A look at what the Ukrainian army might be trying to achieve by invading Russia.
It’s now been a full week since the news started spreading last Tuesday, August 6, that the Ukrainian army had crossed into the Russian province of Kursk, far to the north and west of the regions of eastern Ukraine that have seen the bulk of the fighting over the past two years.
At first, many analysts — myself included — assumed that the operation was more akin to the previous incursions on Russian lands in this war that have been executed by irregular units rather than any sort of full-scale operation intended to seize and hold Russian sovereign territory. At most, I thought that the Ukrainians might be simply executing a raid, perhaps even using regular army units, intended to cause damage and consternation to the Russians and, yes, embarrass the Kremlin.
(The Institute for the Study of War has a series of excellent maps outlining what’s happening.)
It’s now clear, however, that — whatever the wisdom of this Ukrainian operation — what has been launched is of a scale and likely intent far larger than a mere raid. One can now say that the Ukrainian army, in 2024, has executed the first serious invasion of Russian territory since the Second World War.
Christopher Miller, writing for the Financial Times in a remarkable report, confirms that the U.S. and German governments were not informed about the operation before it was launched and were taken entirely by surprise by the Ukrainian plans. This indicates that the Ukrainian military and government are operating with an advanced level of discipline and professionalism when it comes to operational security.
Of course, perhaps the only individuals taken more by surprise by the Ukrainians were the Russians themselves.
Miller, in his piece written from near the Sumy–Kursk border, relates the experience of Volodymyr, a Ukrainian soldier and member of a Stryker armored-vehicle crew, as his unit crashed over the Russian border:
He and the other soldiers of the 82nd air assault brigade listened to their commander’s instructions: eyes open, move swiftly and keep your country in your thoughts. Then, after a short prayer and a battle cry of “Glory to Ukraine!” they set out to invade Russia — the first foreign army to do so since the second world war.
“We entered Russian territory for the first time at 1pm on Tuesday [August 6],” Volodymyr said. “We were among the first to enter there.”
To his astonishment, his unit faced no resistance as their eight-wheeled, 20 tonne US Stryker fighting vehicle stormed across the border in broad daylight.
They soon encountered a Russian unit “sitting in the forest, drinking coffee at a table”, Volodymyr recalled. “Then our Stryker drives right into their table.
“We killed many of them on the first day,” he said. “Because they were unarmed and didn’t expect us.”
Now, a week in, and having attracted a significant (although to date, somewhat shambolic) Russian response, Ukraine has decided, apparently, that it isn’t going to back off.
As many as six Ukrainian brigades appear to be involved in the operation. They have captured towns and villages (even the Kremlin, in a televised briefing chaired by Vladimir Putin himself, admitted that at least 28 Russian villages were under occupation) and overrun several hundred square miles of territory. Some 120,000 Russian civilians have fled the border area. And the provincial government says it is preparing to evacuate tens of thousands more.
What’s more, the Ukrainians appear to be pushing forward in some spots toward further Russian towns, while in other areas they’re digging in.
So, the question can now be asked: What are the Ukrainians up to?
There are likely three non-mutually-exclusive answers.
First, it seems clear that the Ukrainians are trying to relieve pressure on their embattled eastern front by forcing the Russians to redeploy units — and ideally some of their best units — to recapture these lost territories. So far at least, this doesn’t appear to be happening at scale. That may be a smart decision on the Russians’ part, at least for the time being. Indeed, it’s quite time-consuming and logistically challenging for frontline units to be disengaged, pulled from the front line, and then redeployed hundreds of miles away. The Russians, according to reporting by the New York Times, instead of redeploying units from Ukraine’s east, have ordered them into the attack on their current front.
“Our guys do not feel any relief,” Artem Dzhepko, a press officer with Ukraine’s National Police Brigade, fighting in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, told the Times.
From the scattered information available, it seems that, at least for now, the Russians are sending a combination of border guards, internal-security troops, and units that had been training or refitting in the area to repel the invasion. This is quite good news for the Ukrainian maneuver forces in the Kursk area, because, if true, that means that they will be facing units that are likely quite ill-equipped to fight an experienced and mechanized enemy. It does, however, partially explain the seemingly amateur and uncoordinated nature of the Russian response to date.
Second, the Ukrainian army wished to seize and occupy Russian territory as the momentum has slowly drifted this year toward broaching the possibility of talks. It should come as no surprise that, should the Ukrainians go to the negotiating table with Russian towns in their hands, they will be in a much better position to trade for the return of their own territory in the Ukrainian east and south.
How much will the Kremlin be impressed by such a bargaining chip? It’s hard to say. But it’s notable, at least, that the recent operations have engaged Russian units that analysts say are heavily composed of conscripts. Russian units fighting in Ukraine are, at least nominally, made up of “contract soldiers,” i.e., those who have signed on to fight the war, as opposed to units composed of draftees. Russian conscripts are, of course, finding their way to Ukrainian battlefields — whether they want to go there or not — but the fiction that “only volunteers” are fighting for the Russian army in Ukraine is an important one politically because Putin has promised Russian mothers that conscripts would not be used in Ukraine.
The more young Russian boys, in hastily deployed and ill-trained units, die in Kursk, the more precarious the political dynamic might grow for Putin and his regime. And casualties may yet prove to be severe if the Russians decide to throw thousands of untrained young men at the Ukrainian salient. As one Ukrainian told Miller and the FT:
Denys, a soldier driving a US-provided Humvee painted in desert camouflage, said the Kursk fight felt “totally different” from that in the Donetsk region.
“Fighting from defensive positions is much harder,” he said. “The enemy knows everything about us there. It knows where we are. Its drones can see our every move. “Here we had the element of surprise,” he added. “But we were also surprised that [they were] so surprised with [our attack].”
Indeed, one Russian convoy advancing toward the front was reportedly entirely destroyed by a strike by U.S.-supplied HIMARS missiles.
Finally, every war is fundamentally a contest of both sides’ willingness to continue fighting. The Ukrainian people have thus far, over two and a half years of conflict, shown a remarkable willingness to sacrifice to keep their country from falling under the Kremlin’s boot. However, it is no surprise that last year’s bloody and ultimately failed counteroffensive, and this year’s bloody and depressing positional war in the east, have sapped some of Ukraine’s strength, vitality, and morale.
This kind of operation may not be what ends the war. It may not be what wins the war. But symbolic operations sometimes need not be ultimately rational to be successful. Jimmy Doolittle’s famous raid over Tokyo caused relatively little damage to the Japanese war effort. It caused relatively few casualties. It destroyed no important industries. But it dramatically raised morale in the United States, and it arguably caused a significant redeployment of air-defense assets to the Japanese home islands that may have caused the Allied campaigns in the South Pacific to be relatively easier than they would have been otherwise.
War is a contingent endeavor. It is full of surprises. This Ukrainian offensive was a surprise to nearly everyone. And of course, it may very well end in tears.
But the Ukrainians should be credited for attempting to extricate themselves from a merely positional and attritional fight against a far larger and more populous enemy by finding a gap in the Russian war plan.
The Ukrainians have, once again, attempted to maneuver against their enemies. They now hold a piece of sovereign Russian territory. And Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is shocked and embarrassed by the developments.
They have rolled the dice. And they have, for the moment, stolen the initiative from the Russians.