Even two weeks ago, it would have been hard to imagine Ukraine responding to the inconclusive war of attrition in its eastern Donbas region by invading Russia. Yet on 6 August, for the first time since Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, an invading army crossed the border. Fourteen months ago, someone else had managed to launch an invasion of sorts from inside Ukraine, and many wondered whether an army might find it as easy as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private military contractor Wagner Group, to penetrate Russia’s defences. At the time, it was more of a joke than anything else.
In the first two days after Ukrainian troops and armoured vehicles ventured into Russia’s Kursk region, the opinion among military analysts was that this might be imprudent and unwise. Russia has made some progress of late, moving the front line in Donbas closer to the transport and logistics hub of Pokrovsk; many thought stopping its advances there should be Ukraine’s priority. A week later, opinion has shifted. Russia is now at a disadvantage, unable to quickly repel the Ukrainian invasion. Having to evacuate a large number of Russian civilians is humiliating for the Vladimir Putin regime. The war is now being fought on Russian lands. One more of Putin’s red lines has been erased. Are there any left?
For the first half of 2023, Ukraine and its allies believed a successful counteroffensive aimed at recovering occupied Ukrainian land would lead to a turning point in the war. That successful counteroffensive never materialised, and after a while a sense of doom descended. The line of combat has been extensively fortified by Russia, and for the past few months no one had much hope those fortifications could be broken. So why not turn towards the border between the two countries, a place where Russia felt safe – perhaps complacently so? That seems to have been the main strategic consideration behind the incursion.
Whether this is the turning point we have been waiting for is doubtful. Ukraine has in some places advanced a few dozen kilometres from the border into Russia, but a week after the incursion began, Ukrainian troops were already slowing down, faced with the arrival of Russian reinforcements and at risk of overextending their supply lines. The Ukrainian military leadership must now make a difficult decision. Anchoring down and occupying a position within Kursk has its attractions: at other times throughout the war, positions, once held for a while, have tended to be gruelling to dislodge. It is difficult, however, to see how Ukraine could justify to its own citizens the cost of turning the Russian village of Sudzha into a new Bakhmut, a horrific “meat grinder” for both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. Some kind of withdrawal may be inevitable.
The significance of this moment may lie less with events in Kursk than with the change in strategy they reveal. Ukraine may be adopting some elements of guerrilla warfare, looking for weak points anywhere within the Russian forces and taking greater advantage of the element of surprise. The goal would be less to bring about a spectacular victory of the kind Ukraine still dreamed about a year ago than to weaken Russia to the point where it has no alternative but to withdraw.
The war in Ukraine is fundamentally a colonial war, and such conflicts are not decided in a clash for territory between two large armies. Traditionally, they are decided by the gradual weakening of the colonial power and army to the point where costs far exceed envisioned gains. The Algerian War, for example, came to an end in 1962 after internal political divisions in France became unmanageable, and the French public ceased believing victory was even possible.
There can be no doubt that the Russian state has been wounded by Ukraine’s incursion. Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the Kursk region, said on 12 August that Ukraine had captured 28 settlements since its surprise offensive began the week before. More than 121,000 people had already fled border areas. Also on 12 August, in a televised segment of a meeting of the Ukrainian National Security Council, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi told Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine now controlled 1,000 square kilometres of territory. Smirnov’s Telegram has become a list of missile and drone attack warnings for the region. It’s a remarkable inversion from more than two years of war, during which Russia felt safe within its borders while Ukrainian cities sustained relentless attacks. If the first role of a state is to keep its citizens safe and its borders protected, then Russia no longer has a functional state.
Last summer, the Prigozhin rebellion had already created the perception of Russia as a failed state, fundamentally unable to anticipate events and maintain order. Russia seemed like a pyramid of brigandage, where rulers distinguish themselves by greater resources of violence rather than institutions through which to effectively maintain order. Perhaps the state would be more effective if the threat came from the outside, a point made by Russia’s supporters last year to justify the paralysis responding to Prigozhin’s rapidly moving columns. The current Kursk incursion dispels that notion. The FSB, the internal security service and successor to the KGB, is supposedly in charge of securing the state borders. How well did it do on 6 August? Sergei Markov, a Russian political analyst, told the Washington Post that the invasion was a “failure of the entire system of intelligence”.
Though the incursion has slowed down, the hastily assembled Russian grouping responding to it has made little or no progress regaining territory. Russian aircraft seem hesitant to engage with Ukrainian drones in Russian skies. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported from Kursk on 9 August, quoting civilians who felt abandoned and disillusioned with the government in Moscow. Some expressed doubts whether Russia can actually win the war: in what might be a first since it began, these doubts made their way to the printed page.
During the Prigozhin rebellion I interviewed Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s charismatic head of military intelligence, who said the West was making a “tragic mistake” by not taking the war inside Russia. Budanov had already organised several attacks and incursions there, deniable and limited strikes conducted by irregular troops and agents: drones attacked the Kremlin, propagandists were assassinated, Russian soldiers recruited by Ukrainian intelligence crossed the Russian border in quick raids. The current incursion is very different. Budanov is presumably ecstatic that his views on taking the war to Russia are now seemingly mainstream, which forces us to ask: what changed?
That Ukrainian troops could use Western military equipment to invade Russia once seemed inconceivable. Not any more. An official in Washington told me after 6 August that allowing its equipment to be used in such a manner was a gamble, but one worth taking. Even Germany dropped its usual reluctance. The symbolism of German tanks rolling towards Kursk – the site of a 1943 tank battle widely regarded as the largest in history – is unmissable. For the head of the Bundestag’s Defence Committee, Marcus Faber, it is also unproblematic. As Faber, ever the legalist, told the German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost on 8 August, these tanks are considered Ukrainian from the moment of their transfer.
So far Putin has not threatened to escalate, though fear of Moscow’s response has prompted Ukraine’s partners to limit some transfers and uses of military equipment. Given the difficulties facing the Russian army and the evident lack of self-imposed limits in the past, there is only one way Russia could escalate further: employing a new, more forceful form of nuclear blackmail. On 11 August, a fire started at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russian forces for more than two years. Some interpreted it as a message; the possibility that Russia could use a manufactured incident at the plant has long been discussed within intelligence circles. The fire was extinguished by the next morning.
There are several possible explanations why Washington and European capitals seem more sanguine about these risks. First, the prospect of a Ukrainian defeat has become more acute, and that too is a catastrophic risk. Many regard the present standstill as unsustainable for Ukraine, which has motivated Western leaders to provide greater military support and accommodate its strategic autonomy. Second, conversations with Moscow, sometimes via third parties, continue to take place. There is greater confidence that political and diplomatic channels are now in place to prevent the war from spiralling out of control. In recent weeks, a phone call took place between defence ministers in Moscow and Washington about an unspecified threat from Ukraine that Russia claimed would cross every red line. It wasn’t the Kursk invasion but, according to intelligence sources, a possible Ukrainian attack against a military parade in Russia. It remains unclear how the US secretary of defense Lloyd Austin managed to assuage Russia’s fears.
The major prisoner swap between Russia and Western democracies announced on 1 August reinforced the feeling that risks of escalation can ultimately be managed: the two sides managed to carry out an agreement.
Ukraine and its partners now hope to keep Russia under increasing pressure – I expect a succession of attacks – and wait for the Kremlin to conclude that the war cannot be won. The terms for a peace negotiation remain uncertain, but Ukraine is convinced that reaching a deal depends on blocking any path to a Russian victory. Kursk is the opening salvo of a psychological war on Russia.
[See also: Dmytro Kuleba: On China, we know much more than we’ve said]
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This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone