The original Battle of Kursk (4 July – 23 August 1943) was actually the single largest battle in World War II. This one is a lot smaller.
One will note that this map (from the book Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka) does include Sudzha, just to the northeast of Sumy.
Now I have blogged about this second Battle of Kursk before on 15 August: The Second Battle of Kursk – The Dupuy Institute. My concluding remarks were: “Anyhow, this was a clever move by Ukraine…Its impact has probably been overrated by many commentators.”
So, over the last three weeks, the Ukrainian control in and around Kursk has expanded slightly, from about 1,000 square kilometers (about the size of Fairfax County) to around 1,300 square kilometers. It is clear that Ukraine has taken all it can or wants to, and it now settled into a holding operation.
Around 28 August, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Ukraine had 5,000 troops inside of Kursk oblast. This sounds about right. I gather the offensive was initially conducted on 6 August by two brigades, the 22nd Mechanized Brigade and the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, with the 80th Air Assault Brigade added early on to the mix by 10 August (when they reported capturing a T-80 at Sudzha). Now Wikipedia lists nine Ukrainian maneuver brigades in their order of battle, but I really don’t buy into that. If they had two-three reinforced brigades involved and partly or mostly committed, then one would end up with 5,000 or so troops deployed forward. It does seem to line up. I don’t know why they would need to or want to commit more.
Russia has not pulled any troops from its rather slow advance on Pokrovsk. they may have pulled some from around Kharkiv. Russian has at least 557,000 ground troops (see previous blog post for details) with at least 450,000 of them deployed in Ukraine. That gave them 102,000 or so troops in the rear, they could shift to contain and battle up the Ukrainian Kursk oblast penetration. This should be enough, even though their quality is suspect (I assume more of the troops in the rear are still training up). Around 5 September, Zelenskyy (President of Ukraine) claimed that Russian had moved 60,000 soldiers into the Kursk region. I suspect this figure is high, although it is possible.
The only real surprise so far in the lack of urgency on the part of Russia in reducing this penetration. They have clearly moved troops in the area, containing the breached area, but so far have not done any major attacks to reduce the penetration. Perhaps this is because they are using only partly trained rear elements and recent conscripts, and really don’t want to conduct failed attacks and run up the losses.
So, not much has changed around Kursk and things have only changed slowly around Pokrovsk. I will go into that in a later blog post.
Got a couple of more blog posts coming out this week on the subject.
