By Mark Antonio Wright
Monday, August 12, 2024
It’s now been a full week since the news started
spreading last Tuesday, August 6, that the Ukrainian army had crossed into the
Russian province of Kursk, far to the north and west of the regions of eastern
Ukraine that have seen the bulk of the fighting over the past two years.
At first, many analysts — myself included — assumed that
the operation was more akin to the previous incursions on Russian lands in this
war that have been executed by irregular units rather than any sort of
full-scale operation intended to seize and hold Russian sovereign territory. At
most, I thought that the Ukrainians might be simply executing a raid, perhaps
even using regular army units, intended to cause damage and consternation to
the Russians and, yes, embarrass the Kremlin.
(The
Institute for the Study of War has a series of excellent maps outlining
what’s happening.)
It’s now clear, however, that — whatever the wisdom of
this Ukrainian operation — what has been launched is of a scale and likely
intent far larger than a mere raid. One can now say that the Ukrainian army, in
2024, has executed the first serious invasion of Russian territory since the
Second World War.
Christopher Miller, writing for the Financial Times
in a remarkable report, confirms that the U.S. and German
governments were not informed about the operation before it was launched and
were taken entirely by surprise by the Ukrainian plans. This indicates that the
Ukrainian military and government are operating with an advanced level of
discipline and professionalism when it comes to operational security.
Of course, perhaps the only individuals taken more by
surprise by the Ukrainians were the Russians themselves.
Miller, in his piece written from near the Sumy–Kursk
border, relates the experience of Volodymyr, a Ukrainian soldier and member of
a Stryker armored-vehicle crew, as his unit crashed over the Russian border:
He and the other soldiers of the
82nd air assault brigade listened to their commander’s instructions: eyes open,
move swiftly and keep your country in your thoughts. Then, after a short prayer
and a battle cry of “Glory to Ukraine!” they set out to invade Russia — the
first foreign army to do so since the second world war.
“We entered Russian territory for
the first time at 1pm on Tuesday [August 6],” Volodymyr said. “We were among
the first to enter there.”
To his astonishment, his unit faced
no resistance as their eight-wheeled, 20 tonne US Stryker fighting vehicle
stormed across the border in broad daylight.
They soon encountered a Russian
unit “sitting in the forest, drinking coffee at a table”, Volodymyr recalled.
“Then our Stryker drives right into their table.
“We killed many of them on the
first day,” he said. “Because they were unarmed and didn’t expect us.”
Now, a week in, and having attracted a significant
(although to date, somewhat shambolic) Russian response, Ukraine has decided,
apparently, that it isn’t going to back off.
As many as six Ukrainian brigades appear to be involved
in the operation. They have captured towns and villages (even the Kremlin, in a
televised briefing chaired by Vladimir Putin himself, admitted that at least 28
Russian villages were under occupation) and overrun several hundred square
miles of territory. Some 120,000 Russian civilians have fled the border area.
And the provincial government says it is preparing to evacuate tens of
thousands more.
What’s more, the Ukrainians appear to be pushing forward
in some spots toward further Russian towns, while in other areas they’re
digging in.
So, the question can now be asked: What are the
Ukrainians up to?
There are likely three non-mutually-exclusive answers.
First, it seems clear that the Ukrainians are trying to
relieve pressure on their embattled eastern front by forcing the Russians to
redeploy units — and ideally some of their best units — to recapture these lost
territories. So far at least, this doesn’t appear to be happening at scale.
That may be a smart decision on the Russians’ part, at least for the time
being. Indeed, it’s quite time-consuming and logistically challenging for
frontline units to be disengaged, pulled from the front line, and then redeployed
hundreds of miles away. The Russians, according to reporting by the New York Times, instead of redeploying units from
Ukraine’s east, have ordered them into the attack on their current front.
“Our guys do not feel any relief,” Artem Dzhepko, a press
officer with Ukraine’s National Police Brigade, fighting in the Donetsk region
of eastern Ukraine, told the Times.
From the scattered information available, it seems that,
at least for now, the Russians are sending a combination of border guards,
internal-security troops, and units that had been training or refitting in the
area to repel the invasion. This is quite good news for the Ukrainian maneuver
forces in the Kursk area, because, if true, that means that they will be facing
units that are likely quite ill-equipped to fight an experienced and mechanized
enemy. It does, however, partially explain the seemingly amateur and
uncoordinated nature of the Russian response to date.
Second, the Ukrainian army wished to seize and occupy
Russian territory as the momentum has slowly drifted this year toward broaching
the possibility of talks. It should come as no surprise that, should the
Ukrainians go to the negotiating table with Russian towns in their hands, they
will be in a much better position to trade for the return of their own
territory in the Ukrainian east and south.
How much will the Kremlin be impressed by such a
bargaining chip? It’s hard to say. But it’s notable, at least, that the recent
operations have engaged Russian units that analysts say are heavily composed of
conscripts. Russian units fighting in Ukraine are, at least nominally, made up
of “contract soldiers,” i.e., those who have signed on to fight the war, as
opposed to units composed of draftees. Russian conscripts are, of course,
finding their way to Ukrainian battlefields — whether they want to go there or
not — but the fiction that “only volunteers” are fighting for the Russian army
in Ukraine is an important one politically because Putin has promised Russian
mothers that conscripts would not be used in Ukraine.
The more young Russian boys, in hastily deployed and
ill-trained units, die in Kursk, the more precarious the political dynamic
might grow for Putin and his regime. And casualties may yet prove to be severe
if the Russians decide to throw thousands of untrained young men at the
Ukrainian salient. As one Ukrainian told Miller and the FT:
Denys, a soldier driving a
US-provided Humvee painted in desert camouflage, said the Kursk fight felt
“totally different” from that in the Donetsk region.
“Fighting from defensive positions
is much harder,” he said. “The enemy knows everything about us there. It knows
where we are. Its drones can see our every move. “Here we had the element of
surprise,” he added. “But we were also surprised that [they were] so surprised
with [our attack].”
Indeed, one Russian convoy advancing toward the front was
reportedly entirely destroyed by a strike by U.S.-supplied HIMARS missiles.
Finally, every war is fundamentally a contest of both
sides’ willingness to continue fighting. The Ukrainian people have thus far,
over two and a half years of conflict, shown a remarkable willingness to
sacrifice to keep their country from falling under the Kremlin’s boot. However,
it is no surprise that last year’s bloody and ultimately failed
counteroffensive, and this year’s bloody and depressing positional war in the
east, have sapped some of Ukraine’s strength, vitality, and morale.
This kind of operation may not be what ends the war. It
may not be what wins the war. But symbolic operations sometimes need not be
ultimately rational to be successful. Jimmy Doolittle’s famous raid over Tokyo
caused relatively little damage to the Japanese war effort. It caused
relatively few casualties. It destroyed no important industries. But it
dramatically raised morale in the United States, and it arguably caused a
significant redeployment of air-defense assets to the Japanese home islands
that may have caused the Allied campaigns in the South Pacific to be relatively
easier than they would have been otherwise.
War is a contingent endeavor. It is full of surprises.
This Ukrainian offensive was a surprise to nearly everyone. And of course, it
may very well end in tears.
But the Ukrainians should be credited for attempting to
extricate themselves from a merely positional and attritional fight against a
far larger and more populous enemy by finding a gap in the Russian war plan.
The Ukrainians have, once again, attempted to maneuver
against their enemies. They now hold a piece of sovereign Russian territory.
And Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is shocked and embarrassed by the developments.
They have rolled the dice. And they have, for the moment,
stolen the initiative from the Russians.
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