‘The game continues’: evacuating casualties and bombing bridges in Kursk

Deep into one recent night, at a Ukrainian mobile drone command point hidden amid the fields and forests close to the border with Russia, the largest of six screens flashed with images of the wiggling course of the River Seym, deep inside Russia on the other side of the border. Straddling the river, a thin band was visible, rendered in white by the night vision imaging: a pontoon bridge.

Inside the command point, Anna, Pavlo and Ivan watched the display intently. “Move in closer,” murmured Ivan, the team’s 48-year-old commander. Pavlo pushed a button and the camera zoomed in. “Yesterday, we destroyed this crossing, but they’ve repaired it again, probably in the last few hours,” he said, picking up his phone to send the information to an encrypted group chat of Ukrainian commanders in the area.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Anna, Pavlo and Ivan were respectively a logistics student, a property developer and the financial director of a pipe company. Now they form a drone team, part of Ukraine’s 14th Regiment of Unmanned Aerial Systems, piloting reconnaissance drones deep inside Russia to provide intelligence for Ukraine’s audacious incursion into Kursk , which began in early August.

For the past fortnight, they have focused on this section of the River Seym, where Ukraine blew up a bridge early in the incursion, and where the Russians are repeatedly trying to build pontoon bridges over the water as they attempt to halt Ukraine’s advance and reclaim the lost territory.

Ivan said river crossings were crucial for Russian supply lines. “Their whole garrison on our side of the river needs food and ammunition, and they need a bridge for that. The quicker we destroy their logistics routes, the quicker our guys can move forward.”

When the team finds an intact pontoon bridge, coordinates are relayed to other units in the area, and an air or long-range artillery strike can be launched. Further along the river, Ivan pointed out a pontoon bridge that had been intact during the previous night’s drone flight. Now it was destroyed, evidence of a Ukrainian strike in recent hours. “The game continues every day: they try to repair, we try to destroy,” he said.

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is at a critical juncture. It was launched with more political goals than military ones – to change the narrative of grinding Ukrainian losses at the front, to capture Russian prisoners to trade for detained Ukrainians, and potentially to have a chunk of Russian land to trade at possible negotiations, which many believe could be on the agenda in the near future.

There was also a hope that Russia would be forced to redirect forces from its advance on the city of Pokrovsk in the Donbas region to cope with the incursion. But that has not happened, with Russian troops continuing to make gradual advances there. With Pokrovsk in trouble, the wisdom of using so many forces to hold Kursk is increasingly under question.

Speaking on Wednesday, Ivan said the frontline in Kursk was elastic, with regular street battles at the edges. “The last few days, we have seen a lot of movement – some places we have moved them, some places they have moved us. It’s all very dynamic,” he said.

Russia launched a counteroffensive in the area on Thursday, claiming it retook 10 settlements in a speedy push. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, confirmed the Russian move, but claimed “everything was going according to Ukraine’s plan”.

Exactly what that plan is – digging in, attempting to advance further, or pulling back – has not been made public, save for Zelenskiy’s previous statement that Kyiv will try to hold the territory “for now”.

Even those involved in the offensive are not sure how it might look in a few days or weeks. “We have strict orders not to talk about anything to do with strategy on the Kursk front, and to be honest we don’t know ourselves,” said one officer fighting there.

But with Russia apparently halting Ukraine’s advance and beginning its own counteroffensive, holding on to the land taken early in the offensive could come at a high human cost for Ukraine, especially as winter approaches. “It may be more difficult to hold territory over the fall and winter. Right now, the treelines provide concealment, but it will be easier for Russia to identify Ukrainian positions once the leaves fall,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in the US.

Working inside Russia brings other challenges, owing to the lack of Ukrainian logistics infrastructure. The deeper Kyiv’s forces advance, the harder it is to keep the frontline supplied, and to evacuate the wounded and dead.

“On this front there is a feeling of much more danger than on others,” said Tetiana Romaniuk, a 33-year-old volunteer medic with the Hospitallers battalion, who is stationed close to the border and regularly enters Russia to evacuate the wounded.

The previous night, she had been on a mission to collect the bodies of killed Ukrainian soldiers. “We drove without lights, and the whole way I was terrified that someone would jump out of the bushes and ambush us,” she said.

Eventually, a Ukrainian soldier materialised in the darkness and said he would show them where the bodies were. Without radio reception, which had been jammed by the Russians, the team could not verify if the soldier was legitimate, and feared he could be a Russian decoy sent to lure them into a trap. But they had no choice except to follow him. It was not a trap, and they retrieved the bodies, driving out again quickly, always wary of the threat of Russian attack drones hovering above. Sometimes, they have to wait for days before it is safe enough to evacuate the wounded or dead.

“Light injuries become serious injuries while they are waiting for evacuation; and serious injuries without access to qualified help can unfortunately die. This is the problem with such a long shoulder for evacuations,” Romaniuk said.

At the reconnaissance drone command point, as dawn approached, the team sent their drone out one more time and returned to the screens to inspect a few forested areas they thought could be concealing Russian hardware.

“The Russians have much less stuff here than on other fronts,” Ivan said. He recalled a previous posting near Pokrovsk, where, in one drone flight, the team spotted six self-propelled artillery launchers. Here, the Russian forces are more modest – partly because Moscow was caught off-guard by the attack, and partly because it seems the Kremlin has decided to press on for Pokrovsk before trying to regain control of Kursk.

In Kyiv, a security source said a full assessment of the Kursk operation and whether it was worthwhile would only be possible at a later date.

“Nobody doubts that the way it was carried out was absolutely brilliant. It boosted morale, showed we can do things in secrecy and took everyone by surprise. But the final analysis of the operation will only come in a few weeks or months, when we find out if we are able to hold this territory,” the source said.