It was the Ukrainian military’s most significant success in months, but the surprise incursion deep into Russia’s Kursk region raises difficult questions about what comes next.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his aides say they are preparing a proposal to end the war, but Ukraine’s surprise offensive has also focused attention on the uncertainties of Kyiv’s long-term objectives, what it can realistically achieve on the battlefield and how Russia will adjust and respond to the events of the recent days.
Just over three weeks ago, Ukrainian troops, tanks and armored vehicles blitzed across the Russian border, seized a sizable chunk of Russia’s western Kursk region and stunned international observers and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The offensive has dealt a humiliating blow to the Kremlin’s narrative that its “special military operation” was going according to plan, as a foreign army occupies Russian land for the first time since World War II. With the dust having settled and Kyiv claiming to have reached most of its objectives in Kursk, the questions are now: What were those goals? Have they been accomplished, as Kyiv is claiming? And what will be the impact, if any, on the war’s outcome?
It’s not clear what the Ukrainian forces are planning inside Russia or how long they will stay. Kyiv has said it has no plans for a permanent base, but Ukrainian forces have been building up defensive lines inside Kursk and have shown no signs that a withdrawal is imminent.
The Kursk mission “has the potential to change the dynamic” of the war at least “a little bit going forward,” Deputy CIA Director David Cohen told the Intelligence & National Security Summit in Maryland on Wednesday. “We can be certain that Putin will mount a counteroffensive to try to reclaim that territory. Our expectation is that that will be a difficult fight for the Russians.”
The public relations fallout will likely be equally momentous.
The CIA official said Mr. Putin “is not only going to have to face the fact that there is a front line now within Russian territory that he’s going to have to deal with, he has to deal with reverberations back in his own society that they have lost a piece of Russian territory.”
Analysts say the fog of war obscures definitive answers and more time will be needed to assess the situation on the ground and the extent of the Ukrainian incursion in Russia.
Strategic targets
Ukraine’s armed forces said they now control some 500 square miles of Russian territory and more than 100 localities in the Kursk oblast. If true, it means Kyiv has seized more land in two weeks inside Russia than Russian forces have claimed over the past year in Ukraine.
Among the numerous small towns and villages captured by the Ukrainians, the tiny town of Sudzha stands out because of its strategic significance. Less than 5 miles from the border with Ukraine, this small, wholly unremarkable town of about 5,000 acquired a newfound economic value after the sabotaging of the Nord Stream pipelines because it is now the last transit point for Russian gas flowing into Europe.
Having seized the installation could provide Kyiv with important leverage if Mr. Zelenskyy gets his wish for peace talks on Kyiv’s terms. It would also allow Kyiv to put significant pressure on Slovakia and Hungary’s pro-Russian governments, which rely on Russian gas as their primary source of energy and have repeatedly voiced their opposition to sending military and economic aid to Ukraine.
Another objective of the offensive seemed to have been to capture as many Russian soldiers as possible to exchange them later for Ukrainian prisoners of war detained within Russia. In the hours and days after the beginning of the Ukrainian offensive on Aug. 6, videos and photos showing what appeared to be Russian POWs started circulating widely on social media, boosting the morale of the Ukrainian population and dealing a massive blow to Moscow’s narrative about the inviolability of the country’s borders.
On Aug. 19, Mr. Zelenskyy said the operation in Russia had achieved a prime objective: providing a “new replenishment of the exchange fund for our country” — in other words, the increased “supply” of Russian POWs to be traded at a later date for Ukrainian soldiers.
Earlier this week, the two sides agreed to return 115 prisoners of war even as the battlefield fighting raged. Mr. Zelenskyy posted a picture with the returned POWs wrapped in the Ukrainian flag. He said the group included personnel from the border guards, the national guard, the navy and the armed forces.
An officer taking part in the Kursk offensive, who requested that his name and the name of his unit be withheld for security reasons, shared with The Washington Times photos and footage that appeared to show blindfolded Russian soldiers draped in Mylar blankets and various Russian unit and morale patches taken as trophies from the Kursk operation.
One seemed to have been retrieved from the uniform of a soldier of the Akhmat special forces unit, a paramilitary organization answering directly to Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruthless ruler of Chechnya and one of Mr. Putin’s most stalwart allies.
Skeptics say the initial Ukrainian advances don’t change the fundamental fact that Russia has more troops, weapons and resources to use in the fight.
The Kursk fighting has increased Ukrainian casualties at a time when the Zelenskyy government is hard-pressed to find recruits to send to the front lines.
“The Kursk operation may involve greater Ukrainian than Russian losses, which is not an exchange ratio it can sustain,” Harvard University international relations professor Stephen M. Walt wrote this week on the website Foreign Policy.com. “It would be a huge mistake to conclude that the recent successes on the Kursk front mean that additional Western aid will enable Ukraine to retake the Donbas or Crimea.”
Neutralizing the invaders
Another stated primary objective in Kursk is to neutralize enemy troops and equipment before they set foot on Ukrainian soil.
“It is now the main task of our defense actions in general to destroy as much of Russia’s potential, the potential for war, as possible, and to carry out maximum counterattack work,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in a video address on Facebook.
To this end, the Ukrainians seem to be employing hit-and-run tactics again. They have managed to ambush and destroy Russian reinforcements before Russia’s artillery can strike Ukrainian-held positions.
The success of those tactics, which proved highly effective in the early days of the Russian invasion, was on full display within hours of the start of the Kursk offensive. A mere three days after Ukraine’s incursion began, a video circulating online appeared to show a destroyed Russian military convoy with burned bodies of Russian soldiers strewn across the road and slumped in the back of military trucks riddled with shrapnel or bullet holes.
Ukraine might just have pulled another tactical masterstroke by blowing up the only three bridges across the Seym River, further disrupting Russian supply lines and potentially trapping a whole contingent of Russian soldiers between the now impassable river and the border with Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president also said the operation’s goal was to establish a “buffer zone on the territory of the aggressor” to protect civilians from shelling and strikes coming from Russian border areas. Here, too, Ukraine seems to have reached its goal. On Aug. 12, the Russian governor of the Kursk oblast, Alexei Smirnov, told Mr. Putin in a televised briefing that the Ukrainian offensive had forced more than 120,000 Russian civilians to be evacuated or flee the border areas.
Russian credibility
The operation has focused fresh questions on the sincerity of Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling and the ever-shifting nature of Mr. Putin’s “red lines” in the conflict.
U.S. and European officials confirm that Kyiv has stepped up its demands that restrictions on Western-supplied offensive weapons be lifted, given Russia’s failure to respond aggressively to the Kursk mission. The Biden administration and top allies such as Germany have been reluctant to do so because of the fear of escalation.
It may be in terms of propaganda and message control that the Kursk assault will have its most lasting impact.
Analysts say the Zelenskyy government managed to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone.
Where Western attention to the war had been flagging, the attack has put it back in the international spotlight. Where Russian forces seemed to hold a clear initiative in the summer’s fighting focused on the northeast, Kursk has resurrected doubts about the Kremlin’s military machine and the abilities of Mr. Putin’s generals.
The fighting, as Ukrainian commanders concede, is by no means over.
After weeks of unrelenting bombardments and daily assaults, the Russians are now closing in on the city of Pokrovsk, an important logistical hub used to resupply the besieged defenders of Chasiv Yar. Ukraine’s operations in Kursk have not drawn Russian troops away from the area to relieve the pressure.
“You know what’s interesting? Literally every foreign media that has been addressing me lately has been asking the same question,” said “Evgenii,” an officer of Ukraine’s 28th Brigade, when asked whether he had noticed any change at the front since the beginning of the Kursk offensive. For months now, the 28th Brigade has been fending off Russian assaults near Chasiv Yar, one of the last Ukrainian-held strongholds in the Donetsk region and a critical defensive position on the road to the major cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
Evgenii said neither the rhythm of the shelling nor the intensity of the fighting in the region has abated over the past two weeks. “No, not in our direction, not in the neighboring direction, nothing has changed at all,” he said in a phone interview from the front.
“Russia is extremely reluctant to draw troops away from Donbas and send them to the Kursk region. Apparently, they don’t [care about] Kursk, unlike the territories they’re trying to conquer here in Ukraine,” he said. He employed far more colorful language to characterize the shallowness of the Kremlin’s concerns.
Western military analysts said the Ukrainian tour de force in Kursk has the makings of a successful communication operation. It could eventually improve the Ukrainian position at the negotiating table but, for good or ill, is unlikely to change the course of the war.
“The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast and Russian offensive operations in eastern Ukraine are not in themselves decisive military operations that will win the war,” said the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
The analysis said, “It is too early to assess the outcomes and operational significance of the Ukrainian incursion into Russia and the ongoing Russian offensive effort in eastern Ukraine. The significance of these operations will not emerge in isolation, moreover, but they will matter insofar as they relate to a series of subsequent Russian and Ukrainian campaigns over time.”
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.
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