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Credit: Ukrainian Air Assault Forces
Ukrainian paratroopers used an armoured vehicle to try to crush Russian soldiers after claiming to have run out of ammunition during an attack in Kursk.
A US-supplied Stryker infantry carrier with a top speed of 60mph was filmed by drones on Monday chasing Russian troops around a snow-covered field, crushing at least one under its wheels.
Ukrainian troops reported that their 16-ton Stryker – normally equipped with a top-mounted machine gun – had no more ammunition, although one crew member used a rifle to fire at the Russians from its hatch.
The paratroopers did not specify where the incident in Kursk occurred. On Sunday, Ukraine launched a counter-attack with tanks and infantry after months of deadlock in the Russian border region after an initial incursion months ago allowed Kyiv to capture swathes of land.
It was not clear why Russian troops encountered the vehicle in the open. David Axe, a war correspondent and analyst, suggested that the Russian soldiers may have been separated from their comrades during the chaos of Sunday’s assault.
‘Confused fighting’
“That kind of confused fighting has characterised the battle for Kursk,” Mr Axe wrote in Forbes magazine. He added that running over the defenceless Russian troops to death may have also been down to “bloodlust”.
Informant, a pro-Russian military blog, said that Russian troops were unlikely to show mercy to the “dwindling number of Ukrainian occupiers” after the publication of the footage.
Ukraine’s new advance in Kursk continued into Monday and Tuesday, with both sides claiming to have inflicted damage on the other.
Ukraine’s general staff said on Tuesday that it was conducting “new offensive operations” and that it had carried out a “high-precision strike” on a Russian marine brigade’s command centre near the village of Belaya.
Russia’s defence ministry claimed the enemy advance had been thwarted and that its main force had been destroyed near the village of Berdin, about 12 miles north-east of Sudzha, the main town in Kursk under Ukrainian control.
An unverified video that circulated on social media on Tuesday appeared to show Russian troops in Kursk searching the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers lying dead in the snow after a recent clash.
Rybar, a pro-Kremlin war blogger, said Russian forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near Bolshoe Soldatskoe, about 17 miles north-east of Sudzha.
The channel claimed that during the fresh offensive Ukraine suffered over 200 casualties, lost 35 pieces of equipment including tanks and had 14 soldiers taken prisoner.
It also added that Russian forces had taken advantage of Ukraine’s offensive north of Sudzha to advance on Makhnovka, 2.5 miles south of the Ukrainian-held town.
Analysts say Ukraine’s new Kursk offensive is relatively small in scale, but that Kyiv is trying to hold onto its foothold in Russia for as long as possible in order to use it as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Moscow.
Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst, said: “There’s a likelihood that we haven’t seen the main thrust of this Ukrainian offensive operation just yet. We are essentially talking about platoon-sized, company-sized assaults with fairly limited gains thus far.”
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said on Monday that Russia had suffered a total of 38,000 casualties in Kursk since Ukraine seized part of the region in August last year.
