Ukraine’s Daring Gambit Inside Russia

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 08, 2024

 

The once stalemated lines of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces have become far more fluid in recent weeks, and not to Ukraine’s advantage.

 

“Russian forces have made swift and significant territorial gains in Ukraine,” the Financial Times’ Christopher Miller reported yesterday. The Russian military is advancing beyond Ukraine’s defensive lines in eastern Donetsk, seizing some key settlements and threatening future advances with the forward movement of Russian artillery. “Our defenses are showing cracks,” one Ukrainian official told Miller. Indeed, according to one Finnish research group, the amount of territory Moscow’s forces have captured since May “is nearly double that which Ukraine’s military won back at heavy cost in terms of lives and military materiel with its summer offensive a year ago.”

 

The weakness of Ukraine’s defensive lines has led some observers to wonder where Kyiv’s defenders went. Was this grim evidence of the manpower shortage Ukraine’s Western allies have warned of for months? Then, all of a sudden, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers suddenly reemerged amid their shockingly successful advance relatively deep into Russian territory.

 

Via the New York Times:

 

Ukrainian forces have reportedly punched through Russian border defenses and seized several settlements in fighting that was still raging on Thursday, and triggered a state of emergency in one region in the west of Russia. Ukrainian armored columns were filmed moving along roads as far as six miles inside Russia.

 

This is no feint. Nor is it merely a harassment campaign designed to destabilize the Russian rear. This is, according to Vladimir Putin, a “large-scale provocation.” And it is reportedly closing in on targets of strategic value, including population centers, vital highways, and nuclear plants.

 

Both Miller and the Times cite military experts who are perplexed as to the strategic objective Ukraine is trying to secure with its incursion into Russia at the expense of its defensive lines on its own territory. Of course, the near-term tactical objective is to “shift the fighting” to “Russian territory and ease the pressure of Moscow’s offensive in eastern Ukraine,” the Times observed. But in the long run, Ukraine may succeed only in sacrificing its vehicles, weapons platforms, and irreplaceable soldiers to an offensive that is not capable of holding the territory it takes.

 

Maybe. But beginning in May, the Kremlin started sending signals — signals that those in the West who are receptive to Moscow’s overtures received loud and clear — that Putin would be willing to entertain the prospect of a temporary cease-fire that recognizes the lines of contact on the battlefield. Ukraine’s advance into Russian territory likely forecloses on that prospect, both for Putin and those in the West who would see to his interests.

 

Time will soon tell whether Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is a disastrous folly or a clever maneuver designed to scuttle the best-laid plans of cease-fire advocates. If they truly don’t want Russia to use a cease-fire to regroup and reengage in its war of conquest at a time and place of its choosing, Ukraine’s advance should pose no obstacle to their desire to see peace restored to the European continent, whatever the cost to either combatant. It’s telling, however, that the peace activists have grown quiet in the wake of Ukraine’s recent tactical achievements.