SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING - The scenes are stunning.
Russian soldiers held as prisoners on Russian soil.
Ukrainian soldiers tearing down Russian flags and shouting “Slava Ukraini!” – “Glory to Ukraine!” – from their armored vehicles in a Russian border town.
And a video showing dozens of Russian civilians complaining that their government has failed to protect them.
Those are some of the close-up snapshots of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, which began on August 6. The broader view is just as startling.
Less than two weeks into the operation, Ukraine says it controls more than 400 square miles of the Kursk region, including Sudzha, the town where those Ukrainian soldiers were seen cheering. Commanders say they have taken more than 2000 Russian prisoners, and nearly 200,000 Russians have been evacuated from the area.
No one saw it coming – not the Russian border guards, not President Vladimir Putin, and officials in Washington said they were surprised as well. The last time a foreign army invaded Russia was more than eight decades ago, during World War II.
“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,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s Defense Minister from 2019-2022, told The Cipher Brief.
Such “outside of the box” tactics are essential to the Ukrainian cause, Zahorodniuk said, given Russia’s advantages in manpower and resources.
“We need to fight asymmetrically,” he said. “It's doing something which they don't expect, doing something different, doing something creative, something not written in Russian books of war.”
“They found an area of weakness in the Russians’ position, and they exploited it quickly and have exploited it very skillfully,” NATO’s top military commander, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, said at a Council on Foreign Relations event Thursday. “Suffice it to say that it appears to be going quite well.”
While the Russian military and the Kremlin scramble to respond, the operation has raised fundamental questions: Can the Ukrainians hold their ground, and capture even more territory? Will Russian reinforcements and air strikes drive them out? And in the longer term, how will the Kursk invasion change the course of the war?
The Kursk mission – and the value of “operational ambiguity”
Experts told The Cipher Brief that for all the surprise and drama of the Ukrainian operation, it remained unclear what exactly Ukraine had in mind when it sent its troops across the frontier.
“We don't know and we're not entitled to know exactly what the objective of this is,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (Ret.), a former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. He told The Cipher Brief that while the Ukrainians weren’t “on their way to Moscow or something like that,” it wasn’t even clear how best to characterize the operation. “Is it a raid? Is it an incursion? Is it an offensive?”
Reports suggest the mission may have multiple goals: to provide Ukraine leverage in any future negotiations with Russia; divert Russian forces from the Ukraine front; and, beyond the military objectives, to give the Russians a dose of their own medicine.
“Russia brought war to others, and now it is coming home,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, adding that the incursion had been launched to "restore justice" and create a buffer zone against further Russian attacks.
On the day the attacks were launched, a top aide to Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, said, “To engage Russia in a fair negotiation process, the Russians need to face tactical defeats on the battlefield.”
Experts said that a degree of what Zagorodnyuk called “operational ambiguity” was useful for Ukraine as a way of keeping the Russians off guard.
“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,” Zagorodnyuk said. “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.”
The New York Times reported that Ukrainian officials had told their U.S. counterparts that one goal of the operation was to create a fundamental dilemma for the Russians: how to divert sufficient troops to Kursk to repel the invaders, without disrupting their ongoing operations in eastern Ukraine?
There have been several indications that the Ukrainians planned for an extended stay inside Russia. The Times and others reported that Ukrainian forces came equipped with mobile air defenses and radar-jamming equipment, and as the Kursk operation has unfolded, Ukraine has also carried out drone strikes against nearby airfields, perhaps aimed at denting any Russian counterstrike.And Ukraine's Air Force sayys it has destroyed two bridges in the Kursk region that are key to Russian supply lines in the area.
Air Force commnder Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk posted a video of one of the bridges exploding.
“Ukrainian pilots are conducting precision strikes on enemy strongholds, equipment concentrations, as well as on enemy logistics centers and supply routes,” Gen. Oleshchuk said.
The Russian response
By all accounts, the Russian military and the Kremlin were blindsided by what happened on August 6.
“The Russians were clearly not expecting to be attacked,” Gen. Hodges said. “And the Ukrainians had the discipline to not let this leak out in any kind of a meaningful way.”
“It’s had a shocking effect on the Russians,” Gen. Cavoli said.
A sure sign of the shock value, said Zagorodnyuk, the former defense minister, was that Russian elite forces “ran away” as the Ukrainians poured in. “That was, to be honest, something new,” he said.
A confused military response has been mirrored by conflicting messages from Russian media, which typically march in lockstep with the Kremlin.
Since the invasion, Kremlin-backed platforms have veered from downplaying its significance (on the day after, state media said the region held “no defensive significance”) to false reports that the Ukrainians had been driven back, and then blistering criticism of the military for its failure to foresee and defend against the attacks.
“There is no military system in place for guarding the state border, no reserves and no second lines of defense,” Lieutenant-General Andrey Gurulev wrote on his widely-read Telegram channel. The invasion, Gurulev said, had been “a total surprise” to the Russian Defense Ministry. “If the Ukrainian Armed Forces spent two months preparing for this, how did we miss it?”
The chaotic nature of the response was evident inside the Kremlin as well. Putin originally referred to the attack simply as a “situation" before vowing revenge for what he called Ukrainian “terrorism.” And while Putin’s televised appearances are tightly choreographed, an August 12 conversation with acting Kursk Governor Alexei Smirnov wandered off script. As Smirnov began detailing the gains made by Ukrainian forces – “28 settlements occupied” and a “penetration of 12 kilometers” across a 40-mile-wide front – Putin interrupted.
"The military will inform you about the width and length,” Putin said tersely.
In recent days, Putin, Gurulev and others have returned to an old refrain: blaming the West.
“It is obvious that the American Joint Chiefs of Staff is behind this strategy,” Gurulev said. On Friday, Nikolai Patrushev, an influential Putin aide, told the Izvestia newspaper that the operation had been "planned with the participation of NATO and Western special services." And the former Russian president and current deputy head of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who has made a habit of threatening Ukraine and the West, urged an “extraterritorial” retaliation to the invasion, adding that “now it is possible and necessary to speak of this openly, without hesitation and diplomatic courtesies.”
“The Russian response has been ragged and there's been some panic,” Gen. Hodges said. “There is a lot of work being done in the Kremlin to try and gain control of the narrative about what happened. And I think we're going to see a lot of people dropping leaks, blaming who was responsible for the failure.”
Ultimately, Hodges said, “Putin will have to assure the Russian people and maybe more importantly, all of his oligarchs, that he has the situation under control.”
As for its military response, Russia has sent some reinforcements and attacked the recently-taken Ukrainian positions from the air, but the Ukrainians appear to be holding their ground. There has been no sign of armored battalions or other large-scale Russian movements to the region, and Gen. Cavoli noted that given its current large-scale deployments inside Ukraine, "Russia doesn't have a lot of force available to throw at this."
“The ability to move a lot of forces around to react to this, that's very difficult,” Gen. Hodges said. “I mean, we’re talking about huge distances. (Russia’s) logistical network, the command and control, that's been a problem all along. So how quickly they can react with quality effect, I think it's going to be several more days before they are able to really start challenging the Ukrainians.”
The U.S. response
U.S. officials have been restrained in their public response to the invasion. While President Biden said Tuesday that it was “creating a real dilemma for Putin, and we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact — with the Ukrainians,” he added quickly, “That’s all I’m going to say about it while it’s active.”
The Kursk operation is among other things a test of U.S. policies involving Ukrainian use of American military aid. Multiple reports said Ukraine had used American weapons and vehicles in the attacks.
The White House recently authorized Ukraine to conduct limited strikes inside Russia with American-made weapons, but that policy shift was meant to allow for the Ukrainians to act in self defense, not for major ground operations inside Russia. That said, the U.S. and Britain say the operation has not violated their policies.
“The best news for me,” said Gen. Hodges, “is the absence of any U.S. government calls for slowing down, restraint. Hopefully our government will continue to be quiet on this.”
Congressional supporters of Ukraine were less restrained, cheering the news from Kursk. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) happened to be in Kyiv this week. After meeting Zelensky, Graham responded to a reporter’s question about the invasion.
“What do I think about Kursk?” he replied. “Bold, brilliant and beautiful. Keep it up.”
What comes next
Many experts have noted the difficulties Ukraine will face in holding the captured territory, as Russia sends more reinforcements to the region and conducts air strikes against what are now Ukrainian fixed positions. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian advance appears to have slowed, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War.
But Ukraine’s recent strikes on the supply bridges and nearby Russian airfields will help, as will the deployment of hundreds of additional Ukrainian troops to the area. These measures - and Zelensky's announcement that a military command post was being set up in Sudzha - suggest Ukraine is digging in.
“They're creating an area and I would imagine that they're going to build up fortifications against the inevitable Russian counterattack,” Zagorodnyuk said, “and to bring in enough logistics for them to continue to do this until they're satisfied that they've accomplished all they can or all they want.”
If the objective is to use the captured territory as a bargaining chip in negotiations, Ukraine may need to hold the area for a long time. The Washington Post reported that Russia had postponed preliminary cease-fire talks as a result of the Ukrainian invasion, and The New York Times reported that two former senior Russian officials close to the Kremlin said Putin’s focus now was “not peace, but revenge.”
For Russia, the immediate question involves weighing the costs of redeploying large numbers of forces to Kursk from the Ukraine front. For the moment, its operations in Ukraine appear to have continued without interruption. This weekend, Russian forces this weekend closed in on a key town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
Beyond the Russian casualties and prisoners and disruption brought by the Ukrainian operation, there is also the damage done to Russian morale. Since the February 2022 invasion, Putin has for the most part succeeded in maintaining a business-as-usual, life-goes-on atmosphere inside his country, apart from occasional Ukrainian drone strikes and the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted rebellion in June 2023. An extended Ukrainian presence inside Russia could become a daily humiliation for Putin and the Kremlin.
“I don't believe in a Russian revolution,” Zagorodnyuk said, “but for sure, lots of people in (Putin’s) 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. At some point of time, it will be clear that he is not controlling the situation. And then the situation may start to develop very quickly.”
Then there is the obvious morale boost for Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. The daily reports from Kursk since August 6 have given Ukrainians rare reasons to cheer. Many analysts have also said that the operation has showcased improvements in Ukraine’s military abilities – in particular its skills in mechanized warfare and its ability to plan the operation in secret.
“It has had a very good galvanizing effect on the population and on the military itself,” said Gen. Cavoli.
“It is not too early to make some assessments about effects,” Gen. Hodges said. “Number one, clearly this has changed the narrative about the inevitability of Russia winning, that there's no way that Ukraine can win. They have changed that narrative, at least for now.”
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.
