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Ukraine SitRep: The Kursk Incursion Was Stopped
On its seventh day the Ukrainian army incursion into the Russian Kursk oblast seems to have come to a halt. The front-lines are hardening and the Russian side is using its artillery and bombing predominance to push it back.
There are three Ukrainian brigades involved plus a number of battalions that have been dispatched away from their brigades involved in other parts of the front. The 80th and the 82nd paratrooper brigades are the main forces. They have partly been trained in Britain and Germany and are using western equipment. The 22nd mechanized brigade is the third major unit. Then there are some five to ten battalions from various other brigades.
The Economist reports (archived) on the operation from a hospital in Sumy:
[T]he accounts from Ukraine’s wounded suggest it has not been a walk in the park, and remains risky. The hospital ward reeks of the sacrifice: soil, blood, and stale sweat. Foil burn-dressings line the corridor. In the yard, the patients, some wrapped like mummies from head to toe in bandages, smoke furiously. Angol, a 28-year-old paratrooper with the 33rd brigade, looks like a Christmas tree. His left arm is immobilised in a fixation device. Tubes, bags and wires protrude from his body. He was also about 30km into Russia when his luck ran out. He isn’t sure if it was artillery or a bomb that hit him. Maybe it was friendly fire; there was a lot of that. All he can remember is falling to the ground and shouting “300”, the code for wounded. The Russians had been on the run up to then, he insists, abandoning equipment and ammunition as fast as they could.
That the Russia border troops have taken to run is not astonishing. They were mostly conscripts and not armed sufficiently to withstand an armored onslaught:
Some aspects of Ukraine’s operation appear to have been meticulously planned. Operational security delivered the element of surprise, a crucial aspect of warfare. “We sent our most combat-ready units to the weakest point on their border,” says a general-staff source deployed to the region. “Conscript soldiers faced paratroopers and simply surrendered.” But other aspects of the operation indicate a certain haste in preparation. All three soldiers quoted in this article were pulled, unrested, from under-pressure front lines in the east with barely a day’s notice.
The Ukrainian army moved in with the best troops it still had plus some extras scrapped from the bottom of its barrel. Russian units which have been moved to the border have put a halt to the Ukrainian movement. Mobile reconnaissance platoons the Ukrainians have been sending down the roads to outlaying towns have mostly been eliminated. The huge progress seen on some Ukraine friendly maps now looks much smaller. Some 30 small settlements have been captured but even the local administration center Sudzha, with previously 6,000 inhabitants, has not been fully conquered.
A new Ukrainian attempt today to cross the border at the Kolotilovka checkpoint in the Belgograd region has failed and the Ukrainian units involved there have taken losses.
Russia has thus mostly contained the Ukrainian onslaught. The operation is now a new meat grinder like Krinky on the southern front previously was. An operationally isolated attrition pit into which the Ukrainians will have to feed more and more reserves they do not have or will retreat from treeline by treeline.
Russian drones and bombers are now leading the fight. The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that the Ukrainian incursion has lost much of its armored equipment (machine translation):
In total, during the fighting in the Kursk area, the enemy lost up to 1,610 servicemen, 32 tanks, 23 armored personnel carriers, 17 infantry fighting vehicles, 136 armored combat vehicles, 47 vehicles, four anti-aircraft missile systems, a multiple launch rocket launcher and 13 field artillery pieces.
The Ukrainian side knew of the danger that its operation could be a dead end. As the Economist writes:
Ukraine does not appear to be reinforcing its positions in any serious sense. “Our calf demands a wolf,” the security source cautions, using a local saying to warn against overly ambitious objectives.
…
The source cautions against comparing the Kursk incursion to Ukraine’s successful swift recapture of much of Kharkiv province in late 2022. The Russian army is taking the war more seriously now, he says: “The danger is we’ll fall into a trap, and Russia will grind our teeth down.”
It seems to me that this is exactly what has now happened. It was utterly foreseeable.
The operation though is a momentarily still a success in that it increased the moral of the Ukrainian side:
Tired, dirty and exhausted, the soldiers say they regret no part of the risky operation that has already killed scores of their comrades: they would rejoin it in a heartbeat. “For the first time in a long time we have movement,” says Angol. “I felt like a tiger.”
That week long rush of good news for Ukraine is now at its end. The involved units, which already lost a full brigade worth of equipment, will shrink away further. There will be no one to replace them. In the Donbas the Russian army continues its offensive against the weakened and retreating Ukrainian units. New York, Chasiv Yar and Toretsk will soon be taken.
There will soon be questions asked in Kiev, "What was the point?", to which no one will have a good answer. The Ukrainian commander in chief General Syrski may well have to leave over it even though the pressure to do the hopeless operation came, as The Times writes (archived), from elsewhere:
President Zelensky’s personal fingerprints are all over it. It’s been an open secret in Kyiv for many months that the president was pressing his military chiefs to launch a summer offensive.
Given Ukraine’s manpower and resources problems, they were hesitant. But Zelensky is desperate to reverse the narrative that Ukraine is losing its war.
Zelenski believed the Kursk operation would help to keep the war going with Russia failing over time and Ukraine becoming the winner. The Russian Duma announced today that there will not be another mobilization. A mobilization, and following unrest, is something Zelenski had hoped for. There will be no uprising in Russia because of the Kursk incursion, just an increase in nationalism.
The week long operations was certainly insufficient to do change the long term narrative. The high it has caused in Kiev and elsewhere will soon make room for a deep depression.
Posted by: Tannenhouser | Aug 12 2024 22:24 utc | 170
Here is what that gets you:
1) European populations who get to wallow in ever shriller hatred of Russia, while continuing to enjoy relatively comfortable living standards. Every day that passes they shed a little more of the doubt that this arrangement is too good to be true. (It is by the way a myth that anti-Russian sentiment is confined to the political elites. In Sweden, for example, there is consistent 80% support for sending weapons to Ukraine, and slightly lower for sending troops there.)
Energy prices spiked in 2022, and there was real fear of freezing in the dark in many places, but prices have since then mostly normalized, to the point that they are only a real problem for the poorest segments of society (ironically the segment that is least likely to hold anti-Russian sentiments in most European countries). The EU incidentally solved its gas crisis by massive stockpiling of gas that Russia was happy to keep sending them (largely through Ukraine, no less).
2) European governments who demonize Russia every minute of every day, send weapons that kill Russians (including civilians) and laugh and mock the Russians about it, while still getting everything they need from Russia to keep their industries going (including arms, steel, chemical industries). It’s true that there is deindustralization in for example Germany, but it’s not happening at nearly the pace what it should be, mainly due to the stabilization of energy prices (which Russia moved heaven and earth to help accomplish).
Add to this that while they get whatever they need from Russia no matter what they do them or how much they insult them, on the other side there is the United States, which will threaten to kill your entire family (and won’t hesitate to go through with it, if necessary) if you don’t go along with the program. Not much of a dilemma there.
As an aside: I used to regularly read Der Spiegel, including their comment sections, before the current war broke but after the Crimean crisis in 2014 and the beginning of anti-Russian sanctions. The readership of Der Spiegel is overwhelmingly upper middle class and liberal, and whenever there were articles disparaging Russia in general, or calling for sanctions in areas that wouldn’t affect Germany directly, there was almost universal agreement in the comment section that the Russians were barbarians who should be crushed like bugs.
Then there were would be articles about for example cancelling Nordstream 2, because of the “dependence” to Russia that this saddled Germany with. Suddenly the tone in the comment section would be completely different. They would be filled with calls to remember German national interests, that cancellation of Nordstream 2 was an American trap to replace cheap Russian pipeline gas with expensive LNG, that it was a conspiracy to destroy the foundations for German industry and prosperity, and so on. Comments in opposition to this were in the minority and mostly downvoted. Obviously, self-interest suddenly kicked in.
After 2022, the Germans, like everyone else, gradually understood that you can have both: Open war with Russia and openly genocidal race hatred against Russians on the one hand, but at the same time continue to get relatively cheap oil and gas from Russia.
I have never again seen a comment section on Der Spiegel’s site where the war and the sanctions against Russia aren’t universally lauded and doubt there ever will be. (The same is true for all German media, to a large extent even alternative media like Telepolis.)
This is all also beside the issue of “pacta sunt servanda”, which you are referring to. What does it say about Russia if it “sticks to their part of the contract” with a counterpart that is openly sending missiles and drones to attack their cities, their oil refineries, their nuclear bomber bases, their anti-ICBM early warning systems, and so on, and who go out of their way to encourage and praise Ukraine for using the missiles they send to strike targets deep inside Russia, and revels in the deaths of Russian soldiers (and civilians, who deserve it for not opposing their evil dictator and the war enough)?
To a large extent they are not even paying Russia for the oil and gas they are currently receiving (there is a right now a court case where OMV is sued for planning to pay Gazprom for gas it received, with the money that would have gone to Gazprom instead being paid to companies that refused to pay for the gas).
And most importantly: The EU and the USA have also frozen and then proceeded to steal 400 billion dollars from Russia, the bulk of which comes from past payments for oil and gas to Russia. Any person who continues to “honor” “their side” of such contract is a fool, and will (rightly) be treated as such.
Compare this to Iran, which (completely reasonably) abandonded their obligations under the JCPOA when the USA effectively abandoned the treaty by reintroducing sanctions, and the EU countries also broke off commercial relations (and later reintroduced sanctions as well) with the excuse that they couldn’t go against America. With your reasoning, Iran should – as the West by the way, competely shamelessly, demands of them – continue to honor their obligations under the treaty even as the West insists they don’t have to honor theirs. The Iranians are made of different stuff however, and that is by the way one reason there is begrudging respect (but still hatred, of course) for Iran in the West that there just isn’t for Russia (there was, of course, during the Soviet era).
You could also make a comparison with China, which was slapped with EU tariffs on its car exports to the bloc by the American puppet Ursula von der Leyen. China hasn’t so far responded with symmetrical counter-tariffs on European cars (it could even be argued that they don’t need to, since market shares of European brand cars, much less European-made cars, are plummeting in China anyway), but they immediately hit the EU back at its weakest points: Agricultural exports in general and in particular cognac exports from France. The result is very unhappy, highly influential agricultural lobbies mainly in a right now quite vulnerable and chaotic EU country (France), whose businesses are already under immense pressure.
Like it or not, the West respects strength and defiance and they don’t respect people who grovel at their feet and beg to be accepted even as you kick them in the ribs and humiliate and abuse them in every way you can think of.
Posted by: Unnamed | Aug 12 2024 23:30 utc | 194
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