Ukraine crosses into Russia; but will this be a turning point in the war?

August is the traditional holiday month here in Brussels, but seasoned diplomats have long known that this is a risky time to leave town in the hope of a few days of peace and quiet. Almost yearly, something happens in August that catches politicians and diplomats flat-footed and struggling to catch up. Whether it be the chaotic withdrawal of Western forces from Kabul in 2021 to earlier times when the Soviet Union marched into then Czechoslovakia in1968 or Greece and Turkey almost came to blows in the eastern Mediterranean. In August 1995, Bosnian Serb bombardments of Sarajevo forced NATO officials – of which I was one – to desert their holiday beaches to rush back to HQ to deliberate on retaliatory air strikes; and the same happened again in August 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, taking full control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 

True to form, 2024 brought another August surprise. On 6 August, Ukrainian forces crossed the border near Sumy into the Kursk Oblast of Russia. Operational secrecy was almost total taking the Russian border forces by surprise, but also Western chancelleries, which were not forewarned, let alone consulted by Kyiv. This was probably a good thing as several of Ukraine’s international partners would probably have advised it against such a risky move. The operational secrecy was all the more remarkable as Kyiv had massed 12,000 of its best troops along the frontier together with dozens of Western supplied tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery, making the Ukrainian incursion into a major failure of Russian military intelligence. With the Russians advancing slowly but surely in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and the Ukrainian defensive line there under severe pressure, the last thing Kyiv would do seemingly would be to redeploy its forces to another front. Yet doing what the enemy least expects and is prepared for, and opening a second front to disperse his forces, have long been cardinal principles of military strategy. Ukraine had clearly identified a point of weakness in the Russian lines defended by conscripts insufficiently trained and equipped to stop the Ukrainian advance. Beyond the immediate border lay flat and open countryside with good roads, and few Russian fortifications allowing the Ukrainians to do what they haven’t been able to do since the autumn of 2022: conduct a Blitzkrieg with tanks and armour in small units to rapidly seize territory. Within a matter of days Ukrainian commanders were claiming to have captured 1,000 square kilometres of the Kursk oblast and 70 settlements, about the same as the Russians have seized from Ukraine in the Donbas throughout the eight months of this year. 

Overcoming their initial surprise, Western diplomats immediately tried to divine Kyiv’s intentions. Was this just a brief raid to raise morale among Ukrainians at a particularly stressful moment in the war with Russia threatening important Ukrainian transport and logistics hubs such as Pokrovsk and Chassiv Yar and intensifying its bombardment of Ukrainian cities and energy installations? Was Kyiv seeking to humiliate Putin by launching the first military incursion into Russia since the Nazi Operation Barbarossa of June 1941? Putin has always prided himself on being ‘Mr Security’ for the Russian population, keeping it safe from sinister foreign threats and depredations in exchange for its slavish submission to his authoritarian rule. Certainly, a Ukrainian objective in 2024 has been to try as hard as it can to bring the reality of war home to the average Russian and to puncture Putin’s narrative that his “special military operation” in Ukraine will make Russia more secure with little, if any disruption to daily life inside the country. So, Kyiv has used its homemade drones to attack airfields, fuel and ammunition storage sites around Belgorod and Rostov, and two weeks ago struck a gas storage facility in Omsk in Siberia, 2,500km from the Ukrainian border. It also sent drones against Moscow on two occasions in the last two weeks. The Russian air defence claims to have shot them all down, but flights at Moscow’s airports were disrupted and enough noise was made for the average Moscovite to realise that Russia is at war. Yet the incursion into the Kursk Oblast has rammed this point home much harder. Around 150,000 Russian civilians have been evacuated and the pictures broadcast on Russian TV. The evacuees have complained about the slow response of the Russian authorities. Of course, their displacement is hardly comparable to the terrible suffering that Ukrainian citizens have endured in the two and half years since Putin’s invasion with daily missile and drone strikes with apartment blocks, schools and hospitals decimated. According to the World Health Organisation, 9mn Ukrainians are suffering from mental trauma with 3.9mn classified as having severe symptoms. Yet still, the scale of the Kursk evacuations has made it harder for Russians to pretend that the war is not happening. Putin now faces a dilemma: he can allow Russian TV to cover the Ukrainian incursion to show the population how villainous the Kyiv regime is, but in doing so, he only allows more questions to be asked about his own failure to prevent the incursion. 

In marching into the Kursk Oblast, Kyiv is also seeking military objectives. Hundreds of Russian soldiers have been captured, some of whom have already been exchanged for Ukrainian troops in Russian captivity. By driving the Russian army several kilometres backwards, Ukraine also makes it more difficult for Moscow to launch an offensive against Kharkiv or Sumy. The Kursk Oblast contains airfields and missile and drone launch sites that were used to strike Kharkiv and nearby towns. But as Russia uses long-range aircraft, missiles and drones, the Ukrainian army would need to march hundreds of kilometres and deep into Russia in order to significantly reduce its vulnerability to air attacks. Thus, the main rationale for Kyiv’s action is political. Zelensky needed to do something bold to regain the initiative that Kyiv was increasingly losing in the war. He needed to show his Western backers that Kyiv could still win battles and hit back against the Russians. With the Russians advancing steadily in Donetsk, albeit at heavy cost in men and materiel, and the Ukrainians unable to build an effective defensive line, there was an increasing danger that these Western backers would conclude that Kyiv had lost the war. Even if Moscow is now drawing into its ageing Cold War stocks, its advantages in troop numbers and missiles and artillery were beginning to prevail in a war of attrition into which the tired and under-equipped Ukrainian army was inexorably being sucked. Why plough more money and equipment into the war on the Ukrainian side when the outcome was already decided? Why see more soldiers and civilians sacrificed for nothing? This psychology risked creating a vicious circle whereby Ukraine would suffer more setbacks and receive ever fewer resources, which would then cause it to suffer even more setbacks, and so on, all the way to a bitter and humiliating peace dictated by Putin. In capturing a piece of Russia, albeit less than one tenth of a one percent of Russia’s immense landmass, Kyiv now has a bargaining chip to trade for a more significant Russian withdrawal from the 18% of Russian territory that Moscow currently occupies. If Ukraine could advance further into the Kursk Oblast, that bargaining chip would become larger; but that might force Ukraine to over-extend its troop deployments and supply lines making them more vulnerable to a Russian counter-attack. Kyiv might be forced also to re-deploy troops fighting the Russians in Donetsk, thereby risking a collapse of its defensive line. 

Despite the surprise, Zelensky was counting on NATO and the EU either publicly condoning his incursion into Russia or at a minimum turning a blind eye. After all, Russia is the aggressor by invading Ukraine twice, and striking targets in Russia responsible for launching attacks on Ukraine is legitimate self-defence in international law. During the Cold War, NATO strategy was to respond to a Soviet attack by striking the Red Army’s reinforcements and logistics and transport hubs deep inside the country. This doctrine was known as FOFA, and it is understandable that Kyiv should want to do something similar. Some allies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, had also given Kyiv some latitude to use the weapons they have supplied to Ukraine against Russia in border areas – but not to strike Russian targets further afield. No doubt Zelensky was giving an elastic interpretation to this flexibility in advancing 30-40km into the Kursk Oblast. What, after all, is exactly a ‘border area’?

Ultimately, however, a bargaining chip strategy depends on two factors. First and foremost, Ukraine has to be able to hold on to the territory it has captured until serious peace negotiations get underway. The Russian counter-attack has been slow in materialising, but given the affront to Putin’s pride, it seems almost inevitable that Moscow will do its utmost to push the Ukrainian troops back over the border. The question then for Kyiv is how many troops and equipment is it willing to send to the enclave in order to hold it? Not easy if it has not by then succeeded in halting Russia’s advance in Donetsk before Moscow overruns truly strategic locations like Kramatorsk. So, Ukraine has an urgent need to decide on its best strategy to hold onto its gains. It has destroyed or damaged three important bridges over the Seym river, which were important supply routes for Russian forces into eastern Ukraine. As we have seen with the Dnieper at Kherson in southern Ukraine, rivers are good defensive barriers and not easy to cross. So it would make sense for the Ukrainian army to dig in here. 

The second factor is whether the incursion into Russia will persuade Putin that he cannot achieve a quick and total victory in Ukraine and has an interest to start peace negotiations on something less than the maximalist terms on which he has for long insisted : namely that Ukraine cede four of its eastern provinces and Crimea. Moscow has reacted predictably to Ukraine’s incursion by saying that it will not negotiate with Kyiv. Before 6 August, there were some signs that Kyiv and Moscow were preparing to meet discreetly in Istanbul to discuss a moratorium on attacking each other’s energy infrastructure and fuel depots. As noted, prisoner exchanges take place regularly and irrespective of the battlefield situation. Yet even before 6 August, we seemed a very long way from peace talks. Russian was excluded from the Ukraine Peace Summit organised by the Swiss government in Burgenstock in June and Zelensky and his Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, were having trouble in finding a country, principally from outside Europe and North America, willing to organise a follow up Peace Summit and act as a mediator. Zelensky has approached South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Kuleba has travelled to China. In late August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India visited both Moscow and Kyiv (the first time an Indian leader had visited independent Ukraine) and hinted he might try to act as a mediator. But, like China, India has heaved close to China in recent times and has bought substantial amounts of discounted Russian oil and weapons. Zelensky was clearly put out by the warm bear hug that Modi gave Putin in Moscow. On the other hand, Kyiv has agreed that Russia should be invited to attend the next Peace Summit which it would like to hold in November. Without Russia at the table many countries see little value in the process, even though the meeting in Switzerland was useful in setting out the key principles of a just and sustainable peace deal beyond the territorial issues that Russia prioritises. The bottom line here is that the current situation does not favour peace talks. Ukraine needs to hold its Russian territory and Russia has made a point of continuing its advance in Donetsk precisely to show that Kyiv’s objective of forcing a withdrawal of Russian forces to the Kursk Oblast is not working. Moscow has also doubled down on the frequency and intensity of its missile and drone strikes against Ukraine’s cities, including Kyiv and Lvov, as if to demonstrate the price that Ukraine has to pay for its impertinence. So far, Moscow’s response is more of the same rather than the escalation that many western countries had feared. 

When the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, was asked to comment in 1971 on the significance of the French Revolution, he famously replied, “it’s too early to tell” (or at least this is the phrase attributed to him). Ukraine’s offensive has been going for only a month and so unsurprisingly the jury is still out on whether this gamble by Kyiv will pay off in the long term. Certainly a defeat in the Kursk Oblast would be a catastrophe for Ukraine in that it would have sacrificed some of its best elite troops and most up to date Western supplied armour for no lasting gain. The line between strategic genius and strategic folly in warfare is indeed a narrow one. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat, but also defeat from the jaws of victory. Given Ukraine’s deteriorating military situation in Donetsk, certainly the Kursk Oblast incursion was a risk worth taking for Zelensky. There was no wonder weapon on the horizon that would allow him to change the course of the war, nor a massive increase in foreign arms supplies that would turn around Ukraine’s defences. Indeed, of the seven new Patriot batteries announced by NATO at its Washington Summit in July, only one has so far arrived. Moreover, there were no indications that the international sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine would force Moscow to scale down its 50 or so daily attacks in Donetsk any time soon. August brought to light a number of statistics regarding the billions of dollars in revenue that Moscow is receiving from its oil and gas sales, including to EU countries, as well as its abundant imports of missiles, drones and ammunition from Iran and North Korea. So, desperate times call for desperate measures. 

But the Ukrainian incursion has at least forced Western policymakers to interrupt their holidays and think a little more about the overall direction of the war. How can Kyiv’s bold move be put to good use to significantly improve Ukraine’s military position and change Russia’s current uncompromising calculus?  

The starting point is that it reminds us of Russia’s vulnerability. Moscow has piled on the effort in the Donbas with over 600,000 Russian soldiers engaged there. But it consequently cannot effectively defend its lengthy border with Ukraine and its logistics hubs and storage sites behind the lines are poorly defended and vulnerable to Ukrainian counter attacks, if Kyiv has both the precision long range strike capabilities and authority to use them to take full advantage of this opportunity. There may, in the longer term, be lessons for NATO here that could respond to a Russian attack against a Baltic state or Poland by counter-attacking Russia in the high north, particularly along Russia’s lightly defended 1300km border with NATO ally, Finland. NATO’s demonstrated capability to do precisely this would be a powerful reinforcement of the alliance’s deterrence. Yet coming back to the immediate, Zelensky has been urging Washington, London and other capitals to allow him to use US ATACMS long range artillery and UK Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike targets in Russia without range restrictions. Coupled with Ukraine’s occupation of Russian territory, such strikes could seriously hamper Putin’s war effort and bring him to the negotiation table. But so far the Western capitals supplying these missiles, as well as the recently arrived F16s, have maintained the restrictions. The shorter range HIMARS rockets have been used in the Kursk Oblast, particularly to destroy the river bridges, but not the ATACMS. The US based Institute for the Study of War estimates that the range of the ATACMS would allow Kyiv to strike about 250 military targets in Western Russia. US officials have played down the significance of the ATACMS, claiming that Russia has moved its airfields well beyond the front lines and out of range; but this still leaves the fuel dumps, the ammunition storage sites, military transports and bridges. So, the next big step for Ukraine’s Western partners is to lift the restrictions on long range strikes by Kyiv provided that they correspond to a set of approved military targets. About half of the 6,500 missiles that Russia has fired against Ukraine have been against civilian targets. This is not something that Ukraine could emulate without losing political support. 

In the meantime, a country that used to manufacture the rockets and ballistic missiles of the former Soviet Union (including the legendary SS 18 and SS 19) has unsurprisingly proved adept at making its own missiles to do the long range strikes itself. Ukrainian anti-ship missiles have been instrumental in driving Russian warships away from Crimea. Just two weeks ago, Kyiv flight tested its first long range ballistic missile based on a turbo reactor and introduced a new long range drone, named Palianytsia. Yet these homemade missiles are not a substitute for Western supplied missiles but need to be used in tandem to maximise the impact. Zelensky has also been pushing for another unpopular idea: that NATO countries could use their airforces to patrol Ukraine’s borders and shoot down Russian missiles flying through Ukrainian airspace. This proposal has received some support from the Polish Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorsky, and it certainly makes sense with regard to those Russian missiles attacking targets in Western Ukraine and which could easily cross into NATO territory, as some have done already. On all these counts the US and its allies have been cautious fearing that using Western missiles against targets in Russia would be tantamount to a declaration of war. But the Rubicon was crossed already months ago when allies allowed Kyiv to use cruise missiles to strike Crimea – which Russia now considers to be its sovereign territory – or HIMARS to cross the Russian border. This step by step approach has tested at each stage Moscow’s preparedness to escalate despite the verbal threats from Russian spokespeople and the always extremist deputy head of the Security Council, Dimitry Medvedev. Yet so far there has been no actual escalation. Indeed, during August it was business as usual in the pattern of Russia’s hostility to the West. Disinformation campaigns around the Paris Olympics, cyber attacks and sabotage operations, including an attempt to interfere with the water supply at a German Luftwaffe base near Cologne. Where Russia retaliates militarily, it is against Ukraine. 

The second point is that when given the choice between escalation or evacuation, Putin tends to opt for the latter. So, the West needs to be bolder when it comes to challenging Putin’s red lines. After failing to capture Kyiv, Russia retreated to the Donbas. When it lost Kherson, it retreated across the Dnieper. When Ukraine attacked Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea, it retreated from ports in Crimea to the eastern shore of the Black Sea. So, decisive military pressure can force Russia backwards. Yet the stop-go and trickle pattern of weapons supplies from Ukraine’s international partners has played into Russia’s hands. Moscow was able to regroup in the Donbas and build fortified defensive lines after retreating from central Ukraine in the spring of 2022. It dug in across the Dnieper south of Kherson. A slow supply of tanks and armour and shortages of shells and ammunition then blunted the spring offensive of Ukraine in 2023. And a shortage of air defence batteries and interceptor missiles allowed Moscow to rain down its drones and missiles on Ukraine’s energy grid and critical infrastructure to make life for the civilian population as miserable as possible. Yet when Ukraine receives adequate supplies, coupled to its own innovation skills in drone and missile production in small units spread across the country, it can block Russian advances and defend its cities. In the first week of September, the Ukraine Contact Group will meet again at the Ramstein airbase under the chairmanship of the US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, to review the supply situation. In the next few days, NATO is due to stand up its supply and support coordination centre at Wiesbaden and its training  and operational lessons learned centre for the Ukrainian army at Bydgoszcz in Poland. These were initiatives agreed at the NATO Summit last July. If Ukraine is to avoid defeat, they must represent a sea change in the West’s support for Kyiv, leading quickly to a more targeted and consistent approach to developing the Ukrainian forces and plugging capability gaps more urgently. With Jens Stoltenberg stepping down at the end of September, the first big test for his successor, Mark Rutte, will be to get this new system up and running quickly and make it deliver. But he will need not only managerial skills but also the political and diplomatic skills that got him the job in the first place. This is because even the best coordination centre can only be successful if the allies and Ukraine’s other partners produce the money and weapons in a timely fashion. 

Finally Kyiv’s incursion into Russia could either shorten the war, if Ukraine can capitalise on its initial success and bring Russia to the negotiating table; or it could prolong the war by keeping Kyiv in the fight for longer and by obliging the West to provide even more weapons and finance to Kyiv to enable it to sustain two operational fronts rather than just the one in Donetsk. Initially at least Russia will be reluctant to come to the negotiating table before it has attempted to take back its lost territory and will try to capitalise on Kyiv’s dilemma in having to split its forces between defence in Donetsk and offence in the Kursk Oblast. This will be all the more difficult for Zelensky at a time when he lacks soldiers and is training 40 and even 50 year olds to fill the ranks of the depleted Ukrainian army. So, this is a good time for Ukraine’s Western partners to have a serious discussion about the future of the war and their strategic objectives. This arguably has not happened so far. Western actions have consisted in throwing a lifeline to Kyiv to prevent it from losing and there has been vague talk about Ukraine joining NATO in the future “when allies agree and when conditions are met”. But the real issue is what happens between the immediate lifeline and this distant integration of Ukraine into the Euro-Atlantic security structures?  Ukraine’s victory means a Russian defeat, and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. How can the West help to defeat Russia in Ukraine but in Ukraine only?  After all, the West is not looking to start a war with Russia or to defeat it in a broader sense, which would change Russia’s role in the world.  The present Russia with its unpleasant authoritarian regime, for better and for worse, is one that will remain and will have to be lived with and managed for decades to come. In this sense, it is an illusion to speak of ‘an end to the Ukraine war’ as if that means a genuine and lasting peace and the return to the status quo ante. The peace is likely to be a messy compromise with a weakened Ukraine still vulnerable to the hostility of its eastern neighbour and a legacy of hatred and bitterness that will make normalised relations all but impossible. The fallout from wars is often more consequential than the actual wars themselves, as Europe learned to its cost after the First World War and the failure of the Versailles peace treaty to provide the states with secure borders or the willingness to cooperate. An end to this round of hostilities is unlikely to remove the Russian threat to NATO, or to change Russia’s overall confrontational stance towards the West. Even if the Russian conventional army is severely damaged and takes years to rebuild and re-equip, the other dimensions of Moscow’s power projection – its massive and modern nuclear arsenal and its extensive suite of hybrid warfare and disruption technologies – will still be very much in place. 

So, the real policy debate that the transatlantic allies need urgently to have is: how do they help defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a manner that puts them in the best position to manage safely the still-threatening Russia that will emerge afterwards? If Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk Oblast can finally kick-start this long overdue discussion, it will have served an important strategic purpose. 

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.