Can Kiev Sustain Its Losses in Kursk?

President on the 10th anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine: The National Guard has become indispensable in the fight against Russian aggression at the front and in maintaining security in the rear.

For over a week now, Ukraine’s army has been blitzing into Russia’s Kurk region, taking Russian territory and capturing Russian soldiers en masse. But, ask Amy Mackinnon and Jack Detsch in Foreign Policy, can Kyiv keep up the pace? Or is it losing soldiers it can’t replace? They write:

Ukraine’s daring incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, which began on Aug. 6, stunned officials in the West and the Kremlin.

The cross-border assault—which saw Ukrainian troops face little resistance as they pushed into Russian territory, seizing 28 settlements, according to the regional governor—has buoyed morale in Ukraine. Russia’s armed forces have made creeping territorial gains in recent months, but the Kursk operation has left the Kremlin scrambling to respond. The Biden administration was not notified by Ukraine ahead of the operation.

Yet one week into the surprise attack, Kyiv has remained tight-lipped about the goals of the incursion. It was even reticent about the fact that it was taking place, with President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming only on Sunday that Ukrainian troops were fighting in Russia.

Zelensky said on Monday that the Ukrainian government was preparing a humanitarian plan to accompany the operation—and was continuing to urge the West to allow Ukraine to fire donated long-range weapons deeper into Russia—but said little about what Ukraine was trying to achieve. He also made comments about the operation being a matter of Ukrainian security, as Russia has used the Kursk region to launch strikes against Ukraine.

With Ukrainian officials remaining taciturn, analysts have gleaned what they can about the operation using open-source images on social media and scrutinizing claims made by Russian military bloggers.

One leading theory—and one that Russian President Vladimir Putin has also posited—is that the incursion was intended to thwart Russian advancement in key battlegrounds in Ukraine. “Ukraine likely holds that, at a bare minimum, this operation will force the Russian military to deploy a much larger force to counter their offensive, thereby sapping their operations in Donetsk,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ukrainian forces faced little resistance when they blazed across the border last Tuesday, catching border guards from Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, off guard as they pushed into the largely undefended region.

“They knew what they were doing in terms of finding a weak spot,” said Dara Massicot, also a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that different elements of the Russian security services operated in the area, which may have hampered coordination between them and slowed Moscow’s response to the attack. “It’s not clear to me yet whether the Russians failed to detect them point-blank, or they did detect them but the machinery didn’t activate for whatever reason,” she said.

But the lack of clarity regarding Kyiv’s operational goals in Kursk, one of the most sophisticated military movements that Ukraine has made in the war to date, has current and former U.S. officials and experts concerned that Ukraine could be leaving itself vulnerable to a Russian counterpunch.

“The offensive is bold but risky,” Kofman said.

Ukraine appears to have committed some of its most effective units, such as the 80th and 95th Air Assault Brigades, to the weeklong push into Kursk. Russia has so far only responded with small deployments of first-person vision drone teams, military analysts said. But Ukrainian troops pushing into Russia are much less effectively protected there than they are back on their home turf.

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