“Russia’s borders do not end anywhere” ran Vladimir Putin’s electoral slogan in January 2024, in seeming justification of a war of conquest in Ukraine meant to be over shortly after it began. But in a surprise turn two and a half years after the full-scale invasion, Ukraine decided to make good on Putin’s loose definition of sovereignty by invading the Kursk region in southern Russia on Aug. 6, in what has become the largest seizure of Russian land since World War II.
Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, says his forces have captured about 400 square miles of the region, which is opposite the northeastern Ukrainian region of Sumy.
“The situation is stable and in our favor,” he said during a broadcast meeting chaired by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukrainian border raids into Russia are nothing new, although none has been undertaken with this type of forethought and ambition.
If true, in under a week Ukraine has taken more of Russia than its adversary has taken of Ukraine so far in 2024. Even if Syrskyi exaggerated, it wasn’t by much. Geolocated footage of Ukrainian troops and armor — much of it Western-provided — suggests Ukraine’s near-total control of the town of Sudzha. Footage published on social media showed a Ukrainian military unit driving through the area in an American Humvee. “This is the central square of Sudzha,” one Ukrainian soldier can be heard saying.
A subsequent video from the same military unit shows another standing in a deserted street in another part of Sudzha. A dead Russian soldier lies on the ground. No gunfire or artillery can be heard in the distance, indicating the town is uncontestedly in Ukrainian hands. In notable contrast to settlements seized by Russian forces in Ukraine, the buildings of Sudzha seem almost completely undamaged. Much of this likely owes to the little resistance Ukrainians faced in their blitzkrieg.
A Ukrainian source close to the military with firsthand knowledge of the operation told New Lines that the invading troops were shocked by how many prisoners of war they were able to capture on the Russian side and at the initial ease of their breakthrough across the border.
All of Russia’s legal national boundaries are controlled by the FSB Border Guard, officers of which vanished during the assault. Russian troops — almost all of them conscripts — had no idea their enemy was on the march, according to a senior Western diplomat. “Many just laid down their arms and fled,” said the diplomat, who spoke to New Lines on condition of anonymity. “The initial incursion was mounted with a strike force of only 2,000 or so. They wiped out 20 Russian trucks coming to the rescue.”
At least 120,000 inhabitants of Kursk Oblast have left their homes and an additional 60,000 are subject to evacuation, Kursk’s acting governor, Alexei Smirnov, told Putin in a televised remote meeting on Aug. 12. Smirnov clarified that Ukraine controls 28 settlements in the region. (The reliable pro-Ukrainian conflict mappers Deep State claimed it was actually 44 settlements.)
Even official channels in Moscow offer oblique hints of just how far Kyiv has pressed. On Aug. 12, for instance, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed it was engaging Ukrainian forces near the villages of Tolpino and Obshchy Kolodez, an acknowledgment that the latter had advanced almost 19 miles into Russia.
Ukraine’s first tactical victory was silence: Not since its successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv in 2022 had it been able to maintain total operational security, abetted by Russian obliviousness. A person close to the Kremlin told Bloomberg that Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov “dismissed” warnings from the country’s intelligence services that the Ukrainians were mustering forces near the border by Kursk as early as “two weeks” before the invasion. Putin, moreover, was said to be uninformed about that intelligence, an oversight that typically carries heavy consequences in Moscow.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defense minister, told New Lines that “most likely, the Russians decided we were congregating troops around the area to prevent a Russian attack on Sumy,” a contingency that the current attack in the opposite direction might well have forestalled. “The disaster of the counteroffensive last summer,” Zagorodnyuk said, referring to Ukraine’s much-touted but failed effort to sever Russia’s direct line of communication in southern Ukraine, “was to a great extent with its advance warning and publicity — half a year of discussion and preparations, everybody talking about it. Ukraine can learn a valuable lesson here: This was a total surprise to everybody, even a lot of people in the Ukrainian government were kept in the dark about it.”
In the past, raids have been mainly carried out by the Russian proxy forces of the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, irregular units of anti-Kremlin militants directly controlled by Ukraine’s military intelligence service. Both of these units have charged into the Russian region of Belgorod, just north of Ukraine’s Kharkiv, with the intent of humiliating Moscow and generating good propaganda for Kyiv.
The difference here is the sophistication and scope of this operation, as well as the open involvement of regular formations of the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine deployed powerful electronic warfare equipment to hamper Russian communications and remotely mined key roads along which the Russians would likely send reinforcements. It also sent some of its best brigades as the vanguard of the breach. On Aug. 9, three days into the incursion, Ukraine hit Lipetsk air base, about 140 miles northeast of Kursk, obliterating its ammunition dump and hundreds of glide bombs, cheap but relatively accurate long-range weapons that have devastated Ukrainian positions in the past few months.
At least some of the troops Kyiv used are in fact newly mobilized, suggesting their first combat experience has not been on the battlefield at home but on foreign soil. The elite 80th and the 82nd Air Assault Brigades, equipped, respectively, with American Stryker and German Marder armored fighting vehicles, were some of the first units deployed. Later, Ukraine brought up its heaviest tube artillery, including the Pion howitzers, the same guns whose massive shells had helped blunt the initial Russian attempt to take Kyiv at the start of the current war in February 2022. (Use of the Pion has been scant in recent months as its supply of 203-millimeter shells had largely been expended.)
More provocative is what else Ukraine is using in Kursk: its most powerful Western-supplied artillery rocket platforms, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and M270s. Washington has forbidden Kyiv from using these strike targets on Russian soil unless in a strictly defensive move, to preempt another Russian axis of attack. (Even that policy took some doing, coming in the aftermath of Russia’s reinvasion of Kharkiv in May and Ukraine’s inability to countermand it without firing at launch sites and artillery pieces inside Russia.)
Video footage shows what looks to be a HIMARS or M270 strike on a Russian column in the village of Rylsk on Aug. 9. Multiple precision artillery rockets then slammed into the vehicles, leaving nearly a dozen smoldering husks and scores of Russian soldiers lying dead on the asphalt.
So far, the Biden administration’s response has been to label the Kursk offensive a perfectly kosher defensive action linked to a prospective Sumy axis opening up and to offer, if anything, tacit encouragement. Ukraine “has the right to defend itself from attacks that are carried out across the border and because of the need for crossfire,” Pentagon deputy spokesperson Sabrina Singh said in a press conference on Aug. 9. “So they’re taking steps to protect themselves from attacks that come from a region where they can operate with our weapons under U.S. policy.”
The Kursk operation was likely planned with several goals in mind, according to Ukrainian and Western sources.
First was the PR value: the utter humiliation of an aggressive enemy currently racking up points on the board in Ukraine’s east combined with the need to demonstrate that Kyiv’s exhausted and depleted army still has a few haymakers left. Russia is now exposed as far more vulnerable than assumed, with Putin facing the kinds of crises he usually inflicts on his neighbor. He is rattled by the high number of internally displaced people, and his government’s calls on the international community to condemn an invasion appear feckless. Meanwhile, his soldiers are surrendering en masse (and being carted off in NATO vehicles) and there is chaos in a borderland area, whose inhabitants feel their government has abandoned them. Deserting Russian soldiers have been recorded looting the homes of their compatriots, an ironic reversal on one of the most notorious events of the 2022 invasion, when Russian soldiers were filmed stealing toilet bowls and electronics from ransacked Ukrainian homes.
The mood in Kyiv in light of this act of strategic jujitsu is gratification. Kursk comes as a much-needed morale boost amid ammunition shortages, untold losses at the front and a fitfully executed mobilization effort. More and more Ukrainians have lately expressed a reluctance to fight, citing grievances with their commanders, shortages in ammunition or protective gear, or the simple fear of being sent to certain death from Russia’s overwhelming firepower in the east.
The second goal was to cause political headaches for the Putin regime. The out-of-nowhere assault has already exacerbated tensions between and among different Russian military units. Wagner paramilitaries are casting blame on Chechen “Akhmat” Special Forces, some of the first discombobulated troops to run and hide in the face of Ukraine’s invasion — and then record themselves shooting up forests to escape accusations of cowardice. Apti Alaudinov, commander of Chechen forces, called fleeing Russian soldiers “roosters,” prison slang referring to the socially lowest level of inmates, often male rape victims. Alaudinov also claimed “some leaders of the Defense Ministry kept lying and lying,” recriminations reminiscent of the late Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s denunciations of Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s then-defense minister, and Gerasimov for failing his cadres in Bakhmut last year — a tension that eventually led to Wagner’s mutiny and Prigozhin’s assassination.
Third, Ukraine did it because it could. Much of the modern Western equipment now on display in Kursk has proven of limited value in the trenched wastelands of Ukraine’s east, where Strykers and Marders have little freedom of maneuver. Armored vehicles in that theater immediately attract a swarm of Russian drones, and even assuming they didn’t they must still navigate vast minefields that can paralyze them in their tracks. Under these conditions, the vehicles are effectively relegated to “battle taxis” fit only for transporting infantry to and from their positions, evacuating wounded and delivering supplies, but incapable of mounting breakthroughs.
In contrast, Ukrainian mechanized troops in Kursk have been able to enjoy an unparalleled freedom of movement. In the opening hours and days of the Kursk offensive they were able to penetrate deep into Russian territory. In many cases, they didn’t waste time engaging Russian trench lines and other prepared fighting positions; they just drove around them. Unimpeded land routes allowed Ukraine to advance miles in mere hours.
A fourth motivation was to get Russia to divert its war-making resources and manpower from Donbas, where it has been steadily advancing for months, to fortify Kursk. One officer in Ukraine’s National Guard who is based in Kharkiv told New Lines: “On the one hand, maybe they’ll be willing to redeploy some of their forces from the east. What is the most threatened now is not only Povrkosk,” a city in danger of being encircled by the Russians, “but the Kramatorsk/Slavyansk agglomeration.” If Povrkosk is taken, then Ukraine comes closer to losing its last remaining redoubt in the Donetsk region, and Putin will thus consolidate control over another of the four Ukrainian regions he illicitly “annexed” in 2023.
Dmytro Lykhoviy, a Ukrainian army spokesman, told Politico on Aug. 13 that there are indications Russia is “pulling troops out of both Zaporizhzhia and Kherson,” two of the other regions in southern Ukraine, and sending them to Kursk. The Western diplomat quoted earlier also told New Lines that there are indications Russia is beginning to yank personnel from Crimea. The occupied peninsula is now seen as a more viable target for recapture by the Ukrainian General Staff, which has for months degraded Russia’s naval and air defense assets in combined drone and missile strikes, not to mention driving the entirety of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of the vicinity.
But this redirection of Russian energy is by no means a foregone conclusion. “Knowing the Russians, their strategy and tactics, I would not rely on this gambit working out because the edge of the Donetsk region is much more important for them than booting us out of the north,” the Ukrainian National Guard officer said. In spite of Kursk, the Russians have continued to advance in the Donetsk direction, taking three villages in the past 24 hours and threatening to take multiple large settlements, including Pokrovsk.
A fifth objective of the offensive was to snatch territory in order to trade territory. By occupying Kursk, Kyiv might have put itself in a more advantageous position to negotiate the terms of a ceasefire of final settlement, something that may be imposed on it by the United States in the event Donald Trump wins the upcoming presidential election. Zagorodnyuk, the ex-defense minister, said Ukraine isn’t angling to leave Kursk soon and may be digging in indefinitely, by building its own trench lines and fortifications.
“Things are turning into positional war there,” he said, meaning static lines of contact on a battlefield defined by artillery fire, similar to what obtains in Donbas. “I believe Ukraine can hold the line there for quite a long time unless Russia dedicates very serious resources to kicking us out.” One person who agrees is Russian parliamentarian Andrey Gurulev, a retired lieutenant general, who said on state-run Russian television: “We must look at this situation with sobriety. We won’t be able to push them out quickly.”
Finally, Ukraine’s Kursk campaign may have been designed as much for the benefit of Washington and Brussels as it was for Moscow — namely, to show that the perennial fear of escalation with Putin is not rooted in political reality. As of now, the Kremlin has declared only an “anti-terrorism” operation, which is the remit of the FSB rather than the Russian Armed Forces. An all-out declaration of war on Ukraine would trigger Russia’s strategic defenses, which might lead to the launching of nuclear weapons. Gerasimov, meanwhile, downplayed the size of the occupying forces as no more than 1,000, while the Russian Defense Ministry later claimed that all of those plus another 120 were killed.
Ed Bogan, a former senior CIA operations officer who follows Ukraine closely, told New Lines that the campaign has already delivered a “heavy psychological blow to the enemy, as it clearly exposes several of Russia’s many military and political deficiencies and challenges our policy assumptions. Now would be a good time to lift the remaining restrictions and let Ukraine move towards finishing this thing on their terms.”
Those restrictions include using American-sent missiles, such as long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to strike Russian airfields deep inside Russia — exactly the kind of sorties Ukraine has been conducting, as with Lipetsk, using its homemade fleet of drones. The Ukrainian government has been lobbying the U.S. for months to erase this red line, too, in order to reduce Russia’s ability to launch missiles and glide bombs on civilian and military targets alike in Ukraine. A HIMARS strike in Kursk not met by Armageddon but shrugs in the Kremlin makes the case more forcefully for that allowance and other relaxed preconditions on security assistance.
There are tentative signals it may be working.
On Aug. 11, Markus Faber, the head of the German Bundestag Defense Committee, tweeted that the Kursk offensive is “advancing more successfully than anticipated,” a fact that Faber believes justifies increasing the number of German Leopard 2 tanks made available to Ukraine’s Defense Forces. Given that Berlin has typically been the most reluctant to ramp up the fight against Putin, this recommendation carries significant weight in the pro-Ukraine coalition.
“In order to change the course of the war, we need to resort to nonstandard steps,” Serhii Kuzan, the chair of Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center and ex-adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, told New Lines. “This is the principle of asymmetric warfare. We cannot wage a symmetrical war, because there are simply more Russians.”
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