Andrew Potter: What is Ukraine up to in Kursk?

Some are calling Kyiv's cross-border invasion of Russia a humiliation for Putin. It's also a wake-up alarm to the West about a war Ukraine is on the verge of losing.

By: Andrew Potter

So what is Ukraine really up to in Kursk? 

It’s been two weeks since Ukrainian ground forces moved across the border in a surprise incursion into Russia. In that time the Ukrainians have seized as much as a thousand square kilometres of Russian territory. They have killed thousands of Russian soldiers, taken hundreds more prisoner, destroyed a great deal of Russian equipment, and over the weekend, destroyed two bridges and damaged another across the Seym river, isolating Russian troops and cutting them off from resupply and reinforcement.  

But for all this success, no one — not the Americans, nor the British nor the Germans, and certainly not the Russians — seems to have a good sense of just what Ukraine is trying to accomplish here. 

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Russian soil has been occupied by hostile forces in this war. In May of 2023, rebel groups that were based in Ukraine, including outfits from Russia, Poland, and Belarus, executed a number of cross-border harassment raids into Belgorod. They seized a few villages, occupied some government offices, raised their flags, took a handful of prisoners, and eventually were chased out. 

But this latest assault into the Kursk region is something completely different. To begin with, it involves actual Ukrainian formations. More notably, they are using a lot of Western-supplied kit, including Challenger tanks from the U.K., American HIMARS missile launchers, and Canadian-provided artillery, tanks and vehicles.

But more to the point, these are not just harassment raids, aimed at drawing a bit of blood and generating some headlines before scooting back across the border. Ukraine is making a big show of acting as if they intend to stay. They have set up a military office in Kursk, with Ukrainian officials talking about needing to establish a “buffer zone” in the Kursk region for “self-defence” purposes.

This isn’t the only way that the Ukrainians have used this invasion to parrot Russia’s military and rhetorical strategies back at their enemy. Almost immediately after the Kursk invasion, Ukraine’s online supporters started calling on Putin to trade land for peace, and for Russian allies such as China and Iran to stop supplying weapons to Russia in support of an unwinnable war.

In response, Russia has redeployed some units from the front lines down in the Donbas, but it isn’t clear that it is enough to relieve some of the pressure Ukrainian defenders faced down there. And there has to be more to Ukraine’s strategy than embarrassing Putin and grabbing some POWs for later trade, useful as both of those outcomes might be. To grasp Ukraine’s full ambitions here, it is important to understand a few things. 

The first is the grim fact that the war is not going well for Ukraine. Sure, there have been a few high-profile successes of late, most notably in chasing the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea and the sinking of a Russian submarine. But otherwise, it has been a very tough summer for Ukrainians, both military and civilian. On the frontlines in the Donbas, the Ukrainians have never really recovered from the effects of having essentially run out of ammunition last spring after the U.S. Republicans stalled a US$60 billion aid package for seven months over the winter. The Russians seized the initiative and have not lost it since, making steady and significant tactical advances over the summer. 

But Ukrainian civilians have suffered as well. Russia took advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of air-defence ammunition to destroy the country’s electricity generation capacity. It doesn’t make the headlines anymore, but virtually the whole country, including the capital Kyiv, continues to suffer from constant power blackouts. By some measures, as much as half of Ukraine’s electricity grid is offline, and winter is rapidly approaching. Russia also continues to randomly bomb Ukrainian hospitals, schools, malls, and apartment complexes, killing civilians for what appears to be the sheer glee of it.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s allies continue to impose restrictions on how Western-supplied weapons can be used, what Russian assets Ukraine can target, and where. In particular, the strict geographic limits on how the U.S.-provided long-range ATACMS missiles can be used has had the effect of creating safety bubbles from which the Russian airforce can fly with impunity, dropping cruise missiles and glide bombs onto Ukrainians with devastating effect. 

All of this is in the name of “escalation management” in response to fears by the West that if Ukraine goes too far — that is, if it succeeds in defending itself too well — that Russia will respond, like an abusive partner, in a dangerous and unpredictable fashion. Given that it has massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, kidnapped untold numbers of Ukrainian children, raped Ukrainian girls, bombed Ukrainian children’s hospitals and shelters, tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war (including castrating and beheading them), bombed Ukrainian cities into rubble, shelled and mined a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, destroyed a Ukrainian dam releasing enough water to create a massive ecological crisis, and committed uncountable other crimes against humanity, it isn’t clear what exactly Russia might do that it hasn’t already done. It is pretty clear by now that Russia is not going to nuke anyone, and it is not going to directly attack a NATO country. So what exactly are we afraid of?

The insistence on forcing Ukraine to fight one-handed has only compounded its natural disadvantages versus Russia in manpower, equipment, and its predatory culture of orc-brained nihilism. Which means that day by day, metre by metre, life by precious life, Ukraine has been steadily losing the war. The way things are going, at some point, perhaps soon, Kyiv is going to have to sue for peace, on terms largely dictated by the thugocracy in Moscow. 

That is why those who are cheering the Kursk operation for how it has humiliated Putin, discredited the FSB, humiliated Gerasimov, and so on, are looking at it from the wrong angle. The operation might well have done these things, but these are at best secondary effects. The true audience for the invasion of Kursk is not Putin, not the Kremlin, not the FSB, not China or Russia’s other allies, and certainly not Russia’s laughably non-existent civil society. It is the United States of America, more narrowly the White House, and more narrowly still, Biden’s security advisor Jake Sullivan, who (fairly or not) has earned himself a reputation as Putin’s appeaser-in-chief. 

The Kursk operation is a direct response to the efforts of Ukraine’s senior allies to micromanage the war and minimize any geopolitical fallout. Whether they realize it or not, this has simply emboldened Putin and cost Ukrainian lives and land, and put its survival as a functioning state at profound risk. Kursk is Kyiv finally taking full ownership of the fight and responsibility for the consequences. 

Ukraine’s leaders have known for years that Putin can’t be bargained with, and certainly can’t be trusted to honour any ceasefire or peace agreement. The invasion of Kursk is, more than anything, a last-ditch effort to get the West to see things Ukraine’s way. Some, in particular the Nordic and Baltic countries, have responded with barely-disguised satisfaction. But given that Germany has responded to the invasion by cutting off aid to Ukraine, while the U.S. is still hamstringing Ukraine’s use of its weapons and even preventing the U.K. from letting Ukraine to use British and French Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles in attacking Russia, it’s pretty clear that Ukraine’s biggest backers have taken a good look, and don’t really like what they see.

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