FOR those who know their military history, the place name Kursk, in western Russia, will have an immediate resonance. It was there over 80 years ago that Nazi and Red Army troops clashed in what is generally recognised as the largest tank battle in history and one of the most epic and decisive of the Second World War.
The stakes back then could not have been higher, and in the end, the Soviet victory at Kursk assured Russia’s dominance on the Eastern Front and blunted Germany’s last major offensive in the East.
Fast forward eight decades and the Kursk region is once again in the throes of war. The battle currently taking place there is nothing like on the scale of that back in 1943, but the Ukrainian army’s cross border incursion last week is still a huge gamble for its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and also piles pressure on his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
While previous Ukrainian incursions – largely in the Belgorod region – have been carried out by small units of pro-Kyiv Russian troops, this latest operation is different.
To begin with, it is bigger in scale, and most significantly, perhaps, it is being undertaken specifically by Ukrainian troops, marking the first time since the Second World War that foreign forces have invaded Russia.
So just what exactly has the incursion involved and what might its strategic objectives be? What lies behind Ukrainian thinking in taking the fight into Russian territory, and how is the operation going down both with Kyiv’s Western allies and inside Ukraine itself?
It was last Tuesday morning that Ukrainian forces launched an audacious, multi-brigade incursion, that is reported to have involved several thousand troops, including some from elite assault brigades equipped with US and German vehicles and tanks.
Pouring into the Kursk region from several directions, Kyiv’s troops quickly overwhelmed a few checkpoints and field fortifications manned by lightly armed Russian border guards and infantry units along the region’s 152-mile frontier with Ukraine.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank, Ukrainian forces managed to push up to 20 miles deep into the region.
“Ukrainian forces appear to be able to use these small, armoured groups to conduct assaults past the engagement line due to the low density of Russian personnel in the border areas,” it said in an analysis of the raid.
Their advance took them on to the otherwise sleepy town of Sudzha, whose central square is still dominated by a statue of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin.
Sitting as it does some 400 miles southwest of Moscow and otherwise nondescript, Sudzha’s real importance however is as the location of a pumping station on the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod pipeline, through which flows about half of the gas still supplied to Europe.
Essentially, the station serves as a border checkpoint for Russian gas. Once the gas passes through Sudzha, it enters Ukraine’s pipeline system and flows into Slovakia, and then on to Czechia, Austria and Hungary.
Analysts of the Ukrainian operation, however, say it remains unclear what control of that station could bring Ukraine. If it had simply wanted to stop the flow of gas it could have done so by breaking the pipeline on its side of the border.
Then there is the fact that both Ukraine and Russia have interests in the pipeline’s continued uninterrupted operation, given that transmission fees are paid to Ukraine and the financial difficulties of Russia’s Gazprom, which is struggling under the weight of sanctions.
The irony here is that despite the war, Ukraine still rents its Soviet-era gas pipeline to Russia’s gas monopoly, Gazprom, for about $2 billion a year.
Ukraine is also estimated to earn over £600 million a year in transit fees under a deal expiring at the end of this year, says Mark Galeotti, an expert on modern Russia from the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
“Control of Sudzha, granting Ukraine the power to turn the gas supply on and off, might be considered a powerful symbol of its continuing agency, and the need to take it seriously,” observed Galeotti in an article last week, adding that “changing the narrative” around the war may well be a significant part of the operation.
Some Russian pro-war social media accounts meanwhile have suggested Ukrainians are aiming to capture the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, some 50 miles from the border, as a tit-for-tat move against Russia’s occupation of its Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant.
The Kursk power station, one of the world’s oldest, is located in the town of Kurchatov, 40 miles east of Sudzha.
Ukrainian drones have been spotted in Kurchatov, and some analysts said Kyiv wants to destabilise the Russian energy system the way Moscow has targeted Ukrainian power stations and its energy grid.
“The main thing about the incursion is energy supplies. The more destabilised they are, the more destabilised the Russian economy is,” Kyiv-based analyst Taras Zahorodniy said in a television interview.
But many observers, and those within the Ukrainian military itself, have dismissed such a theory. One source from the Ukrainian general staff cited by The Economist magazine pointed out that such a move would require a 50-mile advance from the border and involve a much larger force.
“Without a properly organised force, you’ll repeat the mistakes the Russians made north of Kyiv in 2022 … we cut off their lines and they were easy prey,” the Ukrainian source told The Economist.
The fact that Ukraine has committed mechanised forces, including tanks, would also compound the logistical challenge of such a deep advance given that armoured vehicles need lots of fuel and maintenance.
Gas pipeline and nuclear stations aside, other more likely strategic goals are thought to be at play here too. Coming at a time when Kyiv’s forces are struggling to stem the Russian advances in the east, by launching the incursion, Kyiv could be aiming to force the Kremlin to divert resources from the eastern Donetsk region.
There, Russian forces have pressed offensives in several sectors and made slow but steady gains, relying on their edge in firepower. For months now, Moscow’s has shown an improved ability to exploit cracks in Ukrainian defensive lines, which have been thinned by manpower shortages and strained by relentless Russian attacks along a more than 600-mile front. Time and again, Russian forces have identified weakened and poorly organised Ukrainian units before breaking through by throwing scores of troops and armoured vehicles onto the battlefield.
But should the Ukrainian incursion be an attempt to divert Russian troops from these pressurised eastern frontlines then military experts maintain that Moscow would likely respond with reserves who were not fighting in Ukraine.
“Does it really solve any of the larger military strategic problems that the other parts of the frontline are suffering from?” asked Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst and associate fellow of The International Institute for Strategic Studies speaking to The New York Times and echoing the views of other analysts.
Some maintain too that the Ukrainian incursion is a risky move from Kyiv’s perspective, and that despite its initial successes, the foray into Russia could cause attrition in some of Ukraine’s most capable units and leave troops in Donetsk and other vulnerable frontlines without vital reinforcements.
Much of the outcome of the incursion will depend observers say on what Ukraine has available in reserve to throw into the operation, and how quickly Russian forces organise to counter.
Russia has already moved extra tanks, artillery and rocket systems to its southern Kursk region to battle the shock incursion.
Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, posted a video purporting to show them in control of a town near the border – the first pictorial evidence of their cross-border advances.
In new evidence of the damage inflicted in the Ukrainian counter-offensive, another video posted on social media and verified by Reuters news agency showed a convoy of about 15 burnt-out Russian military trucks spaced out along a highway in the Kursk region.
Yesterday, Russia introduced “anti-terrorism measures” in three regions bordering Ukraine, Russian news agencies quoted officials as saying.
The measures by the National Anti-Terrorism Committee in Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk included the possible evacuation of residents, limits on transport in specific areas, tightened security around sensitive sites, and wiretaps of telephone and other communications, according to RIA news agency.
The statement said the decision, taken by Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), was in response to Ukraine’s “unprecedented attempt to destabilise the situation in a series of regions”.
Ukraine meanwhile appears pleased by the success of its operation, and keen to show its allies in Nato that their support has been worthwhile, having recently been supplied with more weaponry and jets to help the wider war effort.
Certainly when seen through the prism of Ukraine’s allies, who have always been wary of Kyiv taking the battle on to Russian soil using Western-supplied weapons, it would appear that there are no flashing red lights or evidence of allies putting pressure on Kyiv to ease off.
Both Berlin and Washington shifted policy on hitting Russian territory in May in response to the Russian offensive against Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv. US approval was very carefully couched and limited to areas near Kharkiv but as observers say, this is a far cry from last week’s surge by Ukrainian troops across the border.
AS questions persist over Kyiv’s motives and reasoning for an operation which to a great extent remains shrouded in secrecy, one interpretation has gained traction. The fact that since the start of the operation last Tuesday, Russia has lost full control of some 130 square miles of its territory has led some to believe that what Ukraine is trying to do is create a “buffer zone” on the border, similar to Russia’s own attempts to create one in nearby Kharkiv over the past three months.
“Russia was trying to prepare a solid position,” one Ukrainian intelligence source, told The Economist magazine, “but now they are fucked because they can’t protect their own terrain.”
Analysts say this has heaped political pressure domestically on Putin and the Kremlin who are now presented with arguably the biggest challenge to their control since an uprising by Wagner mercenaries in June 2023.
But one other theory stands out as to Kyiv’s motive for its audacious move into the Kursk region. This is that should Ukrainian forces be able to hold on and maintain control of Russian territory – and they are consolidating and reinforcing defensive lines – then the aim might be to strengthen Ukraine’s leverage in any potential negotiations to end the war.
As The Washington Post recently reported, Ukrainian officials are said to have asked the US to let them use long-range ATACMS missiles to hit airfields that Russia is using to retaliate against the incursion – a decision that, if approved, could allow Kyiv to hold a portion of Kursk for some time.
“This will give them the leverage they need for negotiations with Russia – this is what it’s all about,” an adviser to President Zelenskyy, told the Post, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Some experts maintain that this is the most credible explanation for last week’s invasion of the Kursk region – a point underscored by Andreas Umland an analyst at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs’ Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies.
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine last week, Umland highlighted how the Zelenskyy adviser’s take “dovetails” with recent hints by the Ukrainian president that Kyiv was ready to negotiate.
Umland cites an interview with BBC News in July when Zelenskyy said, “we don’t have to recapture all the territories” by military means. “I think that can also be achieved with the help of diplomacy.”
In other words, the idea that occupied Russia could be traded for occupied Ukraine, as former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt suggested on Twitter/X: “Would an idea be for both states to retreat to within their respective recognised border?”
As Umland’s article also points out, were Kyiv indeed preparing the ground for potential negotiations, the Kursk operation would strengthen its hand at the same time as it undoubtedly recognises a “war weariness” among the Ukrainian population and a certain impatience among those allies critical of Kyiv’s reluctance to seek talks with Moscow.
So, is that the real reason for this risky move in Kursk by Kyiv – an attempt to gain a crucial bargaining chip for some future negotiations?
Eighty years ago, the outcome of that epic battle in Kursk is reckoned by many military historians to have placed the German army on the permanent strategic defensive on the Eastern front. In so doing, it ultimately helped hasten the end of the Second World War.
One must be wary of making overt comparisons, but this second battle of Kursk could also yet prove to have profound significance for the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
