Ukraine War: Ten Days In Kursk
The Kursk Campaign of 2024 continues to go well, though not without cost. Ten days in, Ukrainian troops are engaging inbound ruscist reserves but still moving forward.
Intro Note
I’ve decided to do another post on Ukraine’s unfolding Kursk operation. It’s been quite some time since there was this much movement on any front.
Back in 2022 I was still writing on Medium - and much more sporadically about Ukraine - so I didn’t have a chance to track the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives in detail as they unfolded. This time around I’ve also got a bigger stack of open source sites to use, which helps cut through a lot of the confused claims that fly around in the media. Tom Cooper, Mick Ryan, Centre For Defence Studies, and others have been doing an excellent job writing great briefs using their own approaches, and I’ll add my own while the campaign continues.
A brief note is due before I dive in. I’ve seen it baldly stated in several prominent media publications lately that no analyst foresaw Ukraine launching a major offensive in 2024.
Maybe someone should let the Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, CNN, and the rest know about this here blog of mine. Reporting From Ukraine might have also read them in.
There are many reasons why I have become so deeply skeptical of the quality of information released by journalists and the analysts they choose to rely on over the past decade. Far too many of the facts cited in the media about scientific matters are pseudoscientific trash, to put it bluntly, which leaves the average person open to scammers and con artists.
While the world of bloggers has its fair share of quality issues, the fact that people are paid a lot of money after earning fancy degrees to be so bad at their jobs while others do better work for free says something important about modern society. What the news media everywhere is really about is offering the illusion of awareness about the wider world.
If you want to actually understand it, you need science. I am unfortunately afflicted with the silly notion that quality scientific analysis should be available to everybody, which is why I’ve published 6,000+ words every blasted week on this horrific war in Ukraine for over a year and a half - plus a bunch of other shorter pieces before.
And without charging, because that honestly would feel wrong. This isn’t going to change, either. Though I’m definitely opening my doors again (metaphorically speaking, I work remotely) to consulting work.
I’ve been doing this long enough to see highly paid analysts proven wrong over and over again, and not just about stuff they can be forgiven for - Ukraine invading Kursk being a case in point. This isn’t to say that I’m always right, but at least I’ll admit when I’m wrong and work out why. That’s how you develop effective theory, which journalists and the analysts they interview ought to have an obligation to be doing too. But that’s now how their business works, I’m afraid.
As I’ve been arguing to anyone who would listen for about a year now, Ukraine was never going to wait until 2025 to go on the attack. Time is the most precious resource of all in war. If you can force the enemy to waste theirs, you effectively boost your own strength. Seizing the initiative is about having enough resources to force an opponent to play the game your way. You make them react, creating the reality frontline forces then have to figure out how to endure. That’s why it’s so often described as a tangible object.
Kyiv didn’t just call the essential bluff that is the heart of Putin’s power, it also kicked the entire mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy leadership caste that dominates the west in the teeth. It has been utterly delightful to watch these twits see their entire carefully constructed plan for forcing Ukraine into permanent stalemate and forever war go up in smoke.
Unlike most writers, I don’t use the language that I do simply because it makes for interesting reading. I’m trying to communicate that the way war and warfare are treated in western media is fundamentally broken. To paraphrase one of those German military professionals who was pretty good at his business, everything in war is simple, but accomplishing all the simple stuff is exceptionally hard when lives are on the line.
What Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk have accomplished will go down in history for a reason. They managed to assemble thousands of different ingredients in the right quantities and at the proper pace to unleash hell on those standing in their way. Syrskyi might have come up with the plan, but victory depends on effective execution, always.
A week and a half in, the scope and purpose of Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign is less and less a matter of debate. Neither a simple raid nor a PR stunt, Syrskyi almost certainly had a series of branching plans going in that would determine how far Ukrainian troops would be asked to push.
Had the border defenses held for more than a few hours, for example, the operation would have been called off or curtailed. Once they were breached, if Moscow had reacted effectively in the first forty-eight hours, Ukrainian troops might have fought skirmishes around Sudzha then pulled back. It was only when the enemy was visibly shocked and paralyzed for several days did entire brigades push over the border to wreak havoc.
I’m a fan of Swedish metal, particularly Amon Amarth. They wrote some lyrics years ago that suits the moment, if readers will indulge a little minor cheerleading:
The pack of wolves are closing in,
Now, hear the howling beasts!
They move fast through winter woods,
And soon it's time to feast!
A vicious hunt on through the night,
The prey is short of breath!
They feel the sting of burning eyes,
That's fixed upon their necks!
If you’re a Ukrainian soldier fighting in Kursk right now, this is about how you feel, trading the frigid cold of a Eurasian winter for burning heat. At least, you feel pretty great until the bullets fly and shells cry…
Now, there are always hard limits to how long an offensive can go on. Logistics puts operations on a tight leash, especially when mobility is back in play. The concepts of attrition and maneuver are not competing, but complementary. Military units maneuver to inflict attrition without suffering it in return - but the mere act of moving causes some.
What mobile warfare does is allow the side with certain structural advantages to exploit them too quickly for the opponent to recover. Better information and logistics allows a military force to set the pace of the fighting, preventing the enemy from building up a prepared defense. Every offensive is a race against time, one’s own strength always declining as fast or faster than the other side.
That’s part of why an offensive tends to proceed in spurts of rapid movement separate by periods where lines don’t visibly shift. It takes time to establish new fortifications, so teams of soldiers occupy useful positions as long as they can then shift to new ones. The fluidity of the fight makes knowing who is presently in control of what difficult even for the commanders involved. This of course offers added benefits to the side whose teams can act more independently.
The Kursk Campaign At Day Ten
After ten days, it seems clear that Ukraine remains in control of the situation, frontline troops maintaining an edge over the ruscist forces rushing in to challenge them. After two fairly explosive growth spurts, the second naturally more measured than the first, Ukraine appears to be in the midst of a third.
Generally speaking, soldiers can only engage in sustained action for about three days, give or take a couple. Eventually they have to rest, and even though numerous Ukrainian soldiers have experienced far longer periods at the zero line during this war, this becomes very dangerous in offensive operations. This means that even in a major campaign only some third of the troops involved are actively fighting, and progress generally comes in fits and starts.
For example, in 2003 US forces had to stop for two to three days on the road to Baghdad to straighten out their logistics. Media at the time was worrying about the US invasion of Iraq bogging down in the face of increasing resistance. Then the advance began anew, and a few days later the Third Infantry Division was pulling its Thunder Run through Baghdad while a Marine Corps regiment stormed into the city from the east as Saddam Hussein’s loyalists melted away.
Ukraine isn’t marching to Moscow, but in this war the political equivalent is the ability to sever key logistics connections to the front. Crimea relies on the land bridge along the Azov Coast, while ruscist operations in Kharkiv use road and rail networks passing through Kursk and Belgorod districts. Putin’s generals face a very real danger of having to commit more forces to secure Kursk and Belgorod than they have holding the long southern flank along the Black Sea.
Just as at the tactical level success is best achieved by going around major strongholds to cut off their supplies, the same is true at the operational and strategic. Very little has truly changed across some eight thousand years of human warfare - only the tools.
To advance requires maintaining a degree of material superiority across enough domains (high air, low air, open ground, close country, so on) sufficient to move faster and strike smarter than the enemy. Living, breathing people are the ones taking the risk - even if using drones - so they’ve got to be as well equipped and trained as possible. Defeating the enemy is achieved by cutting apart the systems they rely on to hold ground by creating and exploiting asymmetry in each domain.
Translated: a lot has to go right to keep soldiers in the field for long periods of time. Make it harder for the enemy in as many ways as you can. Just be aware that they’re supposed to be doing the same to you.
Aside from achieving surprise and taking advantage of the shock generated by it, Ukraine’s initial success was a function of having extremely good information about the battlespace. It’s clear that the battlegroups that launched the assault knew exactly where to strike, taking hundreds of prisoners in the initial onslaught.
The entire area has likely been infiltrated by small recon teams. Drones operating beyond the new front monitor the forces Moscow sends in. This lets Ukrainian commanders prepare their troops and conduct ambushes.
As more footage from the first days of the campaign emerges, early reports of widespread use of western armored vehicles have been verified. It’s a testament to how effective Ukraine’s assault was that only a few Strykers and one Marder have been visibly damaged. Moscow is very eager to publish footage of NATO gear burning up, so the fact that it’s mostly been armored trucks (MRAPS), BTR wheeled APCs, and T-64 tanks that Moscow has visibly destroyed is extremely telling.
By their presence and testimony of the first wave of Ukrainian solders rotated off the front lines, it’s apparent that major elements of the 80th and 82nd Air Assault, 22nd, 61st, and 116th Mechanized, and 103rd Territorial Defense Brigades are involved. Elements of other brigades (88th, 92nd, 93rd mech) and independent battalions are also on the ground.
Battlegroups from the air assault brigades seem to have led the initial attack after a brief but intense barrage and remain at the leading edge. These formations tend to place a premium on fast-moving operations, so the fact that they have mostly pushed north and northwest from the breach, avoiding Sudzha, tells me that Ukraine aims to advance the farthest in this direction. The mech brigades are focusing more on the eastern flank, where ruscist resistance has also been the toughest.
Both air assault and mechanized brigades employ company level teams that combine armored vehicles - including tanks - with infantry and fire support at the tactical level to strike targets. Despite multiple brigades being involved, this operation was not a NATO style multi-brigade combined push across a broad front or even a textbook breach. It was almost a pure distillation of what I’ve been trying to get across in my conception of the Scout’s Way of War: a balance of organic central planning and autonomous decentralized execution.
Within a day of the initial assault, Ukraine’s vanguard had breached Moscow’s border defenses, bypassed Sudzha, and rushed deep into enemy territory. Two days in, leading elements were almost 20km from the border, at the outer edge of effective artillery and drone support. There they began to take up good ambush positions near key roads, avoiding towns while beginning the job of holding off inbound reinforcements.
This is when orc drone videos of strikes on Ukrainian equipment begin to appear, along with an influx of aviation. They had little immediate effect, and by the end of day two the initial attack was clearly a wild success. Ukrainian commanders immediately moved more battalions onto russian soil, securing a border road and a solid chunk of the ruscist defense line around Sudzha.
The initial breaches were each around 10km wide and 5km deep, but once merged together the gap became 20km. This created a relatively safe central pocket where medium range air defense and artillery could begin work without being intensely shelled. Ukraine also pretty clearly moved a lot of electronic warfare gear into the area, probably using new jamming routines. Supposedly drone interceptors are also at work, helping blind Moscow to what’s happening on the ground in real time.
Knowing that the enemy has ten thousand soldiers operating across a thousand square kilometers of territory doesn’t do Moscow a lot of good. You can’t fire blindly across such a big area and hope to inflict enough casualties to stop an advance, even with nukes.
Many of the targets that Moscow did hit, mainly MRAPs, were struck while out in the open and probably abandoned after hitting a mine or being struck by an RPG. The soldiers riding in them could easily be fine, taking cover in a nearby wood and still able to fight. There have been a number of reports, at least one positively confirmed, of ruscist air strikes hitting their own forces in the confusion.
On the third day of the Kursk campaign the magnitude of what was happening first became clear to tuned-in observers. Interestingly, the shock in Moscow was so great that it took until then for Putin’s regime to react. This delay of probably two days doomed any hope of russian resistance forcing Syrskyi to call off the offensive and label it a mere raid.
Day three saw Ukraine’s initial exploitation of the breach culminate, advance units taking up position about 30km from the border. Reconnaissance teams pressed farther, allegedly raiding along the Kursk-Rylsk highway a full 30km away - a plus side of having lots of wheeled armored vehicles is that until the enemy establishes a lot of good defensive positions raids this deep are feasible given adequate drone and artillery support. On the third day images of a burned out convoy of trucks carrying reinforcements until they were immolated by HIMARS rockets appeared on the road to Rylsk, and other less stunning scenes no doubt played out elsewhere.
That Ukraine’s rate of advance slowed substantially beginning about day four makes perfect sense given the limits of human endurance. By this point the troops leading the operation would be in dire need of rest, most having lost at least a few people. Like ruscist units on the road to Kyiv in 2022 they would have been somewhat disorganized. At the same time the first reserves dispatched by Moscow began to arrive, and unlike the conscripts, Chechens, and recuperating regulars in the area, they weren’t shocked.
Around the time the rest of the world was coming to grips with the fact that the strategic situation in the Ukraine War had just radically changed, Ukraine was probably moving a second echelon of forces into the fight. At first no more than a couple thousand soldiers would have been operating on russian soil, but this likely tripled by days five and six.
While many of the soldiers who had led the attack rotated out for some well-earned rest, fresh troops took on the job of holding off inbound ruscist reinforcements and securing the territory so far taken while logistics links were set up.
Moving into day 5 the focus of Ukraine’s operations remained safeguarding the base of the penetration while disrupting enemy efforts to form a coherent front. By attacking west and east from the initial breach, Ukrainian troops steadily widened it to over 45km, meaning that ruscist tube artillery can no longer reach the center of the liberated area. Rockets can, but they’re less accurate, unless Moscow wants to expend expensive and much scarcer Iskanders.
Ukraine managed to secure full control over Sudzha in days five and six, repelling initial counterattacks from the east. The first reinforcements dispatched by Moscow came from the southern and Kharkiv fronts, and though they moved swiftly to the northern and western sides of the breach the eastern flank remained the easiest to reinforce.
Around day six Ukraine appears to have decided to take overt measures to reduce this threat. After a couple days advancing south of Sudzha, new Ukrainian forces lunged all the way to the town of Giri, some 15km from the border and 25km southeast of Sudzha.
This didn’t go entirely according to plan, unfortunately. An advance company of up to ten BTRs drove into Belitsa and Giri only to walk into an ambush. At least half a dozen Ukrainian APCs were destroyed and another captured - this ironically sparked panic among the locals when some Chechens went on a joyride.
But despite the tough day one Ukrainian company had, this advance marked a renewal of Ukraine’s effort to expand its zone of control. By day seven it was evident that Ukraine now controlled the territory out to within a few kilometers of where its forward units were fighting. Troop numbers supporting the incursion had built up to close to ten thousand, the better part of four brigades now on russian soil with another two or more in reserve.
It looks like Kyiv understood about a week in that the operation was a smashing success and there was little reason to hold back from launching the next phase. Moscow was still acting sluggish, though Putin soon appointed his bodyguard to oversee FSB efforts to bring the situation under control, the empire revealed to have precious few reserves available.
In other words, after a week of fighting it was clear that Ukraine had a golden opportunity to inflict savage losses on the enemy and set the stage for subsequent offensive operations on other fronts. More reserves are being formed, with Ukraine now churning out the equivalent of six brigades every month when in May the numbers were just a third of that. Ukraine can afford to maintain up to half a dozen brigades in Kursk to tie down and degrade enemy reinforcements for weeks or even months.
Eventually Ukraine will be able to swap out the attacking brigades for lighter ones that can conduct an area defense, slowly withdrawing towards the border one field or tree line at a time. In the process they’ll tie up forty to fifty thousand orcs who are needed to sustain the advance in Donbas. When it peters out, Moscow will be basically running on empty, vulnerable to new offensives on other fronts. This is how you seize the initiative.
By day seven Ukrainian troops had built up enough combat power on the outer edge of the incursion to fix and destroy ruscist reinforcements trying to defend key towns. Moscow appears to have formed three blocking groups in an attempt to slow Ukraine down.
To the west, across days seven and eight Ukrainian forces steadily edged their way around Korenovo, taking Snagost’ and approaching Tolpino, threatening to encircle the town. By day nine a new route leading north from Ukrainian territory to Snagost’ through Gordeevka was secure, with troops of the 103rd taking control of the russian side of the border. Moscow apparently ordered the evacuation of the entire Glushkovo district, just to the west. This could well be a prelude to the area falling and Ukraine seizing another significant chunk of russia.
Along the roads leading north to Kursk Moscow has been building up a somewhat tougher group, with Ukraine only edging closer to Kromskie Byki, a local road junction. What Ukraine has planned for this direction is uncertain - it is conceivable that enough combat power could be applied to push the front lines all the way to L’gov in the next ten days. This would pair well a broader objective of seizing Rylsk, something I suspect is a stretch goal for the campaign.
The L’gov-Rylsk-Sudzha triangle should be reasonably defensible. Kursk nuclear power plant at Kurchatov would remain 10km or so from the front lines, forcing Moscow to commit a lot of forces to hold it unless and until Ukrainian troops are pushed back. Taking it would be a mistake, of course, because Ukraine would then be responsible for its security.
East of Sudzha is where the most substantial ruscist reinforcements appear to have been fighting, but here days seven through nine saw them experience setbacks in the face of new Ukrainian attacks. Forced out of Makhnova to the southeast and Martynovka to the northeast by day nine, the grouping has also outflanked to the south.
Though at first it looked like just a scouting expedition gone wrong, by day nine it was apparent that Ukraine’s push to Giri back on day six was not an isolated event. Ukrainian forces pushing over the border have reached the town, and if the members of the company of BTRs that lost most of their vehicles either held positions in the woods or slipped back west just a few kilometers, they’re back on Ukraine’s side of the lines now.
By holding this area Ukraine prevents orc reinforcements from approaching Sudzha’s eastern side. That ought to make it possible to wrestle ruscist forces back a full fifteen kilometers from Sudzha. Securing an arc from Giri to Bol’shoye Soldatskoye would allow Ukraine to safeguard the eastern flank of the incursion and set the stage for securing portions of the Belgorod-Sumy border area in the future.
On the tenth day Ukrainian troops continued moving towards Glushkovo, with suggestions of an advance by 82nd Air Assault beyond Torpino raising the odds of Moscow being pushed from Korenovo. If that happens, the road to Rylsk will be open, cutting the town off from Kursk. Moscow will have to abandon twice as much territory as it has already lost if Rylsk falls, and Ukraine will be able to establish a defensive position Moscow will have to assail from a road that passes close to the border farther north or the one that passes through L’gov.
That could easily put it on the front line. In short, if Ukraine’s second echelon is replaced by a fresh third on the front lines in the next few days, another explosive growth of the Free Kursk zone is not only possible, but probable.
It’s also possible that Ukraine will simply hold what it has, but this would probably be a mistake. The front line of the incursion is presently over 150km, even if the eastern flank consolidates. However, the border breach is only a third of that. Securing Rylsk would allow Ukraine to create a zone with only 150km of frontage, which is almost exactly the length of the section of the international border adjacent to its location.
My evaluation ten days in is that Ukraine’s goal is to spend the next ten days establishing a buffer zone of this size. It will eventually force Putin to dedicate almost all the combat power he can spare for offensives in Ukraine to securing Kursk and Belgorod.
Weak points along the front in occupied Ukraine will form. Syrskyi will exploit them, and the end will begin.
Developing Offensive Operations
Tracking a major operation presents some interesting challenges to any observer lacking access to highly confidential information. In truth, nobody really knows what’s happening on the ground at any moment except the people who are actually there.
The rest of us - this includes generals and presidents - get secondhand info at best. You have to apply scientific logic to work out what’s reliable enough to trust.
Ukrainian brigades began openly posting footage from the first days of the fighting this week, which allows for a fuller reconstruction of events. Generally speaking, a body of initial geolocated footage hits the internet about two to three days after a significant event, generally one involving material losses. People who monitor pro and anti Ukraine social media tend to be alerted to major events within two days.
The mainstream media is generally at least five to six days behind. That’s why coverage in foreign outlets like the BBC - an international standard, if not without flaws, started out very skeptical, then worried about how big of a risk Ukraine was taking, and only the past few days have been willing to say that the gamble is paying off.
Everyone operates according to their own institutional standards. I sacrifice speed of response for what I believe to be a scientific approach that uses a weekly sampling window to track developments. In the future others can evaluate whether this worked better than daily updates or some other window.
The way this operation unfolded has all but confirmed my standing theory that Ukraine’s brigades function as administrative shells that routinely command battalions and companies borrowed from others for the duration of a given operation. This is common in the field, where detailed organization charts don’t mean much. Companies and even platoons tend to be thrown together on an ad hoc basis even if this makes coordination tougher.
Thanks to the range of modern weaponry, squad and platoon level actions across a couple kilometers of front merge into a company scale movement. Several companies hitting targets across five to ten kilometers of the front form a battalion level action. Ukrainian brigades assigned to cover a particular area feed infantry battalions backed by companies of supporting elements - armor, artillery, drone - into the fight.
These are what I tend to call battlegroups, Englishing the German word Kampfgruppe. Soviet doctrine tends to employ even bigger but functionally similar task oriented formations called Operational Maneuver Groups, a bundle of forces meant to exploit a breach in the enemy’s front.
Whatever scale you’re working with, the idea is the same: a kind of organism is created motivated by a single goal: engage and destroy enemy forces within reach. It’s a deadly threat to anyone within shooting distance, which extends to the outer reaches of reliable fire support coverage. Ukraine has effectively pushed an OMG comprising several battlegroups into Kursk. This demanded spending a good deal of the past ten days building up its strength and establishing lines of supply between major pushes.
Part of the reason that Ukraine’s initially explosive advance seems to have slowed is that, after breaching the border, advance units basically tried to see how far they could go. Company-sized detachments raced up to 30km from the border, sending smaller scouting elements twice that far. I’d bet special forces units are on the ground further still.
Not only do Ukrainian brigades tend to be composed of three battlegroups - more in the case of select units like Third Assault - but each of them is generally in a different stage of its own deployment cycle. While one of three is on the line of contact, another will be in the rear recovering while a second acts as the operational reserve.
Brigades that have to keep two-thirds of their combat power in action - ones with their reserves committed slowly degrade, leading to a need to pull the entire brigade from the line completely to recover. However, this leaves one battlegroup relatively functional while the other two are forces to retire, meaning that even a brigade that has been battered can lend support to others.
Ukraine appears to economize its forces by using battlegroups undergoing recovery as the operational reserve in quiet sectors unlikely to often require their intervention. This results in brigades appearing to be broken up across different fronts, elements in two places at once.
That’s part of the confusion about which brigades are fighting in Kursk. The case of 82nd Air Assault is illustrative.
It tends to be difficult to spoof georeferencers, which is why the datasets they generate are so valuable (I need to look into how to help preserve them, since Musk-owned Twitter likes to remove overtly pro-Ukraine content). And with each side having a strong incentive to show images of the other’s destroyed equipment, somebody usually “tattles” after substantial encounters.
The 82nd has shown itself to have very good operational security discipline over the past year and a half. Unlike 47th Mechanized, another prominent brigade equipped with modern gear, the 82nd keeps a lower profile. It fought hard to breach the Surovikin Line near Verbove in 2023 after being committed in July and only lost one Challenger 2 and a handful of Marders and Strykers in an exceptionally tough operating environment.
Though there were reports of the 82nd or a battlegroup from it having moved from Vovchansk to Kursk, it took a full week for enough footage to emerge to confirm the brigade is leading the charge right alongside the 80th. So: there are almost certainly NATO-standard vehicles on the ground russia right now. It’s a scenario even Tom Clancy didn’t dare dream of.
And guess what? Putin isn’t bombing Poland or Germany. The nukes haven’t flown.
In 2022, when HIMARS arrived, it was fair to be concerned that he might launch a missile at a supply base in Poland just to test NATO’s precious Article 5. Which, for the record, compels no member to participate in a war, just condemn an invasion and send some form of aid to the victim. That’s how arch-rivals Turkey and Greece are in the same alliance.
Now, such a move would be tantamount to suicide. Individual NATO countries like Poland would feel compelled to strike back even if Biden will only ever risk war for Israel, secure in the knowledge that only a nuclear attack could truly threaten their survival. And the French and British submarine based arsenals alone are enough to make that a step too far even for Putin.
But back to Kursk. Kyiv was able to achieve surprise at the outset by breaking the rules of what everyone thought Ukraine felt was in its best interest to do. This does not mean that it will also be able to break the harder material rules governing how quickly combat power is lost.
The reason why everyone talks about combined arms warfare is that by combining multiple different specialties a social organism is produced that can act in a decisive way. Each added element serves as a force multiplier that enhances the powers of others. Keeping them all organized and supplied is the fundamental challenge of leaders in command.
Front line units have to be careful not to advance so quickly that they leave dangerous gaps an enemy can exploit. They also have to be mindful of the fact that logistics become exponentially more difficult the farther you get from base. Artillery and other kinds of fire support are the real source of casualties inflicted on the enemy in most cases, so soldiers at the leading edge of an advance can’t outrun the guns or drones, both of which have a maximum effective range.
To breach the ruscist frontier Ukraine had to incorporate numerous supporting elements like electromagnetic warfare, air support, and casualty evacuation. These don’t become any less important as you drive into enemy territory. And every day that passes even a hidebound bureaucratic nightmare like Putin’s regime can and will work out how to adapt.
Worse, every day a fighting force is in the field it’s shedding combat power. I’ve generally been assuming that a brigade in combat loses an average of 1% of its strength every day, with a loss of around a third leaving it barely able to hold ground, much less advance.
So far this rough estimate has proven reasonable - Putin’s efforts to take Kyiv were called off after a little more than a month, once the invasion force in the north was on the verge of total collapse. The first phase of Ukrainian operations in 2023 also lasted just 3-4 weeks; after that a decision was made to commit the operational reserves. Their attacks began to wind down 4-6 weeks after that.
In most cases, everything that an offensive hopes to achieve pretty much has to happen in a matter of days. After a certain point, pressing it is a mistake unless a critical objective has nearly been achieved and the enemy is out of reserves. The next ten days in Kursk will strongly determine how much territory Ukraine holds and the rate at which it is forced to pull back.
Whatever happens, over the past ten days Ukraine has once again achieved what seemed impossible until Ukrainians it showed wasn’t. A nuclear “superpower” was caught by surprise, losing territory and positively flailing to regain its balance. If Moscow truly was facing an international coalition determined to destroy russia, nothing would stop it from marching to the Kremlin.
The failure to take Kyiv, Wagner’s revolt, now Ukraine seizing a substantial chunk of Kursk - the pattern is clear. Putin’s empire is crumbling, bit by bit, his regime a hollow charade that relies on bluff and weapons left over from Soviet times.
Even if Putin’s troops do muster the strength to push Ukrainian forces back across the border, if the latter choose to mount an active defense as they slowly retreat they’ll inflict tens of thousands of casualties over the next few months. Putin’s army is already losing more soldiers and gear than it can replace. This trajectory won’t be any kinder to the current occupant of the Kremlin than it was in Muscovite wars of old.
Further, Moscow now has to consider the possibility of Ukraine mounting incursions anywhere along the border from here on out. On the Kharkiv front, this raises the specter of Ukrainian troops striking the rear of ruscist formations pressing on Vovchansk. The orcs battling to reach the Oskil on the Kupiansk front are likewise vulnerable to a Ukrainian push along the river towards the big ruscist base in Valuyki.
The entire logic of Moscow fighting in Ukraine at all is utterly demolished if it faces the danger of losing some of its own internationally recognized turf. And with virtually all of Moscow’s combat power pulled from its other borders, save for much of its badly outnumbered Navy, anyone with a mind to has every reason to prod Putin while they can.
Of course, Ukraine’s weak-kneed allies have been caught out as well. The warnings about dire escalation if Ukraine is not kept from getting the best weapons and a license to use them however it sees fit were all nonsense. A bunch of bureaucrat-scholars created an imaginary universe where applying Vietnam-style thinking about managing conflicts led to tend of thousands of Ukrainians dying in a war that could have been over almost two years ago.
At worst, it appears that Ukraine will be able to walk away from this offensive by conducting a phased withdrawal under pressure over many weeks and still wind up controlling Moscow’s own defense line along the border as a buffer zone. At best, Free Kursk will expand to encompass about half the district, allowing Ukraine a chance to repeat the process in Belgorod.
With Sumy and Kharkiv buffered from attack, it should be possible to deploy Patriot systems to guard the area from ruscist drone, missile, and glide bomb attacks. This would also greatly aid Ukraine’s use of F-16s and AWACS aircraft, pushing ruscist aviation and drone launch points further from Kyiv. Forward air bases east of the Dnipro that have been coming under drone attack lately should be much better protected, potentially even able to host F-16s.
The posture of Ukrainian forces in Kursk indicates a strong desire to continue a fight that’s going their way. I doubt they will leave soon, possibly not until the very end of the war. Why give up such defensive positions like those constructed Moscow constructed at great expense on Putin’s side of the border?
Grounds for a just ceasefire ahead of peace talks can be found in each side agreeing to a phased withdrawal from territory occupied by the other. Moscow pulls back to its positions as of 2021, and in exchange Ukraine retreats to the border area, which it holds as insurance until ruscist troops go back behind international borders. Then the difficult process of reintegration and reconstruction can begin on both sides. Reparations and handover of regime members for trial can be coupled to a release of frozen russian financial reserved.
There are definite limits to how far Ukrainian forces can advance. Kursk and the nuclear power plant in nearby Kurchatov have always certainly never been the objective of this campaign, though posing a threat to both absolutely is.
Every operation has a natural culmination point. Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign might even have reached its own already. Time will tell.
Regardless, at some point in the next three weeks Ukraine’s campaign will almost certainly shift gears. There will likely be a consolidation and handover of positions to new brigades. Then Syrskyi will unleash the same type of op somewhere else - perhaps near Hulyaipole, or even along the Dnipro. Somewhere in Donbas could be a viable target if Ukraine gets adequate support, including a lot more modern armored vehicles.
The next time, the orcs may not have reserves to seal a breach. The Kursk Campaign could pave the way for a terminal breakthrough on the Azov Front, just as the operations in Kherson and Kharkiv were twins.