Ukraine's Kursk Assault Success Stuns Allies and Russia - Which Is the Point

Offense in the Ukraine war was supposedly an historical artifact. No one could escape drone surveillance and ensuing destruction. 

But at a point where even their supportive allies were beginning to think neither side could prevail, Ukraine has launched a successful combined arms offensive designed for maneuver warfare. And again - pay attention all you NATO staff college experts - without air superiority. As the picture to the right, which captured the destruction of a Russian battalion-sized column attempting to reinforce Kursk, coordination between armor, infantry and artillery has been impressive. The lesson, for all who need to be reminded, is that this is not over and the Russians are not winning. JL

Max Boot reports in the Washington Post:

The Ukrainian military shocked the entire world - and Russian defenders - when it sent a combined-arms offensive utilizing armored vehicles, infantry, artillery and electronic-warfare equipment into Kursk. Ukraine reportedly committed elements of four elite brigades to the operation. “The strategic, operational and tactical deception shown by the Ukrainians during the planniing and execution of the Kursk operation has been superb,”

As the war in Ukraine settled into a stalemate, two assumptions became prevalent among analysts: First, that it is nearly impossible to achieve any surprise on a battlefield blanketed by drones. Second, that it is nearly impossible to mount fast-moving offensive operations, given the extensive defenses erected by both sides. Ukraine has challenged both assumptions over the past few days with its surprise, lightning-fast thrust into Russia’s Kursk region — an area familiar to military historians as the site, during World War II, of the biggest tank battle in history.

 

The Ukrainian military shocked the entire world — and the Russian defenders — when it sent an armored column on Tuesday across the border from Ukraine’s Sumy region. There had been cross-border raids by Ukraine before, but those were much smaller operations conducted by Russian volunteers. This was something much more ambitious: a combined-arms offensive utilizing armored vehicles (some of them German- and U.S.-made), infantry, artillery and electronic-warfare equipment. Ukraine reportedly committed elements of four elite brigades to the operation.

This was, in fact, the kind of well-planned, well-executed assault that the Ukrainians had hoped to pull off last year, on a much grander scale, when their objective was to slice through Russian lines in southern Ukraine and break the land bridge between Crimea and Russia. That offensive failed against well-prepared Russian defenses full of mines and trenches, all covered by heavy artillery fire and large numbers of drones.

 

By contrast, the Ukrainians have practically waltzed into the Kursk region, because the Russians weren’t expecting an attack there. This reinforces the lesson of the June 2023 rebellion by Wagner Group mercenaries, who found a practically open road to Moscow before turning back at the last moment. The interior of Russia is lightly defended, and the lumbering Russian military cannot react quickly to new threats. It makes you wonder why the Ukrainians mounted a costly and futile frontal assault on Russian lines last summer instead of staging a “left hook” through Russian territory to attack the Russian defenders from the rear — similar to the maneuver that the United States employed against Iraqi forces in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991.

 

“The level of strategic, operational and tactical deception shown by the Ukrainians during the planning, assembling forces, and ongoing execution of the Kursk operation has been superb,” retired Australian Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, author of the new book “The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation,” wrote on X. “This is not a technical achievement — it is a human one. People who have learned from their successes and failures since February 2022 have crafted an operational design that is being competently executed by motivated soldiers.”

Russia’s armed forces and political leadership appear to have been utterly stunned by the Ukrainian gambit. The Ukrainians have reportedly captured “many” Russian soldiers — prisoners of war who can be used in future exchanges to liberate Ukrainians in Russian captivity.

 

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin actually complained: “The Kyiv regime has undertaken another large-scale provocation.” So, in the grotesque Putin worldview, it seems that Russia launching an unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine is perfectly proper — but Ukraine striking back at Russia is “provocative.” How dare the Ukrainians defend themselves?

The Kremlin keeps saying that the Ukrainian attack has been defeated, even while the Ukrainians continue to advance. By Thursday, the Institute for the Study of War was estimating that Ukrainian forces had advanced at least 21 miles past the Russia-Ukraine border, while the Economist reported that the Ukrainians had taken about 135 square miles of Russian territory.

The question is: Now what? Will the Ukrainian forces try to hold Russian territory, perhaps in hopes of gaining leverage in a future negotiation, or will they retreat to their own territory before Russia can mobilize a large counteroffensive?

 

Part of the answer will depend on the attitude of Washington. While the Biden administration has not complained about the use of U.S.-made vehicles in this offensive, it apparently has not yet granted Ukraine permission to use American-made ATACMS missiles to hit Russian airfields and other targets deep inside Russia. Such strikes, perhaps backed up by attacks from Ukraine’s newly acquired F-16s, could impede any Russian counterattack. If Ukraine is not granted the permission it needs from Washington, its forces will be forced to retreat sooner than necessary. Given how Ukraine keeps erasing supposed Russian “red lines” with impunity, this is a risk President Joe Biden should be willing to run.

 

Despite the early success of the Ukrainian assault, its ultimate fate — and wisdom — remains a matter of speculation. CNN reports, citing U.S. and Ukrainian officials, that the intent is “in part to disrupt and demoralize Russian forces and in part to divert Russian forces away from other parts of the eastern front.” The latter goal will be harder to achieve than the former.

Russia still has a large manpower advantage over Ukraine, despite the heavy losses the Russian army has suffered, and so the Kremlin should be able to send reserves from Russia into Kursk without having to deplete its front-line units in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. By contrast, the Ukrainian forces are so undermanned that they are running a major risk if they are redeploying troops from the fighting in the Donetsk region to Kursk.

 

But the Ukrainian assault is already producing the kind of positive headlines for Ukraine that it has not seen since the fall of 2022 when its forces were able to stage dramatic advances in both Kharkiv province in the east and Kherson province in the south.

Before the new Kursk incursion, much of the news in recent weeks had been focused on the slow if steady Russian advances in the east and south that have already eradicated the minor gains achieved by the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Ukraine has been bracing for more territorial losses as its overstretched troops, depleted after 2½ years of war and still waiting for an influx of fresh recruits mobilized under a new conscription law, struggle to hold a front line stretching across 600 miles. At the very least, the Kursk offensive changes the narrative and reminds the world of the kind of Ukrainian derring-do that was the main story of the war’s early days. Given the importance of global opinion for the outcome of the conflict — Ukraine is dependent, after all, on aid from the United States and Europe — that is no small achievement.

Whatever the ultimate fate of the Kursk offensive, it is the kind of bold and unexpected maneuver that a smaller power such as Ukraine must make when fighting against a larger adversary that is trying to grind down Ukrainian defenses through sheer weight of numbers. Even while a growing number of Ukrainians tell pollsters they are amenable to territorial concessions to end the war, the Ukrainian armed forces are showing they still have plenty of fight left in them — and that the Russians can hardly take victory for granted.