,000-strong tank corps, those factory-fresh T-72B3Ms are becoming a rarity. And that surely makes their wholesale destruction in failed assaults such as that around Kurakhiv especially painful for the Russians.
It’s telling that the assault group aiming for Kurakhiv included fewer APCs than tanks. The Kremlin is struggling to acquire replacement tanks, but it’s struggling even more to acquire replacement APCs and infantry fighting vehicles.
That’s apparently why the group also included bike troops. As armored vehicles become an increasingly rare and precious commodity in the Russian military, civilian-style vehicles—trucks, all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles—are replaceing them.
And they’re getting dismantled at least as swiftly as the tanks and APCs do.
Sources:
1. 79th Air Assault Brigade: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1173826133728731&vanity=79AMBUA&paipv=0&eav=AfYsVrGx9blVOUgL8RvLgUJILC7nP2TliAUn3isriI7SaQsGQE3493NY-6YTs_2Nhi0&_rdr
2. Center for Defense Security: https://cdsdailybrief.substack.com/p/russias-war-on-ukraine-180724; https://cdsdailybrief.substack.com/p/russias-war-on-ukraine-180724
3. Anton Gerashchenko:
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