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EXPERT Q&A — As Ukraine’s Kursk incursion enters its third week, much remains unclear about both the mission and the implications for the broader war. Ukrainian officials have described the unprecedented attacks on Russian territory as a potential lever for future negotiations with Russia, a way of forcing Russia to divert troops from the Ukrainian front, and a mission that imposes suffering on Russia that mirrors – if in a small way – the suffering Russia has inflicted on Ukraine.
How long can Ukraine hold Russian territory? What are the potential long-term impacts of the Kursk operation for Putin’s regime – and for the war itself?
In the latest episode of The Cipher Brief’s new weekly show The World Deciphered, Chief International Correspondent Ia Meurmishvili turned to Ukraine’s former Minister of Defense, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, for answers to these questions and more.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Meurmishvili: How significant do you think this all is from the Ukrainian perspective?
Zagorodnyuk: It is very significant because the only way for us to win, whatever the political definition of victory is, is to do something outside of the box, something which is not according to the book.
Because according to the book, the Ukrainian and Russian army would fight very similarly, and then the resources difference would kick in, and that’s what happens with pretty much all symmetrical wars. So we need to fight asymmetrically. And that doesn’t mean traditional asymmetries which have been studied in the West, like insurgencies. But it’s doing something which they don’t expect, doing something different, doing something creative, something not written in Russian books of war.
And of course, (the Russians) didn’t expect that. From an operational perspective, that’s something shocking to them, because it looks like they didn’t expect that at all and they didn’t have proper reserves and so on.
It’s not just that Ukraine dared to do that. It’s not just like Ukraine calculated that the border would not be protected and it would go into Russia relatively easily. It’s also that Ukraine calculated that Russia doesn’t have sufficient reserves. And then it also has calculated that Russia would be very reluctant to move troops out (of Ukraine) and bring them in (to the Kursk region).
Also what we didn’t expect is that Russian special forces, elite forces as they call themselves, would actually run away. That was, to be honest, something new.
Meurmishvili: In your assessment, how do you see the end goal of this operation?
Zagorodnyuk: Well, if we qualify that as a raid, it may not last for a long time. And if we manage to divert (Russian) forces from the key operational areas, it still would be a success. Even if part of the forces are diverted, if Russia is failing in Ukraine because it has to deal with this raid, that would be fine.
But most likely, it is more than a raid, because obviously raids don’t include digging trenches and so on. So that’s something different. However, it still may end up being a temporary case.
I believe that one of the reasons why the Ukrainian government, particularly the military leadership, are not disclosing the endgame is because disclosing the endgame would work against the endgame. And so they want to keep this ambiguity – some operational ambiguity, we can call it, in order to make the Russians wonder what exactly is going to happen.
It might be safe to assume that several options might be on the table, and depending where that goes and the ultimate scenario, potentially, is that these territories hold until the political settlement.
Meurmishvili: So to use it as some sort of bargaining chip?
Zagorodnyuk: It wouldn’t be phrased like that, because phrasing it like that would immediately kind of demote the whole purpose. But the thing is that if Russia cannot protect its own territory, certainly it will be much weaker in whatever the political process will be.
We cannot map out what’s going to happen because this war is very unreasonable, at least from the Russian side, because Putin is fixated on Ukraine, and that fixation seems like it’s beyond the reasonable limit. He’s already lost close to 600,000 people from casualties, enormous losses. Half of his economy is a war economy, so he’s already invested into this more than anyone thinking reasonably in his place would do.
The (Russian) gains are incremental. They are quite small and many of those gains don’t have any strategic effect. At the same time, (Putin) is losing in the maritime domain completely. So politically this war hasn’t brought him any gains at all so far. Even the cities which he conquered are not going to bring any justification of what he has done. And he’s facing trials for war crimes.
So now the question is how the process will look in the future. It’s completely unclear. But whatever is going to happen politically, his situation will look much weaker now.
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Meurmishvili: What do you think in the long term this could mean for Putin?
Zagorodnyuk: I don’t believe in a Russian revolution because we don’t see any critical mass of people who are capable of doing anything with results against the current regime, at least for the moment, in the foreseeable future. But for sure, lots of people in his key circles are tired of this war and they don’t see any point of this. One thing which keeps Putin in power is his image of invincibility and the fact that he is holding all the cards and investing money in the war and so on and so on. At some point in time, it will be clear that he is not controlling the situation. And then the situation may start to develop very quickly. And they may start to develop from inside Russian circles of power. That’s probably the only way we can realistically see the regime changing.
But it’s very possible. I can only say that when Russia starts to lose, we may see some quite rapid changes inside there. It’s very difficult to say. There’s so many variables there that predicting anything, I don’t think we can realistically see the future here. But we can see the past. And in the past, Russia has lost wars. We can name a couple – like the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War, even World War I, when they had substantial resources but the government could not convert them properly into capabilities and to wage effective war. And that was always a surprise to the government. They never understood at the end why they couldn’t fight. They were investing a lot of funds and a lot of resources to the war. They had lots of people and they always think that having lots of people and having lots of resources automatically means victory, but it didn’t. And in all these cases, the (Russians) never understood what went wrong. I think that in this case, it will be exactly the same thing.
Meurmishvili: In the first week of this operation, Ukraine took more territory from Russia than Russia took in the past year from Ukraine. What does that mean and where does it go?
Zagorodnyuk: Again, there are multiple scenarios. But generally speaking, Russia will have to eventually address that problem properly and they will have to send troops there. And that inevitably means that they would be failing on the Ukrainian front because they don’t have additional troops, at least in the foreseeable future. So essentially, I think that they will have to be bringing troops there.
The raid may end up with Ukraine moving out, but at the same time, Russia will fail in other fronts. If that happens, that’s already a success. And I think that that could very well be the original end game, or at least one scenario. So we’ll see.
But of course it’s a dangerous operation. There are risks, but honestly speaking, doing nothing was even more risky.
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Meurmishvili: There is a Russian advancement that we’ve been hearing about on the southern front (in Ukraine) and in the east as well. What’s happening there?
Zagorodnyuk: In a number of areas where Russians are trying to advance, they are not advancing or they are advancing with such a small pace that it’s almost no movement. But at the same time, yes, in Donbas they are. Let’s put this way: in some areas where they focus enormous forces and they pay a very dear price for that, in terms of casualties and so on, they do have some incremental gains. And that’s one of the reasons I believe why that this diversion attempt (in Kursk) has been created.
Russia has things which Ukraine doesn’t have. The ability to establish local superiority with their glide bombs. The length of the front is so big and Ukraine has a shortage of ground-based air defenses, and Ukrainian planes cannot keep Russian planes away. So they come and basically throw these glide bombs, which create substantial damage, enormous damage to positions.
And then the (Russians) send people without caring whether they die or not in great numbers. So these things Ukraine doesn’t have. Of course we do have people, but we don’t treat people like Russians. For us, casualties are our best people. In Ukraine, people are actually treated as a huge value, as ultimate value, not in Russia.
So that’s basically how they found the algorithm of moving forward. But they don’t have the forces to make a strategic breakthrough. So it’s not like they can achieve a major victory, unless, again, we’re talking about a long period of time, then there are different calculations because in a long period of time, Ukraine needs to do something, Russia will be doing something and so on. But in the foreseeable future, Russians don’t have any capacity for the strategic breakthrough. That’s why this Kursk assymetric measure is even more interesting now.
Meurmishvili: In your former capacity as the defense minister of Ukraine, you’ve dealt with Europeans, Americans, NATO partners. What do you think the impact of this Kursk incursion will be on their attitude towards Ukraine?
Zagorodnyuk: We don’t see a negative response. We see some analysts being very pessimistic about it, but otherwise the reaction was positive. And people were reacting in a positive way because nobody wants Ukraine to lose, in the West.
There’s been a huge investment, but more importantly, people understand the strategic meaning of this war. They understand the strategic meaning of why it’s important that Russia loses and why it’s important that Ukraine wins. Again, whatever the political definition of victory is, we’re not getting there now. But overall, it must not be a success for Russia.
So when they see something happening, something asymmetric, bringing out-of-the-box solutions, the people who supported Ukraine react positively.
Obviously, we’ll see how it goes in the future. Of course, we were quite surprised with the United States government’s response, because the U.S. government’s response wasn’t negative. It was actually supportive, and we see the latest president’s comment on this and so on.
People are looking for the answer. They’re looking at how this war can be won, and they don’t want to see Putin gaining.
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