The Kursk Kamikaze: Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s border region will turn out to be self-defeating

Note: I am reposting this text from the beginning of last August as it is topical again.

Since Tuesday, 6 August, substantial Ukrainian forces have been fighting inside Russia. Their exact size is unclear. According to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, by 9 August, within a few days after their surprise attack, Ukrainian forces had lost almost 1,000 troops and over one hundred armored vehicles. If these figures are largely accurate – and Russia’s MOD tends to be fairly reliable in this regard – then they do not only reflect severe Ukrainian losses but also imply that the Ukrainian invasion must involve significantly more soldiers since it was still ongoing despite these casualties. According to a Russian Telegram source that is usually well-informed, multiple Ukrainian brigades and other units as well as Western mercenaries are part of the incursion force. One way or the other, it is not small.

After the attackers initially achieved surprise, Russia has been striking back hard, mobilizing forces in the area and reserves from farther away, evacuating civilians, and declaring a state of emergency. Russian media in general, including important Telegram channels, have been busy with the event. While the coverage on television expectably conforms to government positions and narratives, the Telegram sphere is, as often, much less regulated and features sharp criticism of the Russian authorities for not doing their job of waging war and protecting Russia well – and fiercely - enough. In any case, there has certainly been no news blackout about the Ukrainian incursion.

The Ukrainian leadership in Kiev, meanwhile, has been extremely sparing with statements about their own military’s attack on the Kursk region. President Zelensky has mentioned it only indirectly, if, of course, proudly, and no official explanations have been offered regarding the purpose of what is, predictably, turning into a very costly battle. One of his advisers has made a few – to be frank – banal comments that only confirm that the regime isn’t really explaining anything.

Some Ukrainian and Western observers have speculated that Kiev’s aim was to seize a gas flow measuring installation in the town of Sudzha. Since some EU states are still importing Russian gas through Ukrainian pipelines, disrupting this system can affect those states and Europe more widely. Yet it is difficult to take this “Sudzha theory” too seriously, for three reasons. If Kiev had really decided to physically interfere with the gas flow before the end of the current transit agreement next January, it simply would not have to take possession of Sudzha for that purpose. Second, the incursion operation has turned out to be much larger than seizing Sudzha alone would have required. Moreover, gas transit is still continuing, while it is still unclear who is in effective control of the town. If sabotaging it at Sudzha had been the incursion’s key aim, it is hard to see why. In short, this is probably a red herring, even if gas prices have responded to the attack.

A second hypothesis is that Kiev may be trying to “land a humiliating blow” on Russian president Vladimir Putin, as one publication has put it, so as to force him to acquiesce to ending the war in a way that Ukraine finds acceptable. But if the Ukrainian leadership – political and/or military – is really thinking in such terms, it is making a terrible mistake.

If there is one thing we have learned about Putin’s psychology, then it is that his response to attempts to humiliate him and/or Russia is not to give in but to push back and retaliate. Put differently, the whole approach makes no sense in dealing with him because the only kind of “blow” that would suffice to perhaps make him change his mind would have to be not “humiliating” but absolutely crushing. Kiev, however, is lightyears away from being able to inflict the latter.

In a different but related vein, other observers speculate that the Ukrainian attack may be intended to shake Putin’s prestige and authority at home. And it is true that, especially on Telegram, Russian authorities – but precisely not Putin – have come in for some harsh censure, as mentioned above. But we have seen this phenomenon before, and the real point about it is that it does not undermine Putin or the Russian state as such. Individual generals and civilian officials may well end up as scapegoats, but that will be it, again.

In reality, this speculation is wishful thinking and based on the same assumptions that led to exaggerated Western and Ukrainian expectations when the former leader of the Wagner organization, Yevgeny Prigozhin led a spectacular but quickly defanged mutiny in June of last year. Then as well, Putin’s authority was widely misunderstood as resting on extremely fragile and shallow foundations. Quite a few Western experts embarrassed themselves by predicting his removal from power by an intra-elite coup or even a general breakdown of Russia in unrest and civil war. Of course, none of that happened. Putin is still there; Prigozhin is not.

A fourth popular guess concerns the area that Ukrainian forces have managed to enter. It could serve, according to this speculation, as a territorial bargaining chip in future negotiations. Again, if Kiev really has such aims, success along these lines seems extremely unlikely. It is one thing to achieve a surprise breakthrough, but a very different matter to then actually hold and permanently occupy territory against counterattack. Given Russia’s reserves and resources, Kiev will not be able to do so.

A fifth hypothesis concerns potential psychological effects not on Putin or Russian society, but on Ukrainian and Western societies, and, in the West, in particular on decision-makers. Here, the key idea is that by crossing the Russian border in force and with its own troops (not, as occasionally before, with small detachments of foreign legionnaires), Kiev is trying to demonstrate to its Western backers that Russian red lines never matter. The purpose of that demonstration would, then, be to make these Western governments remove their remaining restrictions (not many) on using the weapons they supply for deep strikes in Russia and, beyond that, to generally, increase the quantity and quality or their supplies again.

Yet it is at least equally likely that Kiev’s incursion will make at least some of its Western supporters nervous. Moreover, timing also matters here: Ukraine has launched this operation a few months after receiving fresh Western aid and enacting a new mobilization law. Intelligent Western observers – even those sympathetic to the Zelensky regime – will wonder, if perhaps quietly, if this sort of attack, without clear or plausible aims, is what Kiev intends to blow that Western aid and its own troops on.

Regarding the Ukrainian leadership’s possible aims for its own population, they are fairly obvious: to boost its flagging morale – as polls and pervasive draft dodging show even under the at least semi-authoritarian Zelensky regime – by presenting what, for a moment, is a military success against a Russian opponent that has held the initiative since at least the beginning of this year and has been making slow but steady advances. The intended message is clear: Here, see? We can turn the tables!

But at what price and for how long? And what happens after the inevitable Russian backlash and victory? That is a question surprisingly little discussed. There are first signs, even in some Western media, that the “Kursk effect” inside Ukraine is more complicated than Kiev may have anticipated. The very pro-Ukrainian war correspondent of German newspaper Bild, Paul Ronzheimer, for instance, is already reporting that he hears much criticism of the Kursk operation among his sources in the Ukrainian military. There, the question asked is how Ukraine can afford such an operation in view of the enormous Russian pressure that it has to fend off at the same time.

Consider that a harbinger of things to come. Because the single most important question about the Kursk incursion is not what it is doing to Putin’s authority but what it will do to that of Zelensky once it will have fully failed. Ukrainians and their Western backers will come to look back on this attack as a senseless and wasteful Kamikaze operation.