Probe For Weakness And Then Attack Fast—The Tactics Behind Ukraine’s New Kursk Operation – Forbes

Two days after Ukrainian mechanized forces counterattacked in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, taking advantage of an “operational pause” by Russian and North Korean troops in the oblast, the leading Ukrainian elements are clinging to new positions around the village of Fanaseevka, three miles east of their original lines.

In the third year of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, with drones everywhere all the time and modern armored vehicles in short supply on both sides, a one-day advance of three miles is impressive. To march that far, that fast, the Ukrainians appear to have employed the same tactics the Russians use in their own most successful assaults—but with a twist.

It’s not at all clear the Ukrainian infantry will be able to hold on in Fanaseevka. Their positions in the forest just outside the village have been under relentless bombardment by Russian drones and artillery for two days. “There’s still a chance to quickly push the enemy out,” one Russian military blogger reported in a missive translated by the Estonian analyst WarTranslated.

But to get as far as they did, the Ukrainians did what the Russians usually do: probed enemy lines for weaknesses and then deployed fast-moving groups of armored vehicles to shuttle infantry into new positions past the original line of contact. Whether the Ukrainians can consolidate their advances depends on whether more infantry arrive fast enough to defend against Russian counterattacks.

Having consolidated, Ukrainian forces “may attempt another attack to build on their success,” the blogger warned.

The probe-then-assault tactic, led by infantry but enabled by fast-moving vehicles, was refined by the Russian armed forces as the wider war ground into its second year and Ukrainian mines, drones, artillery and anti-tank missiles rendered massed mechanized assaults impractical if not suicidal.

The Russians, with their three-to-one or greater manpower advantage in many sectors of the front, tend to send small groups of infantry toward Ukrainian lines, clearly assuming most of the scouts will get killed but apparently hoping a few of them discover gaps in Ukrainian defenses.

“Disposable infantry are the first to be employed,” the Royal United Services Institute in London noted. “As teams are destroyed by defensive fire, Russian forces will commit successive teams forward by the same line of approach. Ukrainian forces must continuously defend their positions against consecutive waves, expending ammunition, exposing the locations of their defensive positions and exhausting their personnel.”

If Russian manpower outlasts Ukrainian firepower, the Russians may take control of the weakened Ukrainian positions.

The main difference between the Russian and Ukrainian versions of this assault tactic is that the Russians have an abundance of troops, but the Ukrainians don’t. So the Ukrainians must be taking some other approach to probing Russian lines before the main attack.

Ukraine’s advantage in drones surely helps, but the presence of Ukrainian special operation teams in the vicinity of Ukraine’s most successful attacks may also hint at another Ukrainian advantage that lends itself to probing operations that aren’t virtual suicide for the scouts.

The Ukrainian navy’s 73rd Naval Special Operations Center—Ukrainian Navy SEALS, basically—is deployed in Kursk near the launching position for the recent counterattack toward Fanaseevka. The center’s job, it stated, is to “gather crucial intelligence on hostile forces.”

Highly trained Ukrainian commandos stand a better chance of surviving a risky reconnaissance mission than untrained Russian conscripts who may have signed their enlistment contracts mere weeks earlier. In that way, Ukrainian assaults may be less costly than Russian assaults—a necessity for a Ukrainian military that has consistently struggled to mobilize enough troops.

Indeed, a paucity of manpower may yet doom the Fanaseevka counterattack. “There is just one flaw” in the operation, the Russian blogger assessed. “Positions that were formally ‘secure’ but lack sufficient troops (or have none at all) are instantly lost.”