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Russian forces managed to capture around 68 square miles of Ukraine in April. But it cost them 4,800 vehicles and more than 36,600 dead and wounded troops, according to one statistician who collects data mostly from official Ukrainian sources including the general staff in Kyiv. In the same month, Ukrainian losses were “minimal,” concluded analyst Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting in Poland. Ukraine sprawls across 233,000 square miles, 19% of which is under Russian occupation. At the current rates of advance and loss, the Russians would capture the rest of Ukraine in the year 2256 at the cost of 101...

On Feb. 25, a flurry of accurate Russian drone strikes knocked out dozens of Ukrainian vehicles along the main road to Sudzha, the town that is—or was—the main base for the 10,000-strong Ukrainian force occupying a significant, but quickly shrinking, salient in Kursk Oblast in western Russia. That was “the day you started worrying about Kursk,” wrote independent analyst Andrew Perpetua. Two weeks later, it seems the bulk of the Ukrainian force—Ukrainian army’s heaviest brigades—has evacuated Kursk and repositioned on the Ukrainian side of the border. “My friends managed to leave Kursk, avoiding encirclement,” one Ukrainian source claimed Monday. “It’s...

A terror weapon becomes less terrifying when it doesn’t work. After warning U.S. officials of its intention to launch, Russia lobbed a mysterious new ballistic missile—initially mistaken for a nuclear-capable ICBM—at the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine on the morning of Nov. 21, damaging buildings and injuring dozens of people. The mystery weapon turned out to be a variant of Russia’s RS-26, a 40-ton, solid-fueled missile with six independent reentry vehicles. Its name, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin announced shortly after the strike, is “Oreshnik.” That’s Russian for “hazelnut tree.” Three months later on Thursday morning, the Russians reportedly launched...

When North Korea’s 12,000-strong 11th Army Corps deployed to Kursk Oblast in western Russia to help Russian troops battle an invasion by a powerful Ukrainian force, they brought along anti-tank vehicles, howitzers and rocket launchers. They also brought along a rarely seen air-defense vehicle combining a large wheeled chassis with the radar and missile launchers from a Russian-designed Tor surface-to-air missile vehicle, which normally rides on tracks. The customized North Korean Tor is so unusual that the Russians themselves apparently didn’t recognize it as belonging to their side. On or just before Friday, Russian drones spotted and struck the North...

Something struck a group of Russian troops in Lgov, a town of 21,000 in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, late Sunday or early Monday. “It’s terrible,” a bystander cried. “The guys are all in the bunker,” they added as the bunker burned. A Ukrainian official insinuated the fire was the result of a Ukrainian raid, which would make sense. Lgov lies just 30 miles north of the town of Sudzha, the anchor of the 250-square-mile salient that Ukrainian forces carved out of Kursk back in August. It’s a key road and rail node for troops and supplies supporting the two-month-old Russian...

A four-square-mile patch of Kursk Oblast in western Russia is a graveyard for Russian vehicles—and a harbinger of a looming catastrophe for the Kremlin as its yearlong offensive in Ukraine begins to falter. Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian marine corps drone operator supporting the 20,000-strong Ukrainian force that has held a 20-by-12-mile salient in Kursk since August, tallied around 90 wrecked and abandoned Russian vehicles just in his two-by-two-mile sector on the northwest edge of the salient. That’s an entire brigade’s worth of vehicles. Ukrainian losses in the same sector have been much lighter: just 20 or so. A four-to-one loss ratio...

In the pre-dawn hours on Tuesday, a large flock of Ukrainian drones winged north from Ukraine all the way to Toropets, a town in western Russian that hosts the 107th Arsenal, a sprawling ammunition dump feeding the Russian force fighting in Ukraine, 300 miles to the south. The arsenal exploded with enough force to register as a small earthquake, draw the attention of NASA fire-spotting satellites and compel local authorities to order an evacuation of nearby residents. A lot of Russian munitions went up in flames. (snip) That so many of Russia’s best munitions were reportedly concentrated in a single...

In a surprise move on Aug. 6, a strong Ukrainian force—eventually numbering around a dozen battalions each with up to 400 troops—breached the defenses along the Russia-Ukraine border adjacent to Russia’s Kursk Oblast. In a heady couple of weeks before the front stabilized, the Ukrainians routed poorly-trained Russian conscripts and captured 400 square miles of Kursk Oblast. “This has put [Russian Pres. Vladimir] Putin under pressure,” U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said. Rightly embarrassed, Putin ordered the Kremlin to recapture Kursk by Oct. 1. And on Wednesday, Russian troops dutifully launched a counterattack along the western edge of the Ukrainian...

On the sixth day of Ukraine's advance into Kursk Oblast in southern Russia, there's growing evidence the Ukrainian invasion corps - some or all of up to five 2,000-person brigades plus at least one 400person independent battalion--plans to stay.

As the Ukrainian invasion of Russia grinds into its fifth day, Ukrainian troops have advanced as far as 10 miles into Kursk Oblast—and are beginning to mop up any Russian troops they bypassed in their hurry to extend their zone of control. The Russians, meanwhile, are finally bringing to bear their heaviest firepower—lobbing powerful glide bombs at Ukrainian columns rolling along Russian roads. For more than a year, these glide bombs—each ranging 25 miles or farther with hundreds of pounds of explosives—have been Russia’s most powerful offensive weapons, demolishing Ukrainian defenses ahead of Russian ground assaults. Now they’re defensive weapons—and...

Four days into Ukraine’s surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast, just across Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, the number of confirmed Ukrainian brigades in and around the invasion zone has grown to at least five: four army mechanized brigades and one brigade from the independent air assault force. Altogether, these units could oversee as many as 10,000 troops and 600 armored vehicles. Additional artillery, air-defense, drone and reconnaissance units are playing critical supporting roles. To put into perspective the scale of the Ukrainian force in and around Kursk, recall that Kyiv formed a corps with a dozen new brigades to...

The Ukrainian air force’s Dolgintsevo air base is one of the most vulnerable bases in Ukraine. Situated near Kryvyi Rih just 45 miles from the front line in southern Ukraine, the base is within range of Russia’s best Lancet drones. Since the extended-range version of the Lancet—the so-called “Product 53”—debuted in August, the drones have attacked Dolgintsevo every few weeks, aiming for any warplanes parked in the open at the base’s tarmacs. In nine months, Lancets have struck at least four jets at Dolgintsevo: two Mikoyan MiG-29s and two Sukhoi Su-25s. The first two strikes, last fall, took the Ukrainian...

When a combined force of 40,000 Russian troops launched an assault across Ukraine’s northern border with Russia on May 9 – that’s Victory Day, the day Russians celebrate the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II – observers tried to understand the Russians’ aim. Was the goal to drive on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city just 25 miles south of the northern border? Was it to capture a string of border settlements in order to push Ukrainian troops, and their artillery, farther from Russia? Was it to convince the Ukrainians that either of the above was the goal –...

After months of fighting, the Russians are still struggling to gain a toehold in Ukraine’s 266th biggest population center. Shortly after finally capturing the ruins of Avdiivka following a bloody, five-month battle that culminated in February, Russian forces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region took aim at another eastern prize: the industrial town of Chasiv Yar, which had a pre-war population of around 12,000. Exposed on the very edge of the line of contact west of Bakhmut and depending on a north-south canal—a canal with two easy crossing points—for its defense, Chasiv Yar is vulnerable. And its easternmost canal district, on...

Gen. Serhii Golubtsov, the commander of the Ukrainian air force, has said all along he needed four operational squadrons of Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to have any chance of controlling the air over a single sector of the 700-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. It’s taken more than a year of intensive diplomacy between Ukrainian, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish and Belgian officials, but Golubtsov is finally getting his four squadrons. On Tuesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced Belgium would donate 30 surplus F-16s—boosting to 85 the total number of the nimble, supersonic fighters Ukraine should receive starting this...

Everyone expected Russia to launch a new offensive in Ukraine on May 9. That’s because May 9 is Victory Day in Russia – the day the country celebrates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. It’s a symbolic day for a war of choice that’s less about territory or resources than it is about Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s conception of himself as a new Russian emperor lording over a thriving Russian empire. But Putin’s new Russian empire is a farce, albeit a nightmarishly bloody one. And his Victory Day offensive is a farce, too. Less than...

For a long time, the US Army assumed the US Air Force would protect it from enemy aircraft. Which is why, in the 1990s, the Army shuttered many of its short-range air-defence, or SHORAD, units. This process only accelerated during the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Army was fighting an enemy with no aircraft. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Army was down to just 300 or so aging Avenger air-defence vehicles, each firing infrared-guided Stinger missiles out to a distance of three miles. This to protect a million troops, if you count active...

..... Today these drones—hundreds of thousands of them—are the most important systems in the Ukrainian inventory. This means tactical radio jammers, which can block the signals operators use to control their drones, are the most important systems in the Russian inventory. So when Russian tanks began rolling toward the front line with a giant new jammer—actually, clusters of multiple jammers—in recent weeks, Ukrainian drone operators were interested. Very interested. If the new jammers worked, the Ukrainian operators would need to develop countermeasures. Their chance to find out came earlier this month, when a Russian T-72 festooned with jammers ran over...

Russia went to war in Ukraine two years ago with twice as many artillery pieces as Ukraine had. But it isn’t the advantage in howitzers that really matters – it’s the advantage in shells. The Czechs found, for Ukraine, nearly a million shells precisely when Ukraine needed those million shells the most: at the peak of Russia’s winter offensive. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Czech artillery initiative probably saved entire Ukrainian cities, by giving the Ukrainian army the firepower to resist a much bigger Russian army. It’s no secret how Ukraine got into an artillery bind late...

Russia went to war in Ukraine in February 2022 with no more than nine flyable Beriev A-50U/M radar planes, which extend sensor coverage over the front line. The four-engine A-50s and the 10 or 15 experienced officers who crew each of them are critical and hard-to-replace assets. Which is why the Ukrainians have devoted scarce resources to finding and striking the $300-million planes. A Ukrainian drone damaged an A-50 on the ground in Belarus last year. On Jan. 14, a long-range Ukrainian missile shot down an A-50 over the Sea of Azov in southern Ukraine. Six weeks later on Feb....