Russia seeks to turn humbling incursion into military gains

Berlin: Two weeks after Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia, the Kremlin’s forces have slowed the enemy advance, with the hardening front line in the Kursk region of Russia setting up the next phase of a battle with great political stakes for both sides.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged a decisive response to the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II. But so far, the response has been focused on containing the incursion rather than reversing it, raising the question of what Russia’s depleted military is willing to risk to expel the invaders — or if it is capable of doing so.

The unforeseen invasion of Kursk has exposed the ongoing intelligence failures of the Russian military as well as Russia’s shortage of battle-ready reserves in a war fought along a 750-mile front. Ukraine’s rapid gains have also upended the global perception of Russia’s slow but unstoppable march toward victory in a war of attrition.

But from the Russian perspective, Ukraine’s gambit has also created an opportunity for Russia to speed up the depletion of Ukraine’s own limited forces, make gains in other areas of the front and turn a short-term political victory for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a strategic defeat, at least in the view of Russian military analysts.

After being initially heralded as a brilliant military stroke, the Kursk operation could end up becoming a trap for the Ukrainian army, these analysts said.

“The invasion of Kursk has merely expanded and prolonged a war of attrition, in which Russia enjoys a resource advantage,” said Vasily Kashin, a political scientist at Moscow’s state-run Higher School of Economics, who studies the political impact of Russia’s war.

Still, the battle in Russia’s border regions remains in its initial stages, and Ukraine may yet commit major new reserves or pull off another unexpected attack that upends the military and political calculus of the war.

As Ukrainian forces advanced, videos of surrendering groups of Russian conscripts and border guards shocked many in Russia, shaking Putin’s narrative that the war in Ukraine was being fought far away by well-paid, determined volunteers.

But the present pace of the battle in Kursk is giving Putin time to calibrate his response. And instead of weakening Kremlin’s grip on power, the invasion may eventually cause more Russian citizens to rally around the flag.

The Kursk invasion “is certainly a blow to the Kremlin’s reputation,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political scientist, wrote Tuesday on X. But “it is unlikely to spark a significant rise in social or political discontent among the population, nor will it lead to an elite rebellion.”

Among the options for Russia’s generals, analysts said, are trying to muster an overwhelming new force to crush Ukraine’s bridgehead in Kursk, or using their advantage in aviation and artillery to gradually pound the defenders into a retreat.

But both those strategies could take weeks, or even months to carry out, and would come at the expense of other areas of the front, reflecting the reality of a war where neither side has enough resources to force its opponent to end the fighting.

Even supporters of the Kremlin’s war have conceded that Ukraine’s attack caught Russian forces unprepared.

On August 6, undetected Ukrainian units brushed aside the poorly equipped and inexperienced Russian conscripts sent to guard that section of the front and pushed tens of miles into Russian territory.

Some analysts believe the Russian command did not commit significant forces to this border area because it lacked obvious military value. “The strike hit emptiness,” said Dmitry Kuznets, a military analyst with the Russian independent news outlet Meduza, which operates from Latvia to avoid Kremlin censorship.

Another Russian military analyst, Ruslan Pukhov, thinks the Russian leadership may have also been lulled into complacency by the growing negotiation overtures put out by Kyiv.

After a week of fighting, Ukraine claimed to control almost 400 square miles of Russian territory and to have taken hundreds of prisoners.

But as Ukraine’s supply lines became strained and as Russia pulled in reinforcements, the pace of advance fell significantly in the second week. Most military analysts believe Ukraine no longer threatens any strategic targets, such as Kursk’s nuclear plant or the provincial capital.

“The Ukrainian Armed Forces have not achieved any notable successes in the Kursk offensive in the last few days,” Pukhov wrote in response to questions Tuesday, adding that the opportunity for such successes was narrowing.

Most Russian analysts believe that Russia has now concentrated enough forces in Kursk to largely bog down the invaders in the same type of positional warfare seen in other fronts of the war.

To counter the incursion, the Russian command has relied on a combination of conscripts, volunteers from new units that were being formed in the rear at the time of the attack, and handpicked experienced units from relatively quiet sections of the front in Ukraine, Kuznets said.

Russia’s Black Sea marines, for example, have been moved to Kursk from the Kherson region of Ukraine, where the front has long followed the difficult-to-breach Dnieper River, Kuznets said. Other parts of the initial Kursk reaction force have come from the Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions of Ukraine, where the front has barely moved in weeks, a Russian military analyst, Valery Shiriaev, told Newsroom, an independent Russian news outlet.

Now that it has stabilized the front in Kursk, the Russian command is creating a new strike force in preparation for an eventual counteroffensive to drive the Ukrainians out, Kuznets believes.

He said that while Putin has time to plan the Kursk riposte, he cannot allow the Russian territory to lie in enemy hands indefinitely without risking a nationalist backlash.

Regional authorities have indirectly acknowledged that the fight to push out the Ukrainians may take weeks or even months, by floating the idea that refugees from the occupied parts of the Kursk region be given financial aid to resettle in other parts of Russia.

“If Ukraine hoped that the shock of the attack would lead Russians to lose faith in the outlook of the war, then this is not happening,” Kashin said. “More likely it will lead to anger, and acceptance that the war was inevitable.”

The Kursk offensive did expose the flaws in Russia’s strategy of fighting a prolonged war, largely with volunteers lured by ever-increasing payments.

While this strategy has allowed Russia to mostly replace its losses in Ukraine without resorting to another round of unpopular mobilization, it has also meant that the flow of volunteers has not been enough to create strategic reserves able to respond to a new crisis, like the incursion into Kursk.

In cobbling together a reaction force, the Russian military command has thus far left one part of the front untouched. None of the units fighting in Kursk have come from the Donbas region in the east of Ukraine, according to analysts, where Russia is pressing an offensive.

Since the invasion of Kursk, the Russian forces have only accelerated their advance on the strategic Donbas stronghold of Pokrovsk. In recent days, they have also made gains in other areas of eastern Ukraine, which has seen the most brutal battles of the war.

The Ukrainian government has said that it has moved some units from the front lines to support the Kursk incursion, potentially aiding the Russian advances.

Although the long-term impact of the Kursk invasion remains unclear, one certainty is that it has expanded the front by an additional 60 miles or so for the foreseeable future, forcing both sides to stretch their limited forces even further.

Ultimately, the expansion of the war to new areas will, over time, favor the side with bigger resources, the analysts said. With triple the population and a larger industrial base, that side remains Russia.