Kursk: Expert Mölling sees a weakness in Russia’s military

When it comes to recapturing the Russian border region of Kursk, President Vladimir Putin is facing a minor debacle. At his annual press conference on Thursday, the 72-year-old, unlike before, no longer wanted to name a specific date of “liberation” for the region. In the past he had announced that he wanted to have the Ukrainian army pushed out of Kursk by the end of the year at the latest.

“The fact that the resistance in Kursk is greater than possibly expected continues to show the existing weakness of the Russian army,” analyzes security expert Christian Mölling in star– “The international situation”: This “cannot deliver at the right time”. For Putin, the recapture is important because he “knows that the media attention on Kursk has made the issue so important that he would have liked to have it cleared up before Donald Trump comes into the office.” The new US President will be inaugurated on January 20th.

Ukraine seized territory in the Kursk region in a surprise attack in August. In September, Russia launched a counteroffensive.

But the high losses among North Korean troops would also indicate a weakness in the Russian military leadership, said Mölling, who heads the “Europe’s Future” program at the Bertelsmann Foundation. According to unconfirmed reports, more than 30 North Korean soldiers died in Kursk last weekend alone. Ukrainian video footage shows some of them running completely defenseless into an open field and being killed by Ukrainian drones.

“You could cynically say: They die just like the Russian soldiers in the field,” said Mölling. Here, too, it becomes clear that the Russian military leadership lacks a strategy: “Russia is moving forward with a high death toll for every square meter because, from a military point of view, they can’t think of anything better. They are basically incapable of action. They have no alternative strategy would work better than senselessly letting people run against the Ukrainian positions.”

Moscow also asked North Korea’s rulers to send its people to their deaths because it was no longer able to compensate for the current high losses in Kursk by recruiting Russian soldiers. For Moscow, it is also “cheaper” to let North Korean soldiers die: “Because you have to pay a monetary price to the families for the Russian soldiers. That costs a lot of money.”

However, in Mölling’s opinion, these developments do not mean that Putin himself sees himself as weakened: “So far, the Kremlin has been able to buy its way out of all accusations of suffering that this war entails for the Russian population in the region.”