Russia Had Nearly 200 Artillery Pieces In Kursk When Ukraine Invaded. But The Gunners Weren’t Ready.
Surprise, and not an advantage in guns and launchers, was the key to Ukraine’ s August success.
David Axe | Sep 28, 2024 | 02:45pm EDT
Abandoned Russian BM-21s in 2022.Via social mediaOn Aug. 6, a powerful Ukrainian mechanized force breached Russian defenses along the Ukraine-Russia border and, moving fast and bypassing Russian trenches, quickly seized 400 square miles of Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
Why the Ukrainians invaded is complicated. Seizing part of Kursk shifted the momentum of the war—although not decisively—and forced the Kremlin to divert elite forces from the fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine. That chunk of Kursk could be a valuable bargaining chip for Kyiv in any future negotiations with Moscow.
How the Ukrainians managed to capture so much Russian soil, so quickly, is becoming less mysterious. It wasn’t necessarily a lack of forces that doomed Russian defenses in Kursk. It was a lack of intelligence and coordination.
A map that a Ukrainian soldier captured from a Russian soldier amid the fighting in Kursk helps tell the story. The day before the first Ukrainian troops breached the border, the Russian garrison in Kursk had 18 BM-21 rocket launchers, 98 pieces of tube artillery and 71 mortars.
“That’s huge,” noted Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian drone operator who saw the captured map. “Firepower was on Russian side.”
That quantity of artillery, properly deployed against Ukrainian troops as the Ukrainians broke out into the open in Kursk, could have been decisive—for the Russians. “With a good coordination, you make any breakthrough almost impossible to happen,” Kriegsforscher explained.
But the artillery wasn’t properly deployed, largely due to poor intelligence on part of the Russians—and an assumption the Ukrainians would never attack across the border into Kursk. “Regrettably, the group of forces protecting the border didn’t have its own intelligence assets,” Andrei Gurulev . . .
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/09/28/russia-had-nearly-200-artillery-pieces-in-kursk-when-ukraine-invaded-but-the-gunners-werent-ready/
