The battle is bloodier that ever in Kursk province, Vitaliy Ovcharenko tells me. His unit, which he cannot name for security reasons, was part of the second Ukrainian wave into Russia. He has been fighting there since August 20.
‘The Russians are attacking like psychos,’ he tells me over the encrypted messaging app Signal.
‘Around three to five days ago – I can’t say exactly for sure because I never sleep regularly here – they launched one of their biggest attacks yet.
‘But they used the same tactics and the same route. A column of Russians just came straight toward us; we pounded them and destroyed around 40 armoured vehicles in one day.
‘The next day they repeated the attack with 12 armoured vehicles, and we destroyed those, too.’
It seems extraordinary, but I have seen and heard the same things at every front line I have visited across south and eastern Ukraine: The Russians are happy sending their soldiers to the ‘meat grinder’ to be slaughtered. They have endless supplies and a political system that renders them entirely expendable.
Vitaliy continues: ‘Russian soldiers we’ve captured all say the same thing: They have strict orders to kick us Ukrainians out of Kursk – at any cost.’
This doesn’t surprise me. Everything on the ground in the Russia-Ukraine War is now playing out with Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20 in the background. Trump says he wants to end the war: This appears to mean a Versailles-style carve-up of the territories Moscow stole through invasion, torture and murder.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has promised to set out a new 10-point ‘resilience’ plan for his nation as morale begins to dip in the wake of the US election
President Zelensky has insisted that Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House will help Ukraine defeat Russia ‘faster’
David Patrikarakos beleives that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot negotiate whilst Ukraine holds a part of Russian territory
But I’ve always believed it will be almost impossible for Putin to negotiate while Ukraine holds a part of Russia. It makes him look unforgivably weak.
This is the man who wanted to bring back his nation’s glory days as a global power, but ended up with a foreign army on Russian soil for the first time since the 1940s. He has little choice but to go all-out to take it back before the inauguration, no matter how many will die.
Ukraine seized around 420 square miles of Russian territory in the Kursk Oblast following its August incursion, but the Russians have counter-attacked ferociously and reclaimed around half of what they lost.
Now they are clearly determined to reclaim the remaining 230 square miles, pounding the Ukrainian positions on their north, west and east flanks.
Conditions are getting tough as winter arrives. Ukrainian forces near the Russian town of Sudzha are reportedly using construction equipment to clear roads of mud. Andrii Horets, first deputy commander of 95th Brigade’s air-mobile battalion, says Ukrainian forces are struggling to dig trenches.
But sometimes the bad weather helps. Vitaliy remembers a recent battle. It was night, and through a thermal-vision camera drone he saw a Russian unit assault Ukrainian positions as a group of his comrades poured out to engage them. ‘The problem was that once there was only about 50m between our guys and them we no longer knew who was who,’ he said. ‘So I asked our boys to do something that would distinguish them from the enemy.
‘One guy had an idea – “I’ll make a snow angel,” he said, before laying down in the snow and stretching out his arms and legs in the white power. It worked. As soon as we saw that, we called in the strike. The enemy was done.’
If the Russians are determined, so are the Ukrainians. Horets was clear. ‘No matter what anyone says, the enemy is suffering huge losses here and our losses are small. The more assaults there are, the bigger the losses,’ he told the Ukrainska Pravda news site.
A breakdown of the ATACMS missiles which could prove a ‘game-changer’ for Ukrainian forces
President Biden has after much deliberation given the green light to Ukraine to use US-supplied missiles to strike targets inside Russia
Donald Trump ran his bid for re-election on an ‘America First’ foreign policy, which if implemented, could spell a reduction in US aid for Ukraine
Last week UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer reiterated his ‘unwavering’ support for Ukraine
Ukrainian officials were reportedly furious with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who last week held an hour-long phone call with Russia
President Zelensky has called for increased funding and military aid to be granted to Ukraine by the EU
North Korea and Kim Jong Un have remained one of Russia’s few allies during the Ukraine war
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly given the go ahead for his nation’s troops to be deployed to the Ukrainian frontlines and aid Russian units
Captured Russian soldiers have reported that they believe many more North Korean soldiers are due to arrive on the frontlines in the coming months
US officials have said that Biden may authorise them to be used to strike targets deeper into Russia in the future. In the meantime, a bonus is that Biden’s authorisation means the UK and France will now almost certainly grant Kyiv authorisation to use their Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles inside Russia, too.
Anticipating such a move, Russia has reportedly pulled most of its warplanes and other assets deeper into Russia. In September, a Pentagon spokeswoman said 90 per cent of Russian aircraft launching guide bombs into Ukraine were doing so from airfields out of ATACMS range.
But they will unquestionably help Kyiv with its most immediate priority: The defence of Kursk. And as long as its soldiers hold the Oblast, Putin does not have everything his own way.
‘I read the news about the ATACMS during a meeting with my colleagues,’ says Vitaliy. ‘“Finally, finally,” we all said. We have so much information about the location of Russian troops, logistics and key positions to target that these missiles can really make a difference – and can really help us to win here.’
The Ukrainians will need all the help they get. They are always outnumbered when they face their far more brutal and larger neighbour. And now things are even worse as Russian numbers in Kursk have swelled with the arrival of 10,000 North Koreans. The troops, whom Moscow has supposedly trained in artillery fire, basic infantry tactics and trench clearing, are likely to get involved in the continuing assaults against Ukraine’s positions. They wear Russian uniforms and are equipped by Moscow. But US officials assess that they will likely fight in their own distinct units.
‘I have had no direct encounter with the North Koreans,’ Vitaliy tells me. ‘Right now they are far from the front. But in my reconnaissance work we can see their deployment. Their groups stand out on the front line as they are much shorter than the Russian soldiers and even the Asian Russians, and they look different from them as well.’
He continues. ‘But it’s clear they are going to play a big role here. Some captured Russian soldiers said there are rumours that there are going to be more and more of them arriving. But we don’t care. Whether its North Koreans or Russians it makes no difference – we will kill them. Morale is high. We just need more ammunition.’
North Korean troops have been drawn from the 11th Corps, a special operations group comprised of their best fighters. But they have not seen ground combat for decades, and will fight as light infantry with no armoured vehicles, which is good for the Ukrainians, who are adept at deploying artillery fire and drones against unprotected Russian troops.
Analysts claim the Korean soldiers ‘are younger and in better physical shape than many Russian contract soldiers’. An analyst at the Institute for the Study of War has said the one thing they have that ‘might actually be better than the Russians is cohesion and discipline’. That is of course, if they can stay away from online pornography. The FT journalist Gideon Rachman recently tweeted that a reliable source had told him: ‘North Korean soldiers deployed to Russia have never had unfettered access to the internet before. As a result they are gorging on pornography.’
President Zelensky last week visited Ukrainian forces near the frontline of the war effort in the Donetsk Region
President Zelensky has spent the last number of days visiting Ukrainian forces near the frontline of the war effort in the Donetsk region
President Zelensky has spent the last number of days visiting Ukrainian forces near the frontline of the war effort in the Donetsk region
Morale amongst has been reportedly been low in the aftermath of the US Presidential election with Donald Trump running on foreign policy centering around ‘America First’
Supplies for frontline Ukrainian troops have been dwindling as the nation enters its winter months
Some troops have been on the frontline for over two years without any meaningful respite, resulting in fatigue and a drop in morale
The news that US weaponry can now be used to strike targets inside Russia has come as a great boost to Ukrainian forces
‘Yeah, we heard about this,’ says Vitaliy laughing. ‘Me and a couple of my boys joked about sending drones to their positions and then dropping phones loaded with Pornhub on to them.’
Either way, the arrival of the North Koreans is an ominous development. This marks a major broadening out of the war as another nation state joins the fight. Alongside its troops, Pyongyang has also reportedly supplied Russia with long-range rocket and artillery systems, some of which have been deployed to Kursk.
This includes 50 domestically produced 170mm M1989 self-propelled howitzers, and 20 updated 240mm multiple-launch rocket systems that can fire both standard rockets and guided ones.
The arrival of the North Koreans also drags China further into this war. We already know how deep China and Russia’s ties run. In February 2022 the two powers announced their own ‘no limits’ partnership. Russia is integral to creating the alternate world order Beijing wants to build and lead.
The ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy’ doctrine that underpins Chinese foreign policy stipulates that countries should work together on a ‘common destiny’. Make no mistake, the North Korea-Russia partnership, especially if successful in Kursk, brings the ‘common destiny’ of dismantling American and Western hegemony one step closer.
Trump’s imbecilic son Donald Trump Jr was enraged at Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use the long-range ATACMS missiles, tweeting: ‘The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives. Gotta lock in those $Trillions. Life be damned!!! Imbeciles!’
As ever his words no doubt gave succour to Putin, who warned in September that any use of ATACMS in Russia would change ‘the very essence, the nature of the conflict’. But he said any invasion of Russia would do the same, and he barely mentions the Kursk offensive to his own people.
Vladimir Dzhabarov, deputy head of the Russian upper house’s foreign affairs committee, was also eager to get in on the hyperbole. The US, he said, had taken ‘a very big step towards the beginning of a Third World War’.
In the end, though, it is perhaps a different harbinger of World War III that we need to beware of – and confront. Almost every week in 90 Seconds To Midnight, the Daily Mail’s weekly global news podcast, I discuss how the prospect of mass war is closer than ever. The podcast has travelled from Ukraine to Iraq to Israel, and the lesson from those I speak to is always the same: Appeasement emboldens our enemies.
It’s something that Vitaliy understands, too. ‘What does Trump mean when he says he will end this war?’ he asked me. ‘It can only end once all our conquered territories are returned. Only then will me and my boys go home.
‘Anything less is just a temporary pause, and if you agree with a dictator like Putin, he just uses it to regroup and then return to capture more territory. A dictator is only stopped by strength.
‘Trump reminds me of Neville Chamberlain. He said he would bring peace, but instead brought us World War II. Now, Trump could bring us World War III.’
