The deep Ukrainian offensive into Russia’s Kursk Oblast is becoming a watershed and opening a new page in Europe’s largest military conflict since 1945.
Andreas Umland
September 17, 2024
New Eastern Europe
As it becomes clearer with every additional week since its start, the current Ukrainian foray into the western Russian Region of Kursk that began on August 6th 2024 has been no minor incident. Kyiv’s unexpected operation on the Russian Federation’s state territory could change the character of the war. Ukraine’s attack is a novel and significant development in, at least, five ways.
The war’s new qualities since August 6th
First, it is a classical military offensive being carried out on a large scale by Ukraine’s official armed forces. Previous infantry raids into Russian state territory were carried out by the small and semi-regular Free Russia Legion and Russian Volunteer Corps consisting of Russian citizens fighting on Ukraine’s side. The recent incursion into Russia, in contrast, is carried out by large and regular mechanized and combined Ukrainian troops.
This distinction is relevant in both practical and symbolic ways. The current offensive is not, like the previous ones by pro-Ukrainian Russian fighters, a limited and brief incursion into Russia. It is a major Ukrainian military operation involving significant amounts of personnel and employing a wide range of weaponry.
The previous attacks by the Free Russia Legion and Russian Volunteer Corps were also embarrassing for Moscow. In the end they constituted, however, merely short needle pricks from small paramilitary units with limited arms. Now the regular Ukrainian army is, in many ways, doing to Russia what the Russian army has been doing to Ukraine since 2024. The symbolism of this new development is high, at least for Ukrainians, Russians and other East Europeans.
Second, the first weeks of the Ukrainian land attack into Russia have been unexpectedly successful for Kyiv. Ukraine’s troops managed to quickly occupy more than 300 square kilometres of strategically important territory while losing, during this initial phase, only a limited amount of its soldiers and equipment. Ukrainian forces captured numerous settlements including the administrative district centre of Sudzha.
Though being only a small town of about 5,000 residents, Sudzha was, until August 6th, important for the Russian army as a logistic hub. In the late Tsarist period, Sudzha had been a largely Ukrainian-speaking settlement. In 1918, Sudzha was for about a month the first capital of the emerging Ukrainian Soviet republic.
Sudzha also hosts a Gazprom metering station through which all of Russia’s remaining onshore natural gas transportation to the European Union is running. This fact has apparently been responsible for a nervous reaction on European markets where gas prices have risen sharply since early August. However, the fears behind such hikes appear unjustified.
Gas pumped via Sudzha has, during the entire war since 2014, been continuously flowing via Ukraine to Slovakia and from there further into Central Europe. Both Moscow and Kyiv have been so far and presumably will continue to be, at least until the end of this year, commercially interested to uphold the remaining Russian-EU gas trade. This has meant and may also mean in the foreseeable future that military developments around Gazprom’s transportation infrastructure – whether on Ukrainian or Russian state territory – do not constitute, by definition, hindrances to mutually profitable gas flows.
Three further specifics of Ukraine’s incursion
Third, the Ukrainian invasion into Russia has led to the quickest change of the war’s frontline since the last Ukrainian attack on Russia-controlled territory in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in autumn 2022. Until recently, all Russian and Ukrainian territorial gains or losses since then had been slower and less significant than the current one. For the first time in a long period, the map of the front between Russia and Ukraine looks significantly different.
Fourth, Ukraine’s Kursk incursion can be seen as the belated implementation of the much-discussed Ukrainian counteroffensive that had stalled in 2023. A year ago, a Ukrainian retaliation attack was unsuccessfully attempted on Ukrainian soil whereas now it is being – at least initially – more successfully attempted on Russian lands. With the Ukrainian troops’ surprisingly rapid and relatively deep incursion into western Russia, the war has become less of a position and again more of a movement war.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, with the Kursk incursion the land warfare between Russia and Ukraine has switched from a confrontation almost exclusively playing out on Ukrainian terrain to one now being fought on both countries’ legal state territories. The incursion become a source of embarrassment and distraction for the Kremlin. This will be especially important if the Ukrainian advance into Russia turns out to be not only a short episode but becomes a prolonged phenomenon. In such a case, Kyiv’s redirection of its defensive warfare against Russia on to its soil will have paradigmatic as well as strategic and not only operational or tactical meaning.
The Kremlin’s new challenges
For Moscow, the new Ukrainian strategy, even with its limited achievements, makes further planning and conduct of Russia’s expansionist war against Ukraine more complicated. In view of what has been happening since August 6th, Russia will have to keep and deploy more troops on its own rather than Ukraine’s state territory. Reversing, preventing and deterring the current Kursk and possible other Ukrainian counterattacks on Russian soil has become a new strategic task for Russia’s general staff.
As an instrument of Moscow’s external affairs, the Russian armed forces have, until recently, been mainly focused on fighting for and in foreign lands – whether in Moldova, Georgia, Syria,
Ukraine or other countries. This exclusively offensive, interventionist or/and irredentist period of deployment of Russia’s armed forces against external enemies is now over. It is being replaced by the novel task combining defence of Russian state territory with expansionist operations in the former Soviet space.
Kyiv’s new intentions
For Kyiv the incursion into the Kursk Oblast is above all a diversionary manoeuvre designed to tie up troops that would otherwise be attacking, ravaging and terrorizing Ukraine. The Ukrainian motivation behind the attack could have, moreover, been to influence Russia’s domestic and foreign affairs. Kyiv is apparently trying to undermine the Kremlin’s political reputation, propaganda strategy and information policy among both the Russian population and international community.
Kyiv hopes that the various Russian planning, operational and logistic lapses which led to the Ukrainian military success on Russian soil will become problematic for Putin’s standing within the Russian political elite and pro-Russian groups around the world. Most domestic and international support for Putin is less driven by attraction to the ideology of Putinism or a serious belief in Russian narratives about the threats of NATO expansion, “Ukrainian fascism,” western subversion, etc. Instead, it has been informed by cynical respect for the apparent success of Putin’s ruthless, nihilistic and seemingly efficacious domestic and foreign conduct. The unexpectedly deep and thus far successful Ukrainian incursion and the sudden loser image of Moscow vis-à-vis Kyiv creates, among some of these audiences, cognitive dissonance.
The Ukrainian attack has managed to illustrate Russia’s unexpected strategic inaptitude, administrative deficiencies and material weaknesses. These failings had already become apparent in 2022 during the unsuccessful Russian attack on Kyiv in the spring and the successful Ukrainian counterattack in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions in autumn. The current Ukrainian operation undermines again the popular narrative of Russia’s alleged invincibility and superiority – a mirage often propagated to advocate a Russian Siegfrieden (victor’s peace) with Ukrainian territorial cessions to end the war.
Conclusions
The new offensiveness and risk-affinity of Ukraine’s behaviour in the war is less a reaction to Russian aggressiveness than a result of a more than 30 months-long apprehension or absence of international help for Kyiv. Iraq’s 1990 annexation of Kuwait was quickly reversed by an international coalition within a year. In the 1990s, Serbia’s irredentism was, after some hesitation, resolutely subdued with a NATO mission. In contrast, international support for the embattled Ukrainian state has been not only merely indirect, but also dubiously weak for over 10 years now. That was in spite of such scandalous early events as Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 or the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 with 298 civilians, including 80 children, on board, in July 2014.
Western economic sanctions against Russia and its military as well as other support for Ukraine have become, it is true, ever more significant since 2022. Yet, they have remained and still
remain gravely insufficient to defend Ukraine’s territory, citizens and infrastructure from Russia’s genocidal attack. Worse, many countries of the so-called Global South indirectly fuel Russia’s annihilation war via their trade with the aggressor. In turn, western decisions in support of Ukraine’s defence are taken slowly, hesitantly and half-heartedly. After two-and-half years of death and suffering, Kyiv now wants to fundamentally change the context.
In the future Kyiv will continue to try using various means to demonstrate to international audiences that the development and end of the war remain open-ended, and that the assumption of unquestionable Russian superiority is misleading. A larger geopolitical context of this Ukrainian strategy is related to possible negotiations with the Kremlin about territorial issues. It may be also a preparation for larger multilateral talks such as an intended second international conference on the war following the July 2024 Peace Summit in Switzerland.
In addition to voicing moral, normative and legal arguments, Kyiv can – if it manages to hold on to the captured Russian lands – now follow a new approach. In both its communication with Moscow and larger international audiences, Ukraine’s leadership can make transactional proposals suggesting an exchange of captured Russian lands for annexed Ukrainian territory.
To be sure, Kyiv’s new approach is hazardous for both Ukrainian and international security. The Ukrainian invasion of Russia since August 6th 2024 is, in Vladimir Putin’s words, a “large-scale provocation”. However, those international observers who agree with Putin’s definition should, first of all, blame their own countries’ limited or absent interest in Ukraine’s sovereignty and integrity. It is the insufficient level of foreign aid that has led Kyiv to switch from a defensive to an offensive position.
Whatever the outcome of the current operation in the Kursk region, Kyiv will continue to look for weak points along the entire perimeter of contact with the Russian state as well as its allies, agents and proxies. Russia will have to invest in fortifying the Russian-Ukrainian border and to pay more attention to other theatres of the war than Ukraine’s east and south. The Ukrainian foray into Russian state territory deconstructs the image – inside Russia and around the world – of a seemingly static frontline, stable force constellation and predictable course of the conflict.
Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Center for East European Studies (SCEEUS) of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI). The article is based on a SCEEUS commentary.