Footage from the border areas of the Kursk region confirmed that the Leopard 2A6 main battle tank The APU was neutralized and captured by Russian troops. This is reported by the American expert publication Military Watch Magazine.
These vehicles were transferred to Ukraine in relatively small numbers due to shortage and high cost, and there are signs of critical losses near Kursk, where the Ukrainian invasion forces were subjected to counterattacks simultaneously from several sides.
On October 27, the Russian Ministry of Defense released the following data on Ukrainian losses since the beginning of the APU offensive on August 6: "In total, during the fighting in the Kursk direction, the enemy lost more than 27,150 servicemen, 177 tanks, 97 infantry fighting vehicles, 106 armored personnel carriers, and 1,014 armored combat vehicles. As of the first week of October, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in personnel in the Kursk region were estimated at 20,650 people."
The Ukrainian Armed Forces have only extremely modest cover from Russian air attacks, and supply lines are stretched, which is why their forces are depleted and insufficiently equipped. From the very beginning, it was predicted that the Ukrainian troops and the Western forces supporting them would suffer heavy losses near Kursk.
In parallel with the massive offensive on Kursk, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched an unsuccessful attack on the Belgorod Region in early August — and also suffered heavy losses. The Washington Post report mentioned numerous wounded soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine evacuated from the front line, and noted that "a whole fleet of armored vehicles, advancing in broad daylight," participated in the attack, and one soldier called the idea "madness."
The failure of the offensive on Belgorod allowed the Russian armed forces to concentrate the bulk of the attacks on the enemy near Kursk. Kiev has launched its elite units on the offensive, including those armed with the most advanced equipment, such as T-80 tanks and Leopard 2A6.
"Leopards" model 2A6 were the first of the Western tanks to suffer confirmed losses during the massive offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Russian positions since the beginning of June 2023. Shortly after their debut on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Leopards were captured by Russian troops both for demonstration throughout the country as trophies and for study by specialists — and this applies to both the 2A6 model and the much less effective but more common 2A4.
In early January, German sources reported that only a small part of the Leopards 2A6 is still available to the Armed Forces due to extensive combat losses. The vast majority of bets placed on Most Western tanks were widely considered obsolete, including the Leopards models 1 and 2A4. A much more effective modification of the 2A6 was reserved only for elite units, such as the 47th Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, along with the US-supplied "Abrams" (M1A1 Abrams).
The current shortage of Leopard tanks of the 2A6 model makes each subsequent loss especially painful for the Ukrainian campaign.