The Kursk Counteroffensive
By I am… skeptical of the decision to launch a counteroffensive into the Kursk region, but I’d love to be wrong:
Ukraine pressed its advance into Russia for a fourth day on Friday, battling to capture a town near the border and sending small units to conduct raids further into the western Russian region of Kursk, independent military experts and pro-Kremlin military bloggers said.
The Ukrainian military also said on Friday that it had struck a Russian airfield in the Lipetsk region, which borders Kursk, hitting warehouses that contain guided aerial bombs.
The claim could not be independently verified, but the local Russian authorities said that a large drone attack had caused several explosions and that a fire had broken out at a military airfield. A state of emergency was declared in one of the districts in the area.
Kyiv’s surprise offensive into Russia, which began on Tuesday, has temporarily shifted the focus of the war, opening a new front inside Russia and prompting Moscow to scramble to halt the Ukrainian advance.
At the same, the operation has raised questions about whether it is worth the risk, given that Ukrainian forces are already stretched. It is also not clear whether the mission will help Ukraine improve its position on the rest of the battlefield, where it has been steadily losing ground for many months.
Ukrainian losses in Donetsk have been steady and brutal over the past couple of months, and while there have been some indications that the Russians are approaching culmination (the point at which an offensive reaches limits posed by availability of soldiers, equipment, and munitions, and both logistics and human capital approach exhaustion) I’m not sure I would have diverted significant forces to an entirely different sector. If the effort pulls Russian attention away from Donetsk that’s good, but if it does so at enormous cost that Ukraine can’t really pay then less so.
According the US, the Ukrainians are free-lancing:
Knowing exactly what is going on is difficult.
”I can confirm that we are aware of the recent movement by the [Ukrainian Armed Forces] into the region,” a Pentagon spokesman told The War Zone Wednesday morning. “The U.S. was not consulted about this movement.”
The fighting was still ongoing as of this morning, said the spokesperson, deferring any further updates to Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD), which just last night claimed they repulsed the incursion, said on Wednesday that “the operation to neutralize the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] AFU units is in progress.” The MoD proffered that Ukrainian forces have paid dearly in the operation, ticking off a laundry list of hundreds of casualties and scores of equipment losses it is impossible to verify at this point. The MoD also said that Russian forces responded by striking several rallying points inside Ukraine.
Ukrainian operational security (this has been an enormous problem over the course of the war, as the RUSI account of last summer’s offensive makes clear) was very good:
Much is still unclear, not least the scale of the operation. On August 7th, Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top general, claimed that a force of approximately 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been stopped. Neither aspect of that statement appears particularly accurate. Ukraine has committed units from at least four elite brigades, meaning that the strike force is probably much greater. Ukraine has mined the main road leading south-east to Belgorod, and has significant air defences in the area. Given its successful start, Ukraine may well bring in more reserves, despite its own thin lines in Donetsk province to the south.
Even by the foggy standards of war, the Kursk raid has been shrouded in a cloud of secrecy. Western governments were taken by surprise. A Ukrainian general-staff source near the border admitted he didn’t know the full picture. “We were told to pack our bags on August 4th,” he says. “The bosses didn’t say where we were headed, and we still only see part of it.” The shock, surprise and silence is reminiscent of that achieved by Ukraine prior to another lightning offensive, in Kharkiv province, in late 2022.
Long story short… if this is conceived as a raid that disrupts Russia’s offensive in the Donetsk and perhaps unhinges some Russian thinking on the course of the war then it could work. If the Ukrainians try to hold some territory then I’m very worried that they could suffer very substantial casualties. But we’ll see.