Russia’s IMR-2.
Photo of the Russian Ministry of Defense
Ahead of Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive, which began in June 2023, Ukrainian brigades equipped and trained for one of the most difficult operations in land warfare: breaching, which involves engineers and support vehicles quickly breaking through earth or concrete fortifications (often under fire) to allow tanks and infantry to break through.
Last year’s breakout was generally a disaster, with Ukrainian forces stranded in some of the world’s most densely minefields and then coming under attack from Russian artillery and helicopters.
This year, Ukrainian forces had another chance to prove they could create and exploit a breakthrough: on August 6, around a dozen battalions from around eight Ukrainian brigades, made up of ground, airborne, and territorial troops, invaded Kursk Oblast in southwestern Russia. The initial attack created multiple breakthroughs, followed five weeks later by at least one more in an adjacent region.
The latest incursion on Thursday was a textbook example of this strategy: It worked… until it didn’t. Ukrainian forces broke through, but didn’t get very far.
With a drone watching from above and at least one tank looming nearby, an engineer vehicle, likely a Soviet IMR-2 equipped with mine-clearing equipment, crashed through a bank, a trench, a second bank and a row of concrete tank barriers.
While infantrymen rushed through the breach and began clearing a second trench, the IMR-2 advanced deeper into Russian territory, eventually coming into contact with a mine.
Although the initial breakthrough was successful, Ukrainian forces’ steps to clear the mines on the other side of the breach were apparently insufficient, and the Kremlin claimed that its troops, “supported by army aviation and artillery,” ultimately repelled the Ukrainian attack.
The location of this breakthrough, just south of the Russian village of Novy Put and 20 miles west of the main Kursk salient, is intriguing: it may have been part of a local commando attack, perhaps a reconnaissance operation ahead of a new Ukrainian offensive in support of the nearby Operation Kursk.
In the 2023 counteroffensive, then-commander-in-chief, Gen. Valery Zarzhiny, boldly (some might say foolishly) targeted the best-defended parts of the Russian military’s line, but this year Ukrainian forces “chose the weakest points in the enemy’s line of defense,” Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, Gen. Oleksandr Shirsky, told CNN.
That Ukrainian forces that broke through the Russian defenses south of Novy Put could not get very far before their advance was halted by at least one well-placed mine and delayed Russian artillery fire may mean that the area is not another “weakest point.”
