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.