Running Out of Cards in Kursk – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

“Zelensky’s decision to expose the cream of his army to occupy a piece of vacant wasteland in the world’s largest country, to supposedly strengthen his bargaining power with Putin, could backfire. Russia can now threaten to annihilate his crack troops struggling to hang on to their shrinking perimeter in Kursk while swallowing eastern Ukraine piecemeal,” I wrote last Oct. 18 in The American Spectator. (RELATED: Swallowing Eastern Ukraine Piecemeal)

It’s now happening. According to the latest confirmed battlefield reports, the Russians are cutting Ukraine’s logistic lines to Kursk and surrounding the elite units Zelenskyy sent into the region last August for what is turning into a predictably tragic disaster that further weakens Ukraine’s hand in prospective peace negotiations.

“NATO should be telling Zelensky in no uncertain terms, and publicly if necessary, to pull out of Kursk,” I wrote last Nov. 29. It may now be too late. The brain-dead Biden administration in power at the time exerted no such pressure. Neither did America’s worldly European allies, who never seemed to question the sacrifice of Ukraine’s best units like the 47th Mechanized Brigade, trained and equipped at great expense by NATO, in a doomed gamble.

The notion that clinging to a remote pocket of Russian border territory would force Putin to cede strategic gains in eastern Ukraine is like expecting a master chess player to trade a queen for a rook. Putin took his time building up a separate army group to overwhelm the 20,000 or so Ukrainians entrenched in Kursk. Calculations that he would have to divert Russian forces from Donbas ignored Russia’s overwhelming advantage in manpower. His Western advisors should have hammered the point with Zelenskyy as Vice President JD Vance just tried to do at the Oval Office. (RELATED: Trump and Zelensky — Is There a Way Back?)

Ukraine’s high command was aware of the problem. Former army chief general Valerii Zaluzhnyi published a paper advocating a cautious defensive strategy of “positional warfare” following the failed 2023 Counter Offensive. It wasn’t what Zelenskyy wanted to hear, so he replaced him with the more aggressive general Oleksandr Syrskyi and purged the high command of those opposed to invading Kursk, including the commander of the 80th Air Assault Brigade, which is now getting dismembered there.

Putin gathered Marines brought up from Crimea, newly mobilized motorized infantry brigades, paratroopers from the Kremlin’s strategic reserves based around Moscow, and North Korean troops landed by his buddy Kim Jong-un for a combined force that steadily recovered two-thirds of Kursk before going in for the kill last week. (RELATED: North Korea Is in the Fight)

In my Feb. 22 piece, “Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand,” I reported how Putin announced at a Moscow press conference that he was moving forces to “surround” Kursk. I noted that Russian military bloggers simultaneously reported incursions into Ukraine along either side of the Kursk salient, supported by missile and rocket barrages. (READ MORE: Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand)

Ukrainian spokesmen dismissed the Russian troop movements as “a reconnaissance force,” saying that it had been “quickly repulsed.” The mainstream media gave no attention to Russia’s developing pincer movement as cameras focused on Zelenskyy’s trip to Washington and the televised shouting match with Trump when the U.S. president told him, “You are losing this war … you have no cards.”

The media, Democrats, and globalist intellectuals will naturally blame Trump for the latest battlefield reverses, even if his public threats to cut military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv as a way of pressuring Zelenskyy to accept U.S. ceasefire plans were never fully carried out. But before US KH-11 military satellites may have been temporarily cut off, the Ukrainian leader seemed disconnected from the critical situation developing in Kursk. Zelenskyy seemed more focused on the satellite feeds of CNN.

As Zelenskyy exchanged kisses with EU President Ursula von der Leyen at a gathering of Trump-deranged European leaders receiving him in London like a conquering hero following his White House performance, several regiments of Russia’s 106th Guards Air Assault Division were moving to within artillery range of the highway connecting Ukraine’s logistical hub in Sumy with the Kursk forward base in Sudzha to pound his supply columns.

On the opposite end of the 6-mile salient, Russian marines, regular infantry, and North Koreans simultaneously overran a string of villages north of Sudzha. Entire units fell back to their main base, spurred on by fears of North Korean “Storm” groups spearheading the Russian assault might apply their doctrine of no prisoners with zeal to avenge their 4,000 mates killed by the Ukrainians over previous months.

In a coordinated operation, Russian Spetsnaz and North Korean special forces, with detailed maps of Gazprom’s pipeline network in Kursk, crawled underground for nine miles to infiltrate Sudzha’s defenses, employing tactics applied effectively in previous sieges. They were “detected by drones and repulsed with artillery strikes,” according to official statements from Ukraine’s General Staff. Russian military spokesmen say that the infiltrations were “successful,” and fighting was ongoing in the immediate outskirts of Sudzha where 5,000-6,000 Ukrainians face “encirclement.”

“The defense of Sudzha is holding,” according to Ukraine’s general staff, but an officer anonymously quoted in the Kyiv Independent newspaper says that “nothing is getting through from Sumy.” Ukraine’s military doesn’t give casualty figures and is keeping a very tight lid on the deteriorating situation in Kursk. Drone and satellite images released through various social media channels show countless rows of gutted trucks and armored vehicles lining the highway to Sudzha.

The Russians are also mounting concerted attacks along the western and eastern sides of Ukraine’s 150 square mile perimeter, targeting secondary supply routes and fracturing the occupying force into isolated pockets targeted by one-ton glide bombs launched from Su-34 fighters.

Bridges are being systematically demolished. One aerial video shows a bridge outside Sudzha going up in smoke as a Ukrainian convoy approaches. Men run out, dispersing into nearby buildings and tree lines as their trucks are picked off by newly developed wire-guided “Prince Vandal of Novgorod” drones invulnerable to electronic jamming, which are “saturating the Kursk battlefield,” according to the New York Times.

I commented last November that Zelenskyy needed a “reality check.” It should have come from his allies, but, unfortunately, it’s coming from Putin. His expeditionary force in Kursk faces annihilation. The disciplined bravery so far displayed by elite troops deployed there indicates that they could resist in Sudzha until ammunition runs out. Not more than 20 percent of them are expected to survive the Russian gauntlet they would cross to get back to Sumy, which the Russians could now be starting to encircle.

Russian surrender terms are already being proposed to individual Ukrainian units, according to some unconfirmed reports, including detailed demands for the handover of all NATO equipment, such as U.S. Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, headquarter radios, and drone operating systems with their codes and encryption software intact, etc.

General Syrskyi said this week that he is sending reinforcements to Kursk. But in an exact inversion of what Zelenskyy wanted to do to Putin by invading Kursk, transferring the number of troops needed to reopen supply lines to Sudzha could weaken already overstretched defensive lines in the critical sectors of the front in Donbas and lead to their collapse.

READ MORE from Martin Arostegui:

Cuba Helps Russia Against Ukraine

Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand

Europe’s Deep State Election Meddling Threatens NATO