A Ukrainian 2S7 howitzer in action.
43rd Artillery Brigade
The 10,000-strong Ukrainian garrison in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast is in trouble.
Relentless strikes by an elite Russian drone group have destroyed hundreds of vehicles along the main road into Kursk to the town of Sudzha, the anchor of the shrinking Ukrainian salient in the oblast.
Exploiting the Ukrainian Siversk Operational Tactical Group’s increasingly dire supply situation, the much larger Russian and North Korean force in Kursk has redoubled its three-month counteroffensive in Kursk.
Ukrainian brigades on the northern edge of the salient are pulling back to Sudzha, where Ukrainian troops recently rebuffed an attempt by Russian troops to infiltrate Ukrainian lines by sneaking through an old gas pipeline.
The repositioning could be a prelude to a complete Ukrainian withdrawal from Kursk back to the relative safety of northern Ukraine.
Shrugging off at least one raid by a Ukrainian air force Mikoyan MiG-29, the Russians are moving to cut off any retreat. “The enemy is destroying bridges in Kursk Oblast and along the international border, trying to hinder the movement of the Siversk Operational Tactical Group from exiting Kursk Oblast into Ukraine,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies warned.
The Siversk OTG was actually gaining ground as recently as early February. But the arrival of the Russian Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Systems later that month changed everything.
“Rubicon employs advanced drone tactics,” independent analyst Andrew Perpetua explained. Worse, its explosive first-person-view drones seem to fly right through Ukrainian radio jamming.
A flurry of Russian drone strikes on the road into Sudzha on or just before Feb. 25—dozens in all—signaled the likely beginning of the end of Ukraine’s seven-month incursion in Kursk. “The day you saw this should’ve been the day you started worrying about Kursk,” Perpetua wrote.
The successful Russian drone campaign in Kursk came as U.S. President Donald Trump—increasingly aligned with Russia—cut off Ukraine from further U.S. aid and also ended intelligence sharing between the United States and Ukraine.
Ukraine’s European allies could replace much of the intel the Ukrainians are no longer getting from the Americans. But the switch could take time. And it’s apparent the Russians are seizing the opportunity afforded them by Trump’s pro-Russian lurch.
“The temporal correlation between the suspension of U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine and the start of Russia’s collapse of the Ukrainian Kursk salient is noteworthy,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. pointed out.