Last week, Russia and North Korea may have lost about 400 soldiers in one attempt to capture the village of Makhnovka in western Russia’s Kursk region, according to Forbes.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a message from the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine, General Oleksandr Syrsky.
“In today’s and yesterday’s battles near just one village – Makhnovka in the Kursk region – the Russian army lost up to a battalion of infantry, including North Korean soldiers and Russian paratroopers,” said V. Zelensky. “And it’s palpable.”
In Makhnovka, a no-man’s land on the eastern edge of the 250-square-mile territory that Ukrainian troops wrested from Kursk in August, fierce fighting has been raging for days. Videos circulating on social media show Russian and North Korean soldiers marching into a village and being attacked by Ukrainian infantry, tanks and drones.
Forbes notes that analyst Andrew Perpetua, who analyzes social media to calculate Russian and Ukrainian losses, seemed to confirm the Russian casualties mentioned by V. Zelensky.
“I feel like I just saw an entire battalion of Russians killed in one video,” Perpetua noted Monday. He claimed to have visually confirmed 408 victims in one day.
According to Forbes, the four-mile stretch of front line between Makhnovka in the north and Plekhove in the south is not the most intensive sector of Kursk. Clashes around Machnovka were less frequent than, say, around Zelenyi Shylakh on the western side.
Khorne Group/Telegram/North Koreans killed in Kursk
However, it is possible that separate battles in Makhnovka and Plekhov were bloodier. December 14 more than 500 North Korean infantry, attacking in three waves across the open fields outside Plekhove, eventually managed to dislodge the 100 Ukrainian soldiers holding the village.
But marching across snowy fields without much support, the North Koreans were easy targets for the retreating Ukrainian drones and artillery. Andriy Caplienka, a Ukrainian journalist, suggested that the North Korean losses – killed and wounded – may have been more than half of the attacking force.
Last weekend’s Russian offensive at Makhnovka could have been even more costly and less successful. Machnovka not only remains in a gray area between Ukrainian and Russian control, but there is some evidence that Ukrainian troops – perhaps from the 61st Mechanized Brigade, the 36th Separate Rifle Battalion or their attached territorial brigades – have actually advanced a short distance of about at the same time as up to 400 dead or wounded Russians lay in the same area.
Heavy Russian and North Korean losses are beginning to take a toll on the two-month-old Russian-led counteroffensive at Kursk.
“In the Kursk region, combat operations have intensified to the maximum level, forcing the Russian group there to use all available resources,” the Center for Defense Strategies of Ukraine reported.
“This happened at a very inconvenient and inauspicious time for them,” the group added. – If the intense battles continue for another five to ten days, the Russian group will need to be replenished urgently, because it is already suffering heavy losses during the battles. This replenishment can only be achieved by redistributing forces from other sectors of the front.”
Source: www.15min.lt
