What Ukraine Is Winning in Kursk
The anti-Ukraine chorus says the incursion into Russia was a blunder. The Russians don’t agree.
AS UKRAINE’S OPERATIONS in Russia’s Kursk region unfolded earlier this month, the anti-Ukraine corner—such as foreign policy “realist” John Mearsheimer, echoed by self-styled expert David Sacks on social media—confidently asserted that the incursion was “a foolish idea” and “a major strategic blunder” which would hasten Ukraine’s defeat. It’s too early to claim that the Kursk incursion is a strategic masterstroke, but to call it a calamity defies all evidence.
Almost two weeks have passed since Sacks claimed that Ukrainian forces were being pounded by Russian airpower and sustaining massive losses in men and equipment. In that time, Ukrainian advances on Russian territory have slowed but not halted. Russian propagandists are still rattled, Ukrainian confidence seems undiminished, and Vladimir Putin—true to form—seems unable to react decisively to a crisis.
It’s not known how much ground Ukraine has gained in Kursk since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement on August 19 that Ukrainian troops controlled 482 square miles of territory and 92 settlements in the region. In large part, the lack of information is deliberate: As Russian-American journalist Michael Nacke points out, “The more active combat there is, the more Ukraine maintains silence. When the action stops, that’s when some things get published.” Just about the only reports come from untrustworthy Russian milbloggers, who range from fully Kremlin-compliant propagandists to war hawks who retain some measure of independence. While some milbloggers have claimed that Russia has started taking back villages seized by the Ukrainians in Kursk, there is no confirmation of these reports so far—and possible Russian gains on one part of Kursk don’t rule out Ukrainian advances elsewhere.
It does appear that the Ukrainian incursion has slowed down, as offensives are wont to do, and that some reports of successes in pro-Ukraine media have been exaggerated. Last week, there were widely reported claims that the Glushkovo district of the Kursk region was about to be cut off after Ukrainian forces blew apart all three bridges across the Seym river and that Russian troops in the area were likely to be trapped. Yet the expected Ukrainian sweep across the district never materialized (though there has been some forward movement). As it turns out, the reports of the three bridges’ destruction were inaccurate: One of the bridges is badly damaged but remains operational while the condition of another is unknown.
Too much cheerleading for Ukraine’s successes in Kursk is foolhardy. Ukraine is not, for instance, about to seize the city of Kursk itself; nor is it about to seize the Kursk nuclear reactor and gain control over Moscow’s heat and light.
But the incursion has still achieved important results. While the new offensive on Russian soil has not halted the Russian offensive in Donetsk, particularly toward the town of Pokrovsk, it has forced the Russians to redeploy some troops from the Kharkiv and Zaporizhia regions, which in the long run may be more important to Ukraine’s economic and political survival. Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, also argues that the Russian advance toward Pokrovsk is, in fact, slowing down, and that Western media tend to exaggerate the significance of Russian gains in the area:
So, the Russian Army has advanced about ONE MILE towards Pokrovsk this week. Yet this ponderous and bloody advance is being portrayed as a great strategic victory—such as in this article in the [London] Times—and at the same time the Kursk Offensive is being relegated to secondary status.
Aside from the precise measurements of miles lost and gained the slow grind of war, the offensive has brought the Ukrainians psychological victories. Ukraine has not only taken the war home to Russia; it is maintaining a presence—complete with occupation administrations and humanitarian aid facilities for civilians—on a piece of Russian territory the size of Los Angeles. And it has forced Russian officialdom and state-run media—not that there’s any daylight between the two—to try to spin this occupation as the new normal.
For some Russian propagandists, the spin is proving to be too much. Pro-war “journalist” and “expert” Vladislav Shurygin fumed on the political talk show “The Big Game”:
When you call it an SVO [special military operation] when in fact it’s a war, then you get what is happening today. . . . The enemy is now on our territory for two weeks after we heard promises to take care of it in three days. We still haven’t heard whose fault it is that this happened. . . . After two weeks, the country must see just once an accurate map showing the ground it has lost as of now—the ground our soldiers are going to have to take back at the cost of their own blood. We still don’t have a single regular map anywhere, except for what the bloggers draw up. . . . We are starting very seriously to lose the information war.
Shurygin isn’t the only one frustrated into telling the truth. In a recent roundup, Nacke says that the Kursk invasion has caused a “catastrophe” on Russian propaganda TV, with candid admissions that things are not going that great for Russia, that the “Kiev regime” is not running out of manpower and is not on its last legs, and that Russian TV news is full of lies. On the online channel of uber-propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, “political scientist” Dmitry Yevstafiev has not only excoriated Russian elites for hankering after the prewar status quo but lamented declining trust in the Russian government. The proud son and grandson of veterans of the Soviet secret police, Yevstafiev glumly admitted, “I’m a very loyal person. I really want to believe our state. But even I, with my biography and with my genes, am starting to feel that I don’t trust our state.”
Putin’s blatant lack of leadership isn’t helping public trust. He decided last week was a good time to visit Azerbaijan and then tour the Russian Caucasus (where, among other things, he was filmed watching his henchman Ramzan Kadyrov’s thuggish teenage son shoot targets on an indoor tactical course). Upon his return, he held a low-key meeting with border-region officials in which he referred to the war and occupation in Kursk as a “situation” or “emergency” and approved payments of 15,000 rubles—about $150—to each refugee. He did not comment on his once-frequent promises that 18-year-old conscripts would under no circumstances be sent to the frontlines; of course, it’s precisely those conscripts who are now being sent to Kursk.
While Putin shrinks, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stands taller. He has made it clear that Ukraine did not inform its allies before crossing the border into Kursk. He has talked defiantly about crossing Putin’s “red lines”—and, implicitly, the West’s. He has renewed his demand to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons against military targets in Russia (a demand supported by the EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell). Ukraine’s willingness to hit Kursk without prior Western authorization also raises the possibility that it could show similar independence with long-range strikes and present its Western allies with a fait accompli. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, who seemed to adopt a more conciliatory position toward Moscow last year but has struck a more hawkish note again in recent weeks, now says that Ukraine’s recovery of its “agency”—in particular, in dealings with its allies—has been one of the Kursk offensive’s most important results.
On the Russian side, says exiled Russian writer Dmitry Bykov, the Kursk offensive has led to accelerated “dehumanization.” Examples abound: Military spokesman Apti Alaudinov recently mocked the “whimperings” of the parents of conscripts sent into combat zones, suggesting that they want their grown sons “sent to bed with pacifiers” and urging them to ask themselves “why the country needs you or your children.” A former member of the Russian parliament, Natalia Narochnitskaya, chimed in on national television to propose carpet-bombing Ukraine-occupied parts of the Kursk region as “retribution” and leaving nothing alive, presumably including the thousands of Russian citizens still remaining in those areas. Bykov, whose crystal ball is pretty good—he had repeatedly predicted that August would bring dramatic developments in the war—believes that this escalating madness shows the Putin regime is “closer to collapse than ever.” If the decay continues at this rate, he said in an interview over the weekend, the downfall may become irreversible this fall.
Of course, Putin’s imminent demise has been predicted too many times to count since the start of the war in Ukraine. For now, we can only say that he is not having a good month—and that if his propagandists are sweating enough to discuss “carpet bombing” their own territory, the Ukrainian offensive is doing far better than the “realists” think or hope.