A Russian drone bombs a Ukrainian M-2 in Pogrebki.
Russian defense ministry capture
A picturesque church in Pogrebki, a village in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, towers over a chaotic battleground. Ukrainian forces are determined to push their way past the Church of Saint Michael. Russian forces are determined to stop them.
Armored vehicles blast away with their autocannons. Drones drop bombs. Infantry cower in basements.
The battle that has raged around the Church of Saint Michael in recent days is indicative of the overall trend across Kursk as the Russians fight to push the Ukrainians out of a 250-square-mile salient they carved out of the oblast back in August—and the Ukrainians fight back with local counterattacks.
The fighting is brutal. Gains and losses by either side are measured in yards.
The battle around the Church of Saint Michael had apparently been raging for a day or so when, on or just before Friday, an American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle likely belonging to the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade rolled toward the church and opened fire with its 25-millimeter autocannon.
As the one-pound shells exploded, Russian soldiers took shelter in the church’s basement. “The infantry of the armed forces of Ukraine is trying to finish off our fighters,” one Russian blogger reported.
The blogger piously invoked the Bible’s book of Isaiah. Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with the right hand of My righteousness.
There’s nothing righteous about the fighting in Kursk, where 20,000 Ukrainians are battling 60,000 Russians and North Koreans. The latter reportedly will pull the pins on their own grenades rather than surrender.
Omnipresent drones have made it incredibly dangerous for armored vehicles—especially Russian armored vehicles—to leave concealment. So the infantry often attack on foot, and usually die in large numbers.
Four hundred Russians were killed and wounded in one recent assault. Two hundred North Koreans fell in an earlier attack. An attempt by a Ukrainian air assault brigade to extend the Kursk front line around the village of Berdin ran afoul of Russian fiber-optic drones. The brigade retreated, leaving behind its frozen dead.
The M-2 that rolled into Pogrebki was the exception to the rule: an armored vehicle whose crew was willing to risk a close fight out in the open despite all the drones buzzing overhead.
The crew’s luck held until it didn’t. A drone from the Russian 34th Motor Rifle Brigade lobbed a grenade onto the 33-ton Bradley, just avoiding the vehicle’s anti-drone netting. The grenade exploded, seemingly damaging the M-2’s autocannon. The strike “put to flight” the vehicle, another Russian blogger wrote.
More than half of Pogrebki is under Russian control, the same blogger claimed. At the same time, the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies insisted Ukrainian forces had “advanced on the northern outskirts” of the village, around where the Church of Saint Michael towers.
It’s hard to know who’s right, and it’s worth noting the major analysts still place Pogrebki in the gray zone between Russian and Ukrainian lines. It’s the same contested status Pogrebki has held since a Russian marine brigade first attacked Ukrainian troops in the settlement back in November.
The first two months of skirmishing in Pogrebki cost the Russians the better part of two battalions, each nominally with 400 people. There’s no reason to believe the current fighting is any less bloody. “War as it is,” the first blogger philosophized.
