Nearly two weeks after Ukrainian troops smashed through thin border defences and stormed into Russia’s Kursk region, Moscow has still not assembled the kind of overwhelming force needed to repel Kyiv’s incursion.
It has instead cobbled together units from around the country and from less active parts of the Ukrainian front, while deploying young conscripts performing their obligatory military service.
“People are horrified. We are overwhelmed with requests and can barely keep up,” said Ivan Chuvilayev, a representative of Go by the Forest, a Russian NGO helping citizens to avoid conscription.
In recent days, the organisation has been inundated with pleas for help from conscripts and their families as reports of young soldiers sent to Kursk emerged as Ukraine continued to advance. “It started in some regions, but now it is clear that conscripts are being mobilised from all over Russia,” said Chuvilayev.
“The initial force in the Kursk area was FSB Border Troops, Akhmat fighters from Chechnya, and local ground forces units taken from the Moscow or Leningrad military districts. Now, they have brought in additional forces subordinate from the Leningrad and Moscow military districts – some of them are conscripts,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s supreme allied commander for Europe, this week described Russia’s military response to the Kursk invasion as “slow and scattered”, attributing it in part to a complex command structure in the region, with the FSB security service notionally in charge.
According to military analysts and reports on Russian pro-war social media channels, Moscow may have moved several battalions from locations in Ukraine – including the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions – to Kursk. It has also redeployed troops from its Kaliningrad region, according to Lithuania’s defence minister. But it has largely left untouched its forces in Donetsk, where they are steadily taking territory from heavily outmanned Ukrainian forces.
Although the pace of Ukraine’s invasion slowed last week, it was still advancing a few kilometres a day deeper into Russian territory.
On Thursday it claimed to have fully captured Sudzha, a town in the Kursk region close to the border with a population of 5,000 and containing infrastructure pumping Russian gas to Europe. Ukraine’s military command says it controls roughly 1,000km² of Russian territory, although analysts think the area may be somewhat smaller.
On Friday, Ukrainian forces destroyed a key bridge over the Seym river in Kursk, Roman Alekhin, a pro-war blogger and adviser to the Kursk regional governor, wrote on his Telegram channel.
The loss of the Glushkovo bridge – and Ukrainian attacks on other bridges in the area – could make it much harder for Russian forces to defend a swath of the Kursk region to the west of Ukraine’s main incursion.
Despite Ukraine’s advances, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin appears unwilling to divert more significant resources from the eastern front, leaving him with few options.
“Putin hopes to contain the Ukrainian advance with mostly conscript forces. But can they push back the Ukrainian troops? I doubt it,” said Yury Fedorov, Russian military analyst.
The different contingents that Russia had assembled in Kursk had no experience of fighting together and had no time to learn, Fedorov added. Even after last week’s reinforcements, Russian forces in the region remained significantly smaller than those of Ukraine, although Russia did have air support, he said. The Russian air force has stepped up its use of powerful glide bombs to try to thwart Ukraine’s advance.
“Plugging the gap in Kursk clearly isn’t easy for Russia,” said Pavel Luzin, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “By the second half of 2023, they were already reassigning personnel from other branches of the military [to Ukraine]. They were sending people from the navy, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, and so on.”
Russian conscripts, estimated by Luzin to number 300,000, are almost the only significant reserve available to the Kremlin. Putin has repeatedly stated that conscripts are not deployed to combat zones. Under Russian law, only conscripts who have served at least four months and have special skills can be sent to a combat zone. But the law can be easily defied.
“Conscripts are being forced to sign contracts, and their documents are being falsified to make it appear as though they have been serving for a long time,” said Chuvilayev from Go by the Forest.
“We know for sure that 250 people were transferred from one military unit in the Leningrad region to Kursk. We’ve received requests regarding conscripts from at least 10 units – so it’s fair to say around 1,000 people have been moved,” Chuvilayev added.
State Duma deputy Andrei Gurulev also confirmed that conscripts are fighting in Kursk. According to him, they even “repelled an attack by an entire brigade without any losses”.
“I feel sorry for the boys – no doubt. But we used to fight with them before,” Gurulev said. “There were no contract soldiers in Afghanistan. Were there any contract soldiers in the Red Army?”
Several petitions have appeared on Change.org from the mothers of conscripts, addressing Putin and demanding their children be withdrawn from the combat zone.
“You promised that they [the conscripts] wouldn’t be involved in military actions!!!! We believe in you. We are patriots!!!” Oksana wrote. “Elite, heavily armed brigades against our children with rifles. Every day, more parents find their children in videos and photos among the captured,” another mother, Irina, posted.
Pavel Baev, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said the “obvious solution” was for Russia to withdraw troops from its bridgeheads in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine which it established in a surprise attack in May.
But this would be a further embarrassment for Col-Gen Alexander Lapin, the Russian commander of the entire region, who has already been criticised for the flimsy defences in Kursk.
“He worries that Putin may not appreciate the idea that his vision of a ‘sanitary zone’– the goal of the Kharkiv offensive, according to Putin – has come to an end,” said Baev. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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