Sedan To Kursk: The Strategic Power Of Operational Surprise
By shattering old Ivory Tower myths about russian sovereignty, Ukraine has altered what the experts thought possible for a small country fighting a superpower. There will be consequences.
Intro
Time for another post on the unfolding Kursk Campaign. Ukraine’s strike into russia is now more than two weeks old and still going strong, though the growth is appreciably slower than during the first week to ten days.
This is to be expected. At first Ukrainian troops were blowing through shocked conscripts backed by mostly Chechen paramilitaries. Now they’re dealing with a lot more hardened formations which will fight on even when surrounded.
That transforms the fight into something much more difficult to track and evaluate - for observers and orc officers alike. Across the battlefields in Kursk, small units are encountering each other while trying to maneuver through unoccupied space to gain advantage. Isolated forces are bombarded and encouraged to retreat or surrender, only assaulted when strictly necessary.
Moscow’s troops tend not to be as effective in this kind of fighting as Ukrainian veterans. While individual platoons and companies do often fight well, coordination between elements has always been a weak point on the orc side of the equation whenever they have to move around a lot. Linear fronts are easier to manage from a bunker far in the rear.
Ukraine’s main operational aim right now is to degrade and defeat ruscist forces entering the fight as they arrive to delay the formation of a defensible front. Doing this efficiently requires holding important bits of real estate to form a viable frontier.
This is why I still evaluate Ukraine’s core physical objective over the next few weeks as establishing a solid line from Sudzha to Rylsk. If that proves too much of a stretch, Boosting control of the western flank by at least reaching the Seim in Glushkovo will have to suffice.
From a strategic perspective, Ukraine’s campaign in Kursk is all about ending the war as soon as possible. The essential brilliance of Sykrskyi’s operational sucker punch is that it has totally shattered the essential foundation of Putin’s regime: its claim to be a competent defender of sacred mother russia. Small wonder Putin is trying to pretend that this is no big deal after promising a “worthy rebuff” and rattling his nuclear saber.
As much as this is already an operational win for the ages, the strategic impact may be even greater. It will take time to unfold, so Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Donbas won’t experience direct relief for weeks or even months. But the writing is on the wall for Putin’s regime. The question for russians is now only how much blood will be shed before the wretched empire’s remnants reach a settling point.
At least they can take small comfort in America very possibly going through a similar fragmentation in the coming years. Ukraine has also upended all strategic calculations in D.C. - and probably Beijing too.
I’ve written many times that the war has to be brought to the swiftest possible conclusion that won’t flare up into a repeat performance in a few years. This is why. Every new shock means the unraveling of the Postwar Order will be that much more painful for all involved.
The first part this post will cover developments on the Kursk front since last week. In the second section I’ll lay out why the Battle of France was such a massive turning point in history and how the Battle of Kursk could well prove the same today.
Kursk -17 Days In
Rather than pushing deeper into enemy territory, Ukrainian forces have spent the past week taking on ruscist reinforcements coming down area highways. As a result, the area of Ukrainian activity hasn’t visibly expanded outward, despite a lot of fighting happening within ten kilometers or so of Ukraine’s secure zone.
Syrskyi actually held a briefing this week that showed an outdated operational map which confirmed a great deal about where Ukrainian troops had been operating during the first two weeks. The confirmed area of Ukrainian partial control was accordingly shrunk on UA Map and other open source sites, while the region marked under full control grew.
Mapping any active conflict is a more difficult business than outlets like Institute for the Study of War, which routinely passes off open source info as its own, for the record, will pretend. It’s important to keep in mind that all the colors and arrows are only reference points meant to convey a sense of the dynamics a static map otherwise lacks. This, along with the fact that geolocated events represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s really happening, should always be kept in mind. A map is not reality, but a theory of it.
This past week Ukrainian commanders have been working to fill in the gaps between their advance elements. It is apparent that numerous ruscist squad to platoon sized units have been surrounded and isolated by the rapid Ukrainian advance. This means that some Ukrainian troops have to systematically clear the captured territory while others engage inbound enemy reinforcements.
Aside from implying a strong desire to stick around until Putin commits enough combat power to push them back, Ukraine’s actions also indicate a steady buildup of its own strength. That translates to an ability to rapidly push the front lines farther out when the time is right - ideally a moment when ruscist forces are collapsing while reinforcements are still on the way.
It’s useful to think of the Ukrainian incursion as consisting of four zones. There’s the mostly secure region where Ukraine has had soldiers for almost two weeks, including the western outskirts of Sudzha where journalists have been able to visit. Logistics columns flow freely here. Then there’s the military rear, an area considered secure against the presence of major enemy units, the risk being from small isolated groups an any artillery fires they can call in.
Beyond that lies the area of active contact. A few kilometers past this highly dynamic and contested space is what might best be termed a disruption zone. Here Ukrainian drones prowl the skies, relentlessly hitting orc logistics and reinforcement convoys attempting to reach the front. Between drones and HIMARS attacks, ruscist battalions trying to reach the contact zone wind up damaged and disorganized, vulnerable to Ukrainian ambushes.
Risk of attack in this schema depends on location. The more space that falls into the mostly secure or military rear categories, the more room there is for scattering support elements so they aren’t as vulnerable and the more total work they can accomplish. Bridging operations are extremely challenging precisely because they require a lot of vulnerable kit used by trained specialists. In any battle, there are two groups of people that I want to neutralize the most: scouts and engineers. Once the enemy is blind and kneecapped, they’re usually easy prey.
Even if the Kremlin’s propaganda has switched to pretending that the fighting in Kursk is no big deal, Putin’s FSB goon running the defense isn’t ignoring the threat. The most intense orc counterattacks have been directed at Sudzha from the east, with ruscist reinforcements from Kharkiv able to reach the Giri-Belitsa area with relative ease. The sudden push Kyiv’s forces made east from Sudzha to this region a week ago has led to Ukrainian troops digging in along the Psel river, making a ruscist counterattack along the shortest route from Belgorod to Sudzha difficult to pull off.
Generally speaking, Ukraine looks to have formed two striking fists in Kursk. One is acting as a shield along the eastern arc of the sector, absorbing the heaviest enemy counterattacks while slowly creeping into good defensive positions. The other fist is actively trying to expand west to the Seim river in Rylsk and Glushkovo and northwest towards the Rylsk-Kursk highway.
In contrast, Moscow has reportedly formed three groupings, one each to the east, north, and west. Heavy fighting is underway in Giri and Belitsa as well as Semenkova and Martynovka, the latter a site of many intense orc counterattacks along the Kursk-Sudzha highway. Bol’shoe Soldatskoye, closer to Kursk along this route, is also contested.
North of Sudzha, another group is struggling to hold Ukraine back along the road to L’gov at Kromskie Bykie. This group has been attempting to maintain contact with orc units holding Korenovo along the Rylsk-Sudzha highway, but Ukrainian Air Assault troops are actively keeping them apart.
Along the western flank is where Ukraine is visibly determined to make additional progress, at the very least taking the stretch of country between the Seim river and the international border in Glushkovo. Even if Ukraine never takes Korenovo or gets any closer to Rylsk, it has to reduce the threat posed to the western flank of the incursion to sustain it.
That explains the determined Ukrainian efforts over the past week to drop the bridges spanning the river, both existing ones as well as a series of pontoon bridges ruscist engineers have been struggling to construct and maintain. A pontoon bridge consists of a bunch of floating sections that, once assembled and anchored to each bank, allows trucks to roll right across. Each can be brought in one at a time and assembled in place as an alternative to laying out a single span, as some bridging operations will attempt if the banks of an obstacle are too steep for vehicles to drive up.
Any kind of bridge is vulnerable to the right ordnance, with HIMARS handling pontoons just fine and JDAM glide bombs delivered by Ukrainian aircraft probing able to take out reinforced concrete spans. Ukraine has been losing aircraft doing this, however, implying a need to use Ukraine’s F-16s to assist with electronic warfare support.
A full orc battalion with upwards of a thousand soldiers risks isolation south of the Seim. Even better, Moscow is apparently pushing another battalion of airborne troops in to hold the line. With Ukrainian forces initiating another push into the area from the west, a forced ruscist retreat looks very likely.
Ukraine should be able to secure and hold the area with a fairly small number of soldiers. Occupying the south bank of the Seim will give Ukrainian raiding teams an opportunity to slip across and wreak havoc - if they aren’t already. The northern side of the Seim has some reasonably decent cover, but it will be entirely under Ukrainian fire control, as will be the roads from Rylsk. Remember: Everything on the latter two maps are within drone range.
This should allow Ukraine to continue rolling up Moscow’s border defenses and threaten Rylsk from the west. If Ukraine can fully clear Korenovo at the same time, Rylsk can be slowly cut off and a coherent Ukrainian defense line formed to the north and east. The Seim will make a good defensive frontier against future attacks from the Kursk direction, and any Muscovite attempt to push down from the north will run into trouble because the main logistics routes in that area pass right by the border.
The highway from L’gov to Rylsk passes over mostly flat lowlands for more than fifteen kilometers east of the latter, and with Ukrainian forces already in the rougher country to the south, if it can also take the forests northeast of Rylsk the approaches from L’gov will become an even more lethal kill zone.
At some point Ukrainian troops will run out of steam and have to go over to the defensive. It’s critical that Ukraine reach good defensive positions before that point. Where they are right now is alright for the time being, but in the long run defending three distinct flanks is very difficult. As an organism, the surface area that a military formation must monitor and defend has a direct impact on how effectively it can apply combat power. Cells connect to form tissues in the body because this is more efficient in energetic terms.
To make the sacrifices inherent in the operation count for as much as they possibly can, Ukraine’s end goal has to be to establish an efficient mechanism for future destruction of ruscist combat power. This is why I still expect substantial Ukrainian effort to expand Free Kursk westward until to cost becomes too high.
The first and most critical phase of the operation is over - and a resounding success. Ukraine worked out how to employ the full suite of tools at its disposal, especially those designed to blind ruscist officers by killing their recon drones, to replicate the kind of mobile success that gave Germany the victory over the Allies in 1940.
That is not to say that the cost hasn’t been painful. Some Ukrainian units in this kind of fighting will inevitably be isolated and wiped out.
But gruesome footage taken by Ukrainian air assault units while picking through the wreckage of orc utility vehicles packed with corpses is now emerging. The same is rarely true going the other direction. As often as not, when ruscist propagandists claim a spectacular strike destroyed Ukrainian forces, it was actually friendly fire.
A sign of what lies ahead. The average russian soldier presently stands a better chance of surviving another march to the Kremlin than leaving Ukraine intact. When enough realize - beware, Vlad.
France Defeated: The Shock That Changed The World
Most people in the English speaking world are taught at school that in the year 1940 Hitler’s Nazi Germany launched an invasion of France through the Low Countries - Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands - using a new military approach called blitzkrieg, or lightning war. Four years later, after mastering blitzkrieg themselves and even bettering it, Allied forces led by the USA returned France, liberating it and pressing on to occupy Germany.
That along with a naval blockade and aerial strategic bombing campaign, ushered in the Postwar Order. Oh, and the Soviets were involved too, distracting the Nazis on the Eastern Front at Stalingrad and Kursk with American Lend-Lease aid.
The story sounds nice, especially to American ears. But a far more interesting truth has been steadily overwritten, leading to faulty analysis by scholars and policymakers across any number of fields.
Ideas survive by becoming popular, especially if the truth doesn’t have a visible impact on everyday life. That’s how quality history is submerged under a tide of nonsense. Funny enough, if you want an excellent an largely unbiased history of the Battle of France, Wikipedia’s is solid.
The main reason the conventional storyline is the one American society blithely accepts stems from the fact that the rapid Franco-British defeat in 1940 was an utterly unthinkable outcome - much like Ukraine proving able to defend Kyiv in 2022. For many, so was Ukraine rolling back Putin’s assault in Kherson and Kharkiv later that same year, as well as mounting any sort of defense if US military aid was cut off as it was for six months.
Or successfully invading russia itself, a year before nearly every expert thought Ukraine would go on the attack again at all!
In 1940, the shock generated by the fall of what was commonly referred to as the world’s finest army tore France apart and helped convince Japan to launch its fateful assault on European colonies across the Western Pacific. To protect this bold play, Tokyo decided to destroy the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, fully drawing the USA into the Second World War.
Yet the sudden Fall of France made possible by the dramatic German armored thrust across the Meuse River at Sedan had already materially pulled the USA in on Britain’s side. US and German naval forces clashed on several occasions in 1941 as Berlin’s submarines sought to cut off Britain’s connections to the world. American sailors died.
It’s worth recalling that as late as the 1930s the USA still considered the British Empire to be potential threat. But longstanding cultural ties between wealthy elites in Britain and the USA - along with a genuine common interest in defeating Nazi Germany - led to the USA replacing France as Britain’s military partner.
The international system is a complex web of human relationships shot through with power, to borrow from political ecologist Dianne Rocheleau. Pull on one thread, and a knot is sure to form or unravel somewhere else. Both, probably.
Few know the deeper story. That’s because the Second World War has become the founding myth for the Postwar Era which followed.
The truth was deeply painful for the architects of the Postwar world. In reality, France gave up the fight long before its ability to resist was truly exhausted because many French conservatives saw fascism as a bulwark against the threat of socialism, the ideology that loosely animated the French Left.
Britain then turned and launched a major military attack on the Vichy regime, destroying much of France’s fleet based in North Africa, out of fear that it would fall under German control. This action is widely considered to have been a demonstration of will by Churchill meant to signal to the USA that Britain would fight ruthlessly to the bitter end, and it worked.
After the war, the US-led Western Allies formed NATO to hedge against the Soviet threat. This created a strong incentive for everyone to paper over the ugly side of the first few years of the conflict, leading to public history that emphasizes the victories which came later, not the mistakes that made them necessary beyond appeasing Hitler in the first place.
Explaining away Germany’s victory as a result of the country developing a revolutionary new way of war became central to the Postwar era’s origin story. A full public understanding of exactly how and why France and Britain failed to stop an attack launched by a numerically and technologically inferior force would undermine the natural desire to focus on the positive aspects of the hard-won victory and use these to help construct a more peaceful future.
The thing about countries is that, being social fictions, they live or die on expectations. If other countries think you are strong, you tend to get your way in conflicts. Putin’s empire is the physical expression of the fact that the greater part of power is bluff.
So what happens when it gets called in such a spectacular way? Collapse, in some form, sooner or later. Because once a powerful entity fails to respond as its enemy’s expect, it will be tested over and over again.
To fully appreciate the structural similarities between the political impacts of Kursk and Sedan, I have to tell the story from the beginning. A quick note is required, first.
It has become the trend in recent historical work to refer to all Germans of the Nazi era as Nazis, the German military likewise portrayed as a Nazi institution. This inaccurate position is now part of the standard storyline about the Second World War, but the shift in historiography is in fact new. Up until the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, most scholars differentiated between the Nazi regime and the German people, and with good reason.
The majority of Germans never voted for Hitler in a free and open election. Most were never Nazis. Hitler became Fuhrer by exploiting weaknesses in the Weimar German constitution and political rivalries between various factions. In fact, the Nazi vote share declined from its peak in the last real election Germany had; this was part of the reason why German conservatives saw Hitler as a useful puppet and installed him as Chancellor.
Hitler then abused his position to ban hostile parties and pressured the dying President of Germany to name Hitler his successor, allowing for the effective merger of two distinct offices. He did not rise to power on a wave of antisemitism, though this scourge was absolutely common in Germany at the time. But the same is true of France and a number of other countries. Had Germany been the one to eke out a victory in World War One, it might have been a bitter France forced to accept tough peace conditions that saw a Nazi party rise and burn the world.
Most populations are victims of their leadership. Even those who might say they support a regime like Hitler’s or Putin’s are often just expressing the views they need to in order to get by without needless hassle. Regimes must always be differentiated from the general population.
The deeper story of how the Germans shocked the world in 1940 truly begins in October of 1939, as Berlin began assessing the damage done to its army by the victory over Poland. Though presented as inevitable today, Poland fought as long as France ultimately did while facing much longer odds. It also had no meaningful allied support and got stabbed in the back by the USSR, which had concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that handed Stalin much of Eastern Europe.
In 1939 Hitler was surprised that France and Britain actually carried through with their threat to declare war in accordance with the defense treaty they signed with Poland after Hitler violated the Munich agreement to seize all of Czechoslovakia. But he noted that neither did anything to truly threaten Germany even while nearly all its divisions were committed in Poland. France launched a minor probe beyond the Maginot Line, but nothing more. Leaders in France and Britain wrongly assumed that any new world war would involve mass chemical bombardment of cities, a tactic no one thought possible to defend against.
In October of 1939, German forces were still counting their dead and coming to grips with high ammunition use rates, the loss of hundreds of tanks, and widespread indiscipline that lead to war crimes much like those committed by the orcs of today. Despite all this, Hitler insisted that Germany immediately push west. He deeply mistrusted the entire professional German military establishment, viewing his generals as defeatists bent on undermining his power. He railed about the Spirit of Zossen, as he called it, always working to build up a loyal alternative, Himmler’s Waffen-SS.
Several leading German generals considered a putsch or coup on more than one occasion, fearful of what he was leading their country into. They loved that Hitler wanted to fund the military and rejoiced at ditching the Versailles Treaty, of course. These men were no innocent bystanders lacking an agenda of their own. But like most competent military professionals who have seen a lot of war, they were skeptical of the point of waging one without clear, achievable objectives. Taking on both the French and British empires didn’t qualify.
Attacking France right before the onset of winter, when Germany’s best divisions were largely incapable of active operations, was in any case, idiotic. So much so that even Hitler finally saw sense, agreeing to delays every few weeks until it was obvious nothing could happen until spring.
Even then, what the Germans could hope to accomplish against the combined power of the French Army and British Expeditionary Force remained unclear. With the Maginot Line along the Franco-German border too difficult to quickly pierce, German forces had no choice but to go around it through Belgium. This was essentially a repeat of Germany’s strategy for the Western Front at the outset of the First World War, and France had geared its overall military strategy for twenty years around stopping such a move. They also had plenty of tanks - the entire British Expeditionary Force was motorized while the majority of German divisions relied on literal horsepower.
The initial battle plan submitted to Hitler satisfied no one; there remains a degree of uncertainty as to whether senior German officers in fact wanted the plan to look bad in hopes Hitler would call it off completely. He often got ideas into his head, ran with them, then became bored or distracted by some new thing according to military professionals who had to work for him.
Unfortunately for the French, mid-level German officers like Guderian and Manstein had been working on the problem with their staffs since October. They knew there was only one solution: break a core assumption about what Germany might do. That meant sending its most mobile divisions, those capable of sustaining a rapid advance because they had trucks instead of horses, right where the French wouldn’t expect such a powerful stroke because of the terrain.
Many German officers had fought on the same ground during the First World War and knew it as well as their French and Belgian counterparts. On all sides the possibility of a German attack through the rugged Ardennes region across the valley of the Meuse was understood. Senior French military leaders, however, felt that the danger of routing large numbers of troops through country where they would have to rely a limited number of easily blocked roads was too severe. Even if they did, the line of the Meuse river, 100km from the German border, would serve as a logical blocking point, extending due south of the planned defensive line in central Belgium.
Most of their counterparts in Germany agreed. Manstein and Guderian, however, perceived the simple power of the Allied plan and recognized the futility of meeting the Allied armies head on. This would rapidly degenerate into static trench warfare, a fight Germany would ultimately lose. With a planned French extension of the Maginot Line to compensate for the vulnerability in the Ardennes direction incomplete, both generals separately calculated that they could slip a powerful mobile force between the Maginot Line and Belgium to emerge behind the French army marching into Belgium to halt Germany’s advance near Brussels.
The plan Manstein and Guderian put together envisioned marching to the English Channel in a grand flanking strike, relying on speed to set up a blocking line across French supply lines before France could dispatch a new wave of soldiers pulled from the Maginot Line. It very nearly didn’t see the light of day, Guderian and Manstein facing opposition from the more senior generals who regularly briefed Hitler.
While the debate was raging in the winter of 1940, a German officer carrying a draft of the plans as they stood managed to accidentally land in Belgium. Though the Allies doubted their veracity, the Germans decided they had to make changes.
Through some clever bureaucratic maneuvering the Manstein Plan was brought to Hitler’s attention, and disliking the old one anyway he latched on. The need for an update to the leaked plan melded well with the potential for making the French and British react in a way the Germans could plan for. If they were encouraged to think that Germany was playing this dumb, a surprise attack through the Ardennes would have even more of an impact.
Of course, a plan might look great on paper but utterly fail when it encounters ground truth. All do in some way, but there are assumptions made in every plan that, if faulty, doom it to total disaster.
While the brainy and cold Manstein often gets the credit for coming up with the plan, the energetic and hard-charging Guderian is the one who led efforts to actually implement it. Exactly as critics of the plan feared, logistics proved to be an utter nightmare. One of the key innovations was a scheme for rapidly transporting fuel from Germany to the front line by having vehicles carry as many fuel containers - Jerry cans, the British called them - as possible on the road west. Whenever they ran out they’d be stashed in a depot for empty fuel trucks to take back and refill to repeat the cycle. Forty thousand vehicles consume a lot of gas.
When the operation began on May 9th, traffic was soon backed up through the Ardennes. Pushing through the forest was no cakewalk, Belgian and French light infantry harassing the Germans as they were forced to withdraw. Luxembourg fell without a fight - obviously it was mad for a few gendarmes to resist - and Guderian’s armored spearhead covered a hundred kilometers in four days, reaching the Meuse from Namur to Sedan - a place where an ancestor of mine once lived, oddly enough, back before France kicked the Huguenots out.
The French forces in the area understood right away that this was a major play, but Paris was sluggish to respond. In accordance with the plan, a large German force had simultaneously punched into Belgium and the Netherlands. French and British forces deployed to resist according to their own plan, but faced heavy opposition from the German Air Force. It concentrated its efforts on the fighting north of the Ardennes to reinforce the impression that this was the main axis of attack.
Drawn away, a tremendous opportunity was missed for French bombers to savage the largely undefended columns of German vehicles moving west towards the Franco-Belgian border. Paris ordered reserves to hold the line of the Meuse, but underestimated how ferocious the German attack would be when it crossed the river. A full armored corps fought in the vanguard at the Battle of Sedan, taking only three days to smash the French defenders and establish control of the far bank. The situation soon spiraled out of control.
Air support played a vital role, the German Air Force backing the crossing every step of the way with prompt attacks from dive bombers. Fighters and flak guns screened the bridgehead as it was seized, and French reinforcements were hit as soon as they came near the fight, making a coherent defense difficult. More German battlegroups followed the leaders across the Meuse, seven of Germany’s ten armor divisions allocated to this axis enabling the Germans to overwhelm their opposition.
Contrary to popular belief, German tanks of the day weren’t particularly powerful nor were they the real core of the armored force. Every division was a highly mobile organism containing all the essential ingredients for taking on anything it might run into on the road west. Infantry teams on trucks, halftracks, and even bicycles were needed to protect the tanks by clearing towns and tree lines. Scouts roamed ahead seeking the best routes that avoided concentrations of French troops. Artillery followed close behind the spearheads, and units could communicate by radio.
This combination was practiced by every major army in the twenty years after the end of the First World War. Poland had tanks too. The Germans were simply more effective at fighting with all the ingredients working as one thanks to a combination of decentralized doctrine - and being blooded in the Polish campaign. Desperation also played an important role - German military leaders knew they couldn’t win a long war. If rapid operations failed, they would lose.
Also, the term Jerry rigging came about for a reason. In the Second World War the German Army was one of history’s most proficient scavengers, huge portions of the army that conquered Europe in fact comprised of captured gear pressed into service. Taking Prague and the Czech Skoda works was a massive win; French companies converted to war production melded anti-tank guns to French armored vehicle hulls to produce tank destroyers like the Marder - Marten, in English. Its modern namesake, an infantry fighting vehicle, is fighting today in Kursk.
It’s difficult to convey the almost hilarious, slapdash array of vehicles German divisions used. The most common model of tank in 1940 was the Mark Two, armed with the same type of weapon now used on Marder and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles: a really big machine gun. Only a handful of the heavier Mark Three and Four types were available in any division, and even they were outclassed and outnumbered by the latest French models in technical terms.
But the level of small unit coordination in the German army is one of the great ironies of history. The Nazies inherited a potent military institution that embraced a kind of limited anarchy - rather odd for fascists. And had Hitler and most of Germany’s senior generals been able to effectively control field officers like Guderian and Rommel, they wouldn’t have won as many battles as they did.
A week in, with Guderian’s forces still strong enough to fight and through nearly all of the French defenses west of the Meuse, Berlin began demanding that their progress cease. Being in radio contact made Hitler and senior military officers alike think that because they were looking at a regularly updated map of the battlefield they understood what was really going on. German soldiers in the field, tired as they were - though regular use of amphetamines helped mitigate the effects in the short term - could feel the French ability to resist crumbling.
In Paris and London, the magnitude of the unfolding disaster was soon painfully clear. Their armies in Belgium couldn’t just turn around and rush back to France. In fact, the fighting in Belgium wasn’t going particularly well in its own right. The Dutch had been forced to capitulate in days after losing most of the country then being hit with outright terror attacks by German bombers under Goering’s orders.
Churchill’s shock at being told there was no reserve available to stop the German rush to the Channel is palpable in his autobiographical history of the conflict. He freely admitted that this and losing the colonies in East Asia to Japan along with a pair of capital ships sent to reinforce their defense in early 1942 shook him more than any other crises in the long war - even the Battle of Britain and the U-boat blockade.
Guderian, Rommel, and other commanders on the ground in France could sense their opportunity to achieve a complete victory. They knew full well that French forces coming off the Maginot line threatened their flank. But air support was still strong, scouts reported minimal resistance, infantry divisions were moving up as they could, and if the operation reached its full natural potential Germany would destroy the better part of the Allies’ combat power.
So they disobeyed their explicit instructions to hold back, using every trick in the book to do the equivalent of someone making static sounds into their phone to simulate interference before hanging up. People - even Germans - say that Germans have no sense of humor, but if anyone wants to prove the world wrong just make a black comedy set in Rommel’s spearhead during the French campaign, please.
The result? German troops were standing on the shores of the Atlantic less than a week after the Meuse line was breached, over 200km to the west. Less than two weeks after that the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force and French troops able to retreat to the coast were pulled from Dunkirk with the aid of civilian vessels willing to risk air attack to save as many as they could.
Now, even the stories that go into detail about the first phase of the Battle of France usually conclude the story there. Yet the hardest fighting was still to come, German forces facing the challenge of pushing south to Paris after weeks of rapid movement and tough fighting. They also had to clear the Maginot Line, which though depleted of troops remained a formidable barrier. More German soldiers perished in the second phase of the fight than the first, and before the Armistice was signed the prospect of continued organized resistance threatened to bog down German forces for years.
But once Paris fell, the last vestiges of any will to fight left most of France’s elites. In a very real sense, the Vichy government that rose represented a concerted effort to blame the loss and subjugation to lasting German hegemony on France’s Left, which the conservatives of the Vichy Regime saw as a more mortal threat to their interests than the Nazis.
The truth is - as the French Resistance inside the country as well as Free France in the French colonies proved - French leaders were so shocked by how thin their power had proven when tested most of them abandoned their own people. Their institutions collapsed and they simply gave up, leaving the French people to fight on. Because even if a government gives up the fight, its people may not have the luxury of surrender. Had Moscow taken Kyiv in 2022, this would have proven true in Ukraine.
A country is only defeated if it chooses to be. All wars, especially total ones, end in political settlements that approximate the real balance of power at their conclusion. And in the end, Free France - not Vichy - was on the winning side because it had allies and resources to marshal that Germany couldn’t hope to physically reach.
The legend of Hitler as a military genius, used to sustain German public tolerance of the war effort for years after, was born from the shocking victory over France. Germans had not gone to war eagerly - depression defined the mood when the invasion of Poland began. Hitler greatly feared public opinion turning against the regime, and so once France was defeated - despite his own best efforts - he pretended the rush to the channel was the plan all along. Then some American journalist came along and called the thing a blitzkrieg…
Conclusion - Kursk And Sedan: The Hidden Link
Moscow’s response to Ukraine’s Kursk campaign has tracked how Paris reacted when German forces broke through in the Ardennes. First shock, then an attempt to carry on as if nothing happened even while the political ground is shifting. When something else breaks, Putin had better watch his back.
Every regime is different, and France’s was a weak democracy in 1940. The history of successive Muscovite empires implies that Putin’s weakness has generated a void that some force will be compelled to fill. He won’t live forever anyway, and his grip on power is a visible mirage. If elites in his malignant terror state weren’t such cowards he’d be dead already.
Both Ukraine’s campaign in 2024 and Germany’s in 1940 were both, in retrospect, largely predictable, yet the signs were ignored by people who should have seen what was about to happen. Putin’s overt effort to pretend that nothing is seriously wrong is a clear tell. He did the same thing when Wagner rebelled - and then after doing a deal with Prigozhin, murdered the guy anyway.
On the surface, the comparison between Kursk and Sedan probably sounds overstated. After all, Ukraine isn’t likely to charge three hundred kilometers east to Voronezh then turn south to take Rostov-on-Don. It probably won’t even do more than secure the Rylsk-Sudzha line, if that. A simple 15km buffer along the border from Glushkovo to Sudzha might well be all that Ukraine holds in a few weeks.
But the purpose of a military operation is to destroy the enemy’s combat power. The strategic impacts which follow are derived from the degree of success and how far this deviated from the enemy’s expectations of what should have been possible.
Ukraine doesn’t need to capture a huge chunk of territory or wipe out a dozen orc divisions to achieve the same effect Germany did in 1940. Far from it. Germany was not a democratic country fighting for its survival, but a monster under the control of a malevolent regime that was determined to kill anyone it had a mind to.
Simply proving capable of punching into russian territory and seizing control of a defensible chunk is the political equivalent, in a russian context, of watching the Maginot Line get bypassed. The focal point of the Ukraine War is not the ability to control an oceanic frontier that will force any invading power to mount an amphibious assault, but to demonstrate Putin’s lack of control over his own country.
He’s sending more than a thousand soldiers to die every day advancing a few square kilometers in Donbas, a now-devastated region which Ukraine honestly, in a purely economic sense, could in theory trade away for much better land if countries operated that way. Ukraine, were it a truly ruthless neo-Nazi puppet of NATO, could seize the Kursk nuclear power plant and the tactical weapons storage depot near Belgorod in days.
Imagine if someone had predicted this outcome in the fall of 2021. They’d have been laughed off by every serious scholar or working professional - myself included. The baseline assumption has always been that Ukraine couldn’t possibly do to russia what russia has done to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign has shredded the shroud of threats and bluffs that Putin’s regime relies on to offset its numerous glaring vulnerabilities. As it turns out, nuclear weapons actually don’t do anything to defend a country except maybe deter a nuclear attack. Just like chemical weapons, they’re instruments of terror, not policy.
Which means that russia isn’t a superpower and never was. It’s a giant North Korea, a mafia nation ruled by fear of what it might do if it gets really mad. Yet for all that, both are inherently limited by the fact that if they ever follows through with one of their crazy threats, the game ends very badly for them.
The correct animal mascot for Putin’s empire was never the mighty bear, but a poisonous toad. Just don’t let it get close, and ignore the threatening croaks.
I’m speaking in a purely strategic sense, of course. In operations, the goal is to kill the toad dead however you can. Preferably without taking losses. I think this is what Syrskyi meant when he recently stated in an interview that he knows what he needs to do and how to do it.
All Ukraine lacks are the resources to do it without losing thousands more lives.