The battle of Kursk hinges on the Russian railroad

BelZhD, the union representing Belarusian railway workers, announced that as of August 12, Russian railway authority had asked its Belarusian counterpart not to dispatch trains to stations on the Orel-Kursk lines. This essentially severs rail links between Belarus and Russia.

“There is an accumulation of a large number of ‘abandoned’ trains (according to code 12 – the lack of a locomotive) at the stations of the Smolensk region of the Moscow Railway,” the Belarusian union said.

“This circumstance also affects the rhythm of sending freight trains from the BZD in the direction of the Moscow Railways and leads to a violation of the schedule of traffic.”

Having to reroute trains from Kursk has also created problems. The Ukrainian “breakthrough has led to a severe disruption in railway operations, paralyzing key routes across the country,” according to an August 19 article by European business news site bne IntelliNews.

Exactly how overloaded the Russian rail network may be isn’t clear. “We’ve seen the Belarusian rail workers report about how Russian Railways commandeered rail traffic in southwestern Russia to prioritize military logistics to respond to Kursk,” George Barros, a Russia expert for the Washington-based Institute for Study of War, told Business Insider. “We’ve not been able to independently verify those reports but I have no reason to doubt it.”

Russia’s railroads already were in bad shape before the Kursk operation. Russian bloggers have warned that Western sanctions against exporting ball bearings to Russia has crippled maintenance and created a shortage of locomotives. Russian railroad officials have reportedly been threatened with punishment, while the Russian railway authority admitted in 2023 that lack of locomotive maintenance and spare parts resulted in 42,600 trains being canceled last year.

Western experts question whether their own armies could move large numbers of troops without Russia’s woes from sanctions. “In my own experience, we were constantly short of truck transport when I was a brigade commander in the 101st Airborne Division,” retired Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of US Army forces in Europe, told Ukrainian media. “The point is that nobody, even the Russians, has enough trucks for large movements on short notice.”

So far, Kyiv’s hopes that Russia would divert troops to Kursk from its offensives in eastern and southern Ukraine have been disappointed. Despite the humiliation of foreign troops occupying Russian soil, Russian forces continue to grind forward in bloody attacks at places such as Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region.

Instead, Russia had hastily deployed a hodgepodge of army conscripts, plus internal security forces from the Rosgvardiya national guard, Interior Ministry and FSB spy service, as part of what the Kremlin calls a “counter-terrorist” operation under the command of the FSB. Either way, those units need to transported from around Russia, and then supplied. Relying on trucks would require an extraordinary number of vehicles, so it seems likely that Russian forces at Kursk will require multiple railheads that depend on a limited number of railroad bridges.

“Many such bridge bottlenecks are easy to find,” said Barrow, who has identified for four key bridges in the Kursk, Orel and Bryansk regions.

However, other experts say that the Russian railway system has enough depth to handle disruptions (see this map of the rail infrastructure around Kursk). “Ukraine’s incursion may force Russia to reassign military logistics routes to the Kharkiv front through neighboring regions,” Callum Fraser, a Russia expert at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute think tank, told Business Insider. “This will lengthen the time it takes to supply material from the Leningrad and Moscow military districts, but this will unlikely be a significant extension.”

However, Ukraine has captured data about the Russian railway system, which will make it easier to disrupt operations, Fraser noted. “Russia’s digitization of its railway infrastructure, including aspects such as its integrated infrastructure management system, mean that Ukraine has been able to access data of arms shipments from a captured railway station. There may be more weaknesses within this system that Ukraine could exploit.”

With Ukraine claiming to control 500 square miles of Russian territory around Kursk, it now has what is essentially a forward base inside Russia from which to launch rockets and drones at targets deeper in the Russian interior. In particular, US-made ATACMS guided artillery rockets could hit key facilities such as airfields, supply depots  — and railroad bridges. The Kursk region has nearly a thousand rivers and streams.

Ukrainian aircraft have already destroyed several bridges across the Seym River east of the city of Kursk. However, the Biden administration has balked at giving Ukraine permission to launch long-range ATACMS missiles at targets in Russian beyond the Ukraine-Russia border. Barros believes that Ukraine could seriously disrupt Russian rail traffic and logistics if the US would lift those restrictions.

“Russia’s rail network in Bryansk, Kursk, Oryol, Belgorod, and Voronezh oblasts have some natural bottlenecks where those rail lines go over bridges to cross rivers,” Barros said. “It would be great if, for example, Ukrainian forces could degrade Russian forces’ ability to use rail in this sector by using ATACMS to destroy these rail bridges.”

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.