Weekly Ukraine war summary: AFU moves to isolate Kursk Region’s Glushkovsky District, Ukrainian drones reach Murmansk, Pokrovsk evacuated

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In today's summary:

• Ukrainian troops are attempting to take the town of Korenevo and completely isolate the Glushkovsky District in Russia’s Kursk Region.
• The Russian command has not yet transferred units from Donbas to the Kursk direction.
• The Russian Armed Forces have increased the pace of their advance towards Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region — mass evacuations from the city are ongoing.
• Ukrainian drones struck the Marinovka military airfield in Russia’s Volgograd Region and were close to reaching Murmansk in Russia’s Far North.
• The names of over a hundred conscripts who went missing and were taken captive in the Kursk Region have been identified.
• After more than a month, the U.S. administration has still not responded to a British request for permission to use Franco-British Storm Shadow cruise missiles against targets on Russian territory.
• Germany plans to cut military aid to Ukraine from its budget, replacing it with loans guaranteed by frozen Russian assets.
• Kamikaze drones made of sewer pipes and the first tank equipped with a fully rubber anti-drone “tsar-mangal” (“king grill” aka “turtle armor”) have been spotted on the front line.

Situation on the front lines

The Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) operation in the Kursk Region has been underway for more than two weeks. In recent days there have been no large-scale changes in the line of contact, but actions to expand the combat zone have not stopped. The presence of Ukrainian troops was reported in Olgovka, Vishnevka, and Snagost on the approaches to Korenevo — another district center that the AFU apparently plans to seize following its move into Sudzha.

Ukrainian forces have also entered Krasnooktyabrskoye and Komarovka, effectively cutting off the Glushkovsky District from the rest of the Russian “mainland” to the east. To the north, along the Seym River, the AFU has struck the last fixed bridge, likely rendering it unusable for heavy equipment, and has begun attacking pontoon crossings and engineering equipment, isolating the Russian forces in the Glushkovsky District. Ukrainian forces are now less than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the Glushkovsky District center, where reports of looting by Russian servicemen have emerged.

Roman Alekhin, an advisor to the acting governor of the Kursk Region, is urging residents of Rylsk, another district center, to evacuate immediately. Those who have already fled the conflict zone have described to The Insider a lack of organized evacuation efforts while noting that the flight of officials and law enforcement officers often occurred before civilians were warned of any impending danger. Residents of the affected Russian region also spoke of their attempts to find alternative information sources through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

Despite the transfer of various reserves (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), and after more than two weeks of fighting on Russian territory, the Russian Armed Forces have yet to form a grouping sufficient for a full-scale counteroffensive (The Insider recently estimated that Russia will need at least 30,000 troops to potentially expel Ukrainian forces from the Kursk Region). The Russian Defense Ministry continues to engage in ineffective media management, presenting old footage from Ukraine labeled as new strikes against the AFU in the Kursk Region. Nonetheless, many Ukrainian attacks really are being repelled, as evidenced by a video of close-range combat in the village of Russkaya Konopelka. Meanwhile, Russia is continuing to build rear defensive lines in the region, with Ukrainian forces attempting to disrupt these efforts by targeting construction equipment with FPV drones.

So far, the AFU's Kursk operation has failed to achieve one of its apparent primary goals — the pullback of Russian units from the dangerous Pokrovsk and Toretsk directions in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region (as reported by sources cited by Bloomberg). This is unsurprising, since, as noted by the independent open source intelligence (OSINT) project DeepState, the Russian command has a range of quieter frontlines from which to redeploy reserves, with minimal disruption to its ongoing offensive efforts in eastern Ukraine. Nevertheless, even these quieter areas can become active, as evidenced by the AFU’s 3rd Assault Brigade destroying a Russian battalion defense area near Novovodyane (geolocation) in the Svatove direction, liberating around 2 square kilometers (0.7 square miles) of territory.

Be that as it may, the decision not to withdraw reserves from the Donetsk Region seems to be paying off for the Russian army. According to calculations shared by the daily news arm of the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo, Agentstvo.Novosti, the Russian forces’ rate of advance in eastern Ukraine has increased since the AFU launched its offensive in Kursk, with most of the gains occurring in the Pokrovsk direction, where the Ukrainian military is experiencing a shortage of ammunition for the first time since the resumption of U.S. military aid this past spring — a significant portion of artillery rounds were allocated for the Kursk operation.

Mass evacuations have begun in Pokrovsk itself (a town known as Krasnoarmiisk until 2016), with the Russian military targeting the town and the key highway to Kostiantynivka with FPV drones and tank fire. Despite this, Ukrainian military observer Kostiantyn Mashovets believes that the Russian Armed Forces will likely hold their position and regroup in the near future, and the AFU command may still have the opportunity to organize an effective defense, possibly thwarting Russian plans to advance on Pokrovsk with a flank attack of their own from Ukrainian-controlled Selydove.

Mutual strikes and sabotage

The AFU Air Force command reported the successful repulsion of several Russian nighttime missile and drone strikes over the past week. The AFU described the following missile and drone attacks:

• On the night of August 17, Sumy was struck by an Iskander-K cruise missile and all 14 Iranian-designed Shahed drones launched by Russia were shot down.
• On the night of August 18, 13 out of 16 aerial targets were shot down, including two North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles, three cruise missiles, and eight Shahed drones. Another missile was not shot down, but did not reach its target, and there were no casualties.
• On the night of August 19, all 11 Shaheds fired were shot down.
• On the night of August 20, 25 out of 26 Shaheds, two Kh-59 guided missiles and an Iskander-K cruise missile were shot down, and two Iskander-M ballistic missiles were also launched. In the Ternopil Region, an industrial facility caught fire, causing an increase in the concentration of chlorine in the air, and in the Sumy Region, a strike hit an energy facility, causing a power outage in 72 localities
• On the night of August 21, 50 of 69 Shaheds were shot down, and another 16 were “radar-lost,” possibly as a result of electronic warfare, with one reportedly flying to Belarus); one Kh-59 guided air-launched missile and two Iskander-M / KN-23 ballistic missiles were also launched.
• On the night of August 22, Ukrainian forces managed to shoot down two Shahed drones out of 10, and two more were “radar-lost.” Russia also launched an unnamed number of Kh-31P anti-radar missiles and two Iskander-M ballistic missiles, with the AFU claiming that most of them failed to reach their targets.
• On the night of August 23, 14 of 16 Shaheds were intercepted, two more disappeared from radars, and two Iskander-M ballistic missiles were launched.

During the week, Russian forces struck the following known targets:

• Two groups of Patriot surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems in the Dnipropetrovsk Region (1, 2), one of which may have been a decoy.
• A decoy IRIS-T SAM in the Sumy Region.
• A real S-300PS SAMs and a P-18 radar in the Kharkiv Region.
• M270 MLRS in the Mykolaiv Region.

The Russian Defense Ministry, for its part, also reported on the repulsion of nighttime drone strikes by the AFU during the week. According to the Russian MoD, the following occurred over the territory of Russia and the Crimean Peninsula:

• On the night of August 17, one fixed-wing drone was destroyed.
• On the night of August 18, five UAVs were destroyed, and an oil depot in Proletarsk in the Rostov Region was hit. The depot was ablaze throughout the week, at least 15 of the 76 storage tanks burned out, and nearly 50 firefighters were injured.
• On the night of August 19 — four UAVs were destroyed.
• On the night of August 20 — two UAVs were intercepted.
• On the night of August 21, 45 UAVs were intercepted. The Marinovka airfield in the Volgograd Region came under attack, resulting in the destruction of several hangars, the detonation of an ammunition depot, and damage to up to six aircraft, including Su-34 fighter-bombers which are the main carriers of air-launched bombs equipped with UMPK gliding and guidance kits. According to the Fighterbomber Telegram channel, run by a Russian Air Force insider, all the affected aircraft were already non-operational due to a shortage of spare parts, while the remaining aircraft managed to leave the airbase before the slow-flying drones arrived.
• On the night of August 22, 28 UAVs were intercepted.
• On the night of August 23, seven UAVs were reportedly shot down.

The above statistics from Russian and Ukrainian military sources indicate that the Russian Armed Forces launched at least 154 kamikaze UAVs and 20 missiles at Ukraine during night raids over the past week, while the Russian military intercepted 92 Ukrainian UAVs. Notably, last week saw Ukrainian drone launches outnumbering those from Russia.

A missile strike on Port Kavkaz in Russia’s Krasnodar Region resulted in the sinking of the last railroad ferry at the Kerch crossing, the “Conro Trader.” The Dossier Shpiona (lit. “Spy Dossier”) Telegram channel reported that the strike was carried out by a Ukrainian-made Neptun anti-ship missile. The ferry was transporting 14 tank cars with fuel, 14 railroad cars with military cargo, and 15 crew members, all of whom were rescued.

The BBC Russian Service calculates that a total of 64 strikes have hit Russian energy infrastructure facilities since the beginning of the year, with fires reported in 48 cases. Agentstvo.Novosti estimated that since the beginning of summer, the AFU launched more than 2,000 drones and missiles on the territory of Russia and the Crimean peninsula, half of them from July 21 to August 22. Finally, according to an estimate from the independent outlet Verstka, the area of Russian territory vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks increased to 2.6 million square kilometers (over 1 million square miles) after an attempted aerial raid on the Olenya strategic aviation airfield 90 kilometers from the city of Murmansk, which lies north of the Arctic Circle.

Losses

Journalists from The Washington Post visited a Ukrainian prison for Russian POWs, where 320 people from the Kursk Region passed through in 10 days, 80% of them conscripts. The independent Russian investigative publication Important Stories identified 129 conscripts soldiers who have either been reported missing (84) or captured (45), with the majority belonging to the 488th and 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiments. The BBC Russian Service has confirmed 81 missing conscripts and two deaths. A joint effort by the BBC, independent outlet Mediazona, and a team of volunteers has calculated that a total of at least 65,552 Russian personnel have died since the full-scale invasion began.

On the propaganda show Solovyov LIVE, Russian war blogger Kirill Fyodorov discussed an incident involving the execution of Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian fighters from the “Aida group” — part of the Chechen “Akhmat” special forces unit operating in the Kursk Region. Fyodorov claimed that the captured Ukrainian soldiers “chose to commit group suicide.”

Researcher Naalsio updated data on equipment losses confirmed by open sources. According to his calculations, from July 26 to August 16, the Russian Armed Forces lost at least 93 units of equipment in the Pokrovsk direction, while the AFU lost at least 21 units. In the Kursk direction, between August 15 and August 20, the AFU lost at least 14 units, while Russian forces lost at least 13 units.

Weapons and military equipment

The Times reported that the Biden administration has not responded to the UK's request to allow Ukraine to strike internationally recognized Russian territory with Franco-British Storm Shadow / SCALP-EG missiles. Aside from the U.S., approval would also be required from France and another European country involved in the missiles’ production.

This week it was also revealed that German military aid to Ukraine is being frozen, with plans to reduce funding from Germany’s budget from the current €7-8 billion to €4 billion by 2025, and to just 10% of that amount by 2027. The German government is considering a loan mechanism backed by frozen Russian assets, as agreed to within the G7, but this plan has not yet been fully worked out and remains legally controversial.

Meanwhile, Germany has supplied Kyiv with another batch of weapons, including an IRIS-T SLS SAM, a Bergepanzer 2 armored recovery vehicles, and 14,000 155mm artillery rounds. Previously undisclosed deliveries of Bulgarian-made thermobaric ammunition for the RPG-7 grenade launcher were also spotted. An inflatable decoy of an F-16 fighter jet with Ukrainian markings was displayed at a weapons exhibition in Denmark — though there are no known plans to supply these decoys to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, on the front, the Ukrainian military is making kamikaze drones out of sewer pipes (former Roscosmos head and Russian war hawk Dmitry Rogozin has advised Moscow to adopt the practice) and adapting 60mm rifled mortars to fire 40mm grenades using homemade shell casings.

The Russian military, meanwhile, appears to have reached new heights of “grill-building” by enclosing artillery guns in “tsar-mangals” (lit. “king grills” aka “turtle armor” — contraptions intended to protect military equipment from drone strikes). Russia has also displayed new models of tank-borne “tsar-mangals” with folding beds — and a cover made entirely out of rubber conveyor belt.