Syrskyi Pushes The 'Easy Button' In Kursk

Again, because it keeps working

“This river looks like a nice place to repeat the Kherson offensive of 2022”

Regard the alleged teeth of dragons. A concrete pyramid sitting on the ground is not at all like a tooth. A tooth is embedded deep in your jaw, so that it does not go rolling around on your gums while you chew. So-called ‘dragon’s teeth’ fixed to the ground by nothing more than gravity are like rootless teeth: useless, or worse than useless, for chewing up an enemy. Even if they were fixed to the ground, either half-buried or pinned down by iron bars as actual dragon’s teeth, these would be useless, or worse than useless, without forces in place to defend the obstacle.

As seen in this video (source), any combat engineering vehicle equipped with a bulldozer blade can push these rootless ‘dragon’s teeth’ aside with contemptuous ease. Thousands of Russians are reportedly defending Glushkovo District of Kursk Oblast below the Seym River, yet somehow this spot was weakly defended when Ukrainians attacked. Further Ukrainain drone video released on social media shows many Ukrainian vehicles advancing through the breach.

Pyramidal concrete obstacles might as well be loose boulders. They are ineffective at stopping enemy armor for very long at all. At best, they create the political appearance of defenses. At worst, they lull the command of the defense into thinking their defenses are impregnable, so that they turn their metaphorical backs to the enemy. Russians first introduced these barriers in Ukraine, which belatedly deployed some of their own during the defensive months of 2024. All along the international boundary, the Russians had demonstrated a dangerous disregard for the threat of invasion by Ukraine for too long, put too much trust in these symbolic defenses.

Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi exploited that vulnerability when he planned the ‘Kursk incursion,’ now in its second month. He expected the Russian armed forces to display no imagination in Glushkovo District of Kursk Oblast and was hardly disappointed. Syrskyi watched the geographic pocket develop between Ukraine and the Seym River as hoped and planned, saw Russians preparing to counterattack, and timed his second blow to land in their backs again. The plan was not complicated. Syrskyi hit the ‘easy button,’ then he hit it again. He will continue to press the easy button because it keeps working. Russians keep making choices that make the Battle of Kursk easy, for Ukaine. So why do anything different?