Joe McConnell
It’s been nearly two weeks since Ukrainian troops broke through thin border defenses and surged into Russia’s Kursk region, but Moscow has yet to muster enough overwhelming force to repel Kiev’s incursion.
Instead, it brought together units from across the country and from less active areas of the Ukrainian front, while also deploying young recruits engaged in compulsory military service.
“People are horrified. We are inundated with requests and can barely keep up,” said Ivan Chuvilayev, a representative of Go by the Forest, a Russian NGO that helps citizens avoid conscription.
In recent days, the organization has been inundated with requests for help from conscripts and their families, as reports emerged of young soldiers being sent to Kursk as Ukraine continued to advance. “It started in some regions, but now it is clear that conscripts are being mobilized from all over Russia,” Chuvilayev said.
“The initial force in the Kursk area consisted of FSB border troops, Akhmat fighters from Chechnya, and local ground forces units drawn from the Moscow or Leningrad military districts. Now they have brought in additional subordinate forces from the Leningrad and Moscow military districts, some of whom are conscripts,” said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, this week described Russia’s military response to the Kursk invasion as “slow and fragmented,” attributing it in part to a complex command structure in the region, with the FSB security service nominally in charge.
According to military analysts and reports on pro-war Russian 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 defense minister. But it has leVscek its forces largely intact in Donetsk, where they are steadily taking territory from heavily outnumbered Ukrainian forces.
Although the pace of the Ukrainian invasion slowed last week, it continued to advance a few kilometers a day into Russian territory.
On Thursday, it claimed to have completely captured Sudzha, a town in the Kursk region near the border with a population of 5,000 that contains infrastructure for pumping Russian gas to Europe. The Ukrainian military command says it controls about 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory, although analysts believe the area could be slightly smaller.
Ukrainian forces destroyed a key bridge over the Seym River in Kursk on Friday, 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 more difficult for Russian forces to defend a swathe of the Kursk region west of the main Ukrainian incursion.
You are viewing a snapshot of an interactive chart. This is probably because you are offline or your browser has JavaScript disabled.
Despite Ukraine’s progress, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears unwilling to divert more resources from the Eastern front, leaving him with few options.
“Putin hopes to contain the Ukrainian advance with mainly conscript forces. But can they push back the Ukrainian troops? I doubt it,” said Yury Fedorov, a Russian military analyst.
The diverse contingents that Russia had assembled at Kursk had no experience of fighting together and had not had time to learn, Fedorov added. Even aVsceker reinforcements last week, Russian forces in the region remained significantly smaller than Ukraine’s, although Russia had air support, he said. The Russian Air Force has stepped up its use of powerful glide bombs to try to thwart Ukraine’s advance.
“Bridging the gap at Kursk is clearly not easy for Russia,” said Pavel Luzin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “In the second half of 2023, they were already redeploying personnel from other branches of the military. [to Ukraine]. They sent people from the navy, from the Plesetsk cosmodrome and so on.”
Russian conscripts, estimated by Luzin at 300,000, are almost the only significant reserve at the Kremlin’s disposal. Putin has repeatedly said that conscripts are not deployed to combat zones. Under Russian law, only conscripts who have served for at least four months and have special skills can be sent to a combat zone. But the law can easily be challenged.
“Recruits are forced to sign contracts and their documents are falsified to make it look like they have been in the service for a long time,” said Chuvilayev of Go by the Forest.
“We know for sure that 250 people were transferred from a military unit in the Leningrad region to Kursk. We have received requests regarding conscripts from at least 10 units, so it is fair to say that about 1,000 people were transferred,” Chuvilayev added.
State Duma deputy Andrei Gurulev also confirmed that the recruits are fighting in Kursk. According to him, they even “repelled an attack by an entire brigade without any losses.”
“I feel sorry for the guys, no doubt. But we fought with them before,” Gurulev said. “There were no contract soldiers in Afghanistan. Were there contract soldiers in the Red Army?”
Several petitions have appeared on Change.org from mothers of recruits, appealing to Putin and demanding that their sons be withdrawn from the combat zone.
“You promised that they [the conscripts] would not be involved in military actions!!!! We believe in you. We are patriots!!!” Oksana wrote. “Elite brigades, heavily armed against our children with rifles. Every day, more and more parents find their children in videos and photos among the prisoners,” wrote another mother, Irina.
Pavel Baev, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said the “obvious solution” for Russia would be to withdraw troops from its bridgeheads in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, established in a surprise attack in May.
But that would be a further embarrassment for Colonel General Alexander Lapin, the Russian commander of the entire region, who has already been criticized for the fragile defense of Kursk.
“He fears that Putin may not appreciate the idea that his vision of a ‘health zone’ – the goal of the Kharkiv offensive, according to Putin – has come to an end,” Baev said.
