How Ukraine's Kursk Offensive Has Upended Assumptions About the War

Russia's cloak of invulnerability - and inevitability - has been pierced by Ukraine's Kursk offensive, perhaps for as long as Putin remains its dictator. 

That is a significant victory for Ukraine and for NATO. JL

Max Boot reports in the Washington Post;

The Kursk attack could force Putin to accept the occupation of his territory indefinitely or to move even more substantial resources from other sectors to Kursk. It could even lead Putin to devote scarce resources to fortifying more of the Russia-Ukraine border to prevent future incursions. Whichever course Putin chooses, Ukraine benefits. "The path to success for Ukraine lies in continuing to innovate, to do the unexpected, and to seek ways of generating asymmetric effects, and Kursk is one such effort,”

When Ukrainian forces launched their surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk region on Aug. 6, the widespread expectation was that this was merely a fast in-and-out operation, akin to the cavalry raids undertaken by both Confederate and Union forces behind enemy lines during the Civil War. More than two weeks later, it is now clear that Ukraine is attempting something much more ambitious: As Ukrainian leaders have explained, their forces are bent on occupying Russian territory indefinitely to create “a buffer zone” against Russian attacks and a bargaining chip for use in any future negotiations.

 

As new details have emerged about the operation, it has become apparent that Ukrainian forces skillfully gained the element of surprise — in part by not telling their Western allies what they were up to, and in part by blinding Russian sensors with electronic warfare devices. Battle-hardened Ukrainian troops then found it relatively easy to advance, at least at first, against ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-motivated Russian conscripts. Some 10,000 Ukrainian troops are reportedly now in Kursk.

The Kremlin has been slowly moving more experienced troops to Kursk — many of them coming from less active parts of the front in southern Ukraine — and so the pace of the Ukrainian advance has slowed. But there is still no indication that the Russians have assembled a force large enough to retake their territory. U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Russians would need at least 20,000 troops for the task; the New York Times, citing U.S. officials, suggested the actual figure might be 50,000 troops. Even the lower number would risk dangerously depleting front-line units in Ukraine’s Donetsk province.

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Aug. 19 that Ukrainian troops control 480 square miles of Russian territory — roughly the same amount of Ukrainian territory that Russian forces seized between January and July of this year. The Ukrainians have also captured several hundred Russian prisoners, who can be traded back in exchange for Ukrainian POWs. The exchanges, in fact, began on Saturday when Ukraine sent back to Russia 115 servicemen captured in Kursk in exchange for 115 Ukrainians held in Russia. And more Russian troops might be forced to surrender soon.

 

The Ukrainians have used explosive drones and U.S.-made HIMARS rocket systems to damage or destroy the bridges over the Seym River that would enable Russian troops in the Kursk salient to escape. The Russians tried to erect pontoon bridges, but those did not last long under withering Ukrainian fire. Some 3,000 Russian troops are now in danger of being trapped by advancing Ukrainian troops.

The success of the Kursk offensive has offered a welcome boost to Ukrainian morale after nearly two years in which the front lines have barely budged, even as casualties have piled up on both sides. Meanwhile, an analysis of Russian social media posts suggests that public attitudes toward Vladimir Putin have turned more negative as a result of the Ukrainian advance — the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II. Russian officials are predictably having a meltdown, with a Putin-aligned oligarch warning that Washington is risking a “global conflict,” and the FSB, the Russian security service, filing criminal charges against Western reporters who have entered the Kursk area with Ukrainian forces.

 

But like all military operations, this one is a gamble, and the Kursk offensive comes at a cost. While Ukrainian troops are advancing into Russia, they are falling back in their own territory. Russian troops are now within artillery range of Pokrovsk, an important Donetsk city that is a major transportation hub supplying Ukrainian troops throughout the eastern region. A Ukrainian commander in eastern Ukraine told the Financial Times that his troops are being forced to ration artillery shells for the first time since U.S. aid to Ukraine began flowing again in the spring because munitions have been diverted to Kursk.

Critics of the Kursk attack — including some Ukrainians — argue that Ukrainian troops would be better employed trying to hold back the Russian onslaught in Donetsk. Frederick W. Kagan, a senior fellow and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, told me he rejects those criticisms.

“It would definitely not have been the best use of Ukraine’s reserves simply to commit them to the defense of Pokrovsk,” Kagan wrote in an email. “The Russians have fully embraced positional warfare and are satisfied with making slow, gradual gains at exorbitant costs in manpower and equipment because they think that the Ukrainians will never be able to retake any territory they’ve seized. The Ukrainians cannot succeed by embracing positional warfare. They have to find ways to restore maneuver to the battlefield.”

 

Kagan argues that the Kursk attack could force Putin to either accept the occupation of his territory indefinitely or to move even more substantial resources from other sectors to Kursk. It could even lead Putin to devote scarce resources to fortifying more of the Russia-Ukraine border to prevent future incursions. Whichever course Putin chooses, Ukraine could benefit.

“I think that the path to success for Ukraine lies in continuing to innovate, to do the unexpected, and to seek ways of generating asymmetric effects, and Kursk is one such effort,” Kagan noted. “We should watch it, support it, and await the outcome before rushing to draw conclusions about it.”

Whatever happens in Kursk, the success the Ukrainians have so far enjoyed reveals that Russian red lines are not as menacing as President Joe Biden seems to imagine in setting sharp limitations on the use of U.S. weaponry against Russian territory. Far from going nuclear, Putin is trying to minimize the Ukrainian incursion by pretending it’s business as usual for the Kremlin. “It shows the final hollowness of all the nuclear threats that have been used for years to limit aid to Ukraine,” Phillips P. Obrien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, wrote last week on Substack.

 

Because of those Western restrictions, Ukraine has been forced to rely on its own drones for strikes deep into Russian territory. In recent days, Ukrainian drones have targeted the Russian capital, a giant oil-storage facility in southern Russia and Russian air bases. The Moscow attack is purely symbolic, but deep strikes against Russian air bases and energy infrastructure demonstrably degrade Russian war-making capacity — the former by limiting the number of sorties that Russian bombers can fly, the latter by reducing the revenue the Russian energy sector can generate for the Kremlin.

These deep strikes would be more effective if the Ukrainians were able to employ U.S.-made ATACMS rockets. Biden should grant the Ukrainians the authority they seek, or else risk the possibility that Russia will simply continue to use its greater manpower and manufacturing base to slowly grind down Ukrainian defenses. Ukraine has scrambled assumptions with its push into Kursk. It’s time for fresh thinking at the White House too — and for the administration to finally deliver the strategy for victory in Ukraine that Congress mandated as part of its last aid package in April.