Why Ukraine Is Invading Kursk
With F-16s in the sky, the first phase of Ukraine's 2024 Counteroffensive Campaign can begin. Kyiv is also doing a lovely job of implicitly calling the Biden Administration out.
I’ve decided to do a quick brief on the recent (and ongoing) Ukrainian invasion of ruscist territory in Kursk.
Having caught most Ukraine War observers by surprise, the American defense establishment in particular (I sure didn’t see a new Battle of Kursk coming either, to be fair), the race is now on to define what’s happening in the English speaking media ecosystem. As ever, the early emerging conventional wisdom is largely wrong.
This isn’t a PR op, but a knife thrust into Putin’s kidney. Even if it ends over the weekend with a Ukrainian withdrawal, Kyiv has made its point in a beautifully effective way.
Rochan Consulting has a good overview from an Eastern European perspective. Mick Ryan offers an Australian view. Here’s Tom Cooper’s, from Central Europe. All have great takes, better than nearly everything in legacy media.
Based on what has emerged from the three days of fighting so far, I evaluate Ukraine’s objectives in the Kursk offensive to be as follows:
Publicly demonstrate Moscow’s lack of available reserves.
Show that Moscow can’t adequately respond to imminent developments at the front, with the movement of at least four battalions impossible to miss.
Upset any preparations for a ruscist offensive into Sumy, long rumored to be underway.
Generate a wave of discontent with the management of the war inside russia.
Seize some territory which can likely be defended at a favorable exchange ratio.
Force Moscow to expend assets like Iskander missiles and glide bomb sorties on its own turf.
Pull a succession of unprepared ruscist formations into a meat grinder.
Call Putin’s nuclear bluff. Again.
I’ll address each in turn after giving a brief overview of what’s been confirmed so far. It’s worth noting that only today, three days in, after half of the internet has already weighed in, is Moscow starting to take concrete steps to address the crisis in domestic media. Another sign of how out of touch Putin and his cronies are with conditions at the front.
Ukraine appears to have initiated the offensive suddenly, and while publicly talking more about the Pokrovsk front than anywhere else. This was in fact another of those offensives that we only know about because open source observers across the globe are tracking footage that appear in social media feeds.
Early indications that something big was afoot came from a video of low-flying ruscist Su-25 jets near the border and some burning equipment along with scattered reports of an incursion. Footage later emerged of a shattered crossing point and an Iskander missile strike directed against several presumably Ukrainian MRAP style armored trucks… twelve kilometers inside russia.
Soon images of POWs, probably more than a hundred, along with wrecked tanks and shattered structures, began to flow. An attack helicopter got hit by a drone for the first time. The Sudzha gas terminal fell. And thousands of russian civilians began a chaotic evacuation with little or no support.
In a matter of hours, Ukrainian forces have covered more territory inside of Putin’s empire than the orcs have managed to take in months. Elements of two brigades have been confirmed; 22nd Mechanized and 80th Air Assault, both veteran outfits. The latter is reportedly equipped with Stryker APCs, which if true could mean that US gear - beyond Humvees - is operating on ruscist soil.
Estimates of around a thousand Ukrainian across the border imply at least two and probably three battalions are fully committed. Rumors of other brigades being in the area are not yet confirmed by the sources I rely on but it wouldn’t surprise me. Two brigades looks like the right strength for an attack on a front of this length, their bulk sheltering back in Ukrainian territory until they’re rotated in.
There is also footage of armored recovery vehicles operating on captured ground, pulling damaged MRAPs out of the field. This implies a substantial degree of confidence in Ukraine’s ability to hold off air strikes and the lack of drones the enemy has in this area. Any engineering equipment that Ukraine can deploy to build fortifications will speed up the process.
When evidence first appeared two days ago, this looked like a simple probe. Nothing different than what Free Russian groups have run before with Ukraine’s backing. But the presence of uniformed Ukrainians on russian soil is a new and very surprising turn. The confirmed presence of Syrskyi in the area, who was until a day or two ago reportedly taking personal command of the situation in the Pokrovsk direction, indicates this to be much more than a raid. Ukraine very likely aims to maintain control of at least some enemy territory for a least a couple weeks. At present, Ukrainian forces are ranging well ahead of their territory they’ve actually secured, wreaking havoc on ruscist efforts to mount a response.
This sort of operation is, so far as I understand his record, right up Syrskyi’s alley. I’ve been wondering for a while why the Pokrovsk front was not being reinforced, and the answer appears to be that Ukraine is allowing Putin’s forces here to stick their necks out and approach an area where Ukrainian troops can utilize several built-up space along a ridge line to house and hide troops. Moscow’s supply lines from Avdiivka meanwhile have to pass through some fairly narrow channels, exposed to drone strikes. In other words, the Pokrovsk front is a trap.
The more resources that Putin throws into scoring anything resembling a success in his sputtering 2024 campaign, the better. Ukraine needs Moscow’s forces stretched thin and tired out. The push into Kursk could well be the first shaping operation ahead of a much larger general offensive effort beginning in six to eight weeks.
Budanov, Ukraine’s intelligence chief, recently started giving detailed interviews again after a period of relative silence. He’s once again talking as he does ahead of a new phase of operations. Notably, while claiming that Moscow will finally run critically short of resources by the end of next year, he also pointed out that Ukraine can’t just wait for that to happen.
He also stated that offensives peter out after two to three months - which is true - and also that Moscow’s will grind to a halt in one or two more. Interestingly, this perfectly coincides with the window I have been arguing since late last year stood to be a point where Ukraine might have a chance to do some real damage to a ruscist force exhausted by months of futile offensive operations.
So, what are the implications of all this, so far as they seem to stand today?
The fact that Moscow is forced to pull reserves from other areas to stop a deeper Ukrainian incursion indicates that it’s definitely struggling to resource ongoing operations. This means that Putin won’t be opening another major front inside or beyond Ukraine any time soon.
Ukraine has just proven that all fears of Putin launching a large-scale invasion of NATO territory anytime soon are totally unfounded. NATO can afford to hand over every piece of military kit it has, even at the cost of not being able to meet standing contingency requirements. There is simply no way that Moscow can risk open war with NATO at this point. Air and sea power alone can defeat him.
Hence all the nuclear posturing. He actually nukes a NATO member, he dies, and the coward knows it.
There is absolutely no excuse for Ukrainian brigades to go without modern gear at this stage. Fourteen additional fully equipped brigades can crack the Surovikin Line with proper air support and the ability to strike deep behind the lines that Ukraine now has after dragging Biden kicking and screaming to see sense.
And incidentally, Moscow’s incompetence has offered further proof of the validity of my Scout’s Way of War concept. Even though local orc units along the border apparently reported Ukraine’s buildup, it wasn’t large enough for Moscow to believe that a serious incursion was possible. Ukraine achieved surprise through a scalar fix: exploiting differences in how two levels of an organization perceive the world.
Ukraine’s actions have also revealed that Moscow’s widely suggested desire to replicate the incursion into northern Kharkiv around Vovchansk and Lyptsi up in Sumy was a bluff. Or, as likely, Ukrainian intelligence spread concern about it in the media to cover the intent behind its own buildup. Moscow probably thought it had bluffed Ukraine into responding to a non-threat, then wound up taking a gut punch when Ukraine understood that nothing was backing Putin’s play.
Naturally, the collapse of the flimsy border defenses in Kursk set off a wave of indignant rage in the ruscist military blogger community. You can always tell when something has seriously slipped over there when translations of their whining starts hitting the pro-Ukraine social media universe. It says a lot about the “russian world” lunacy that it responds to setbacks exactly how Goebbels used to in Nazi Germany. Remember that old video clip from Downfall that became a meme? This is Putin and his orc generals, every single day.
Sometimes they get something right, but so does a broken clock. There appears to be only one group of reasonably competent senior orc officers, and they’re fighting on the Pokrovsk front.
Between Medvedev blathering about marching to Odesa, Kyiv, and beyond (go ahead and try, buddy) to the orc bloggers who clearly want to rage against Putin but know they’ll be arrested for sedition, it’s a real clown show over there. A bully always cries the hardest when he gets punched back.
At first, it looked like this was just a quick raid, but with probably over a hundred prisoners and Ukraine driving armored vehicles into russia proper, the plan appears to be to stick around. This will force Moscow to bomb its own territory for a change, though the risk to Ukrainian troops will rise as time goes by. Evaluating this sort of operation ultimately comes down to the exchange ratio - if Ukraine removes three times more soldiers than it loses, it probably isn’t worth it. Five or six to one starts looking like a tragic necessity, because you have to destroy the enemy’s combat power somewhere, and that never comes for free.
With Putin politically obligated to respond fiercely to a provocation of this nature, at least Ukraine knows exactly where and when the enemy will be coming. Let the meat grinder commence. What a policy to have to recommend… what monsters war makes of us all.
Unlike prior incursions with special forces or Free Russian troops, Ukraine came with air defense systems and HIMARS backup. It is not inconceivable that F-16s will begin conducting aerial ambushes of the sort I described in my last post. This is when it would be really, really nice to learn that Ukraine was either given AIM-120D model AMRAAMs with their 180km max range or someone figured out how to adapt a European Meteor air to air missile to fire from a Viper pylon. If Ukraine is already using AWACS aircraft, in theory a datalink could let AWACS control the missile with the F-16 serving as a glorified booster.
Where might will go next is an interesting question. It’s highly irregular in the history of nuclear weapons for a non-nuclear power to launch a sustained military incursion into the territory of a nuclear power. Argentina in the Falklands War (Malvinas to them, Penguin Rocks to me) is about the only one that comes to mind. And Britain’s nuclear arsenal isn’t for that kind of fight. Their doctrine is pretty much no first use, but if a submarine captain can’t ring London, Moscow is vaporized. I approve.
Some commentators are already noting the proximity of the Kursk nuclear power plant complex to the fighting, but I can almost guarantee that Ukrainian forces will go nowhere near it. That would be tantamount to geopolitical suicide.
Technically speaking, Putin could respond to a move like the invasion alone by going nuclear. He almost certainly won’t, which is why Ukraine just did an absolutely excellent job of calling Putin’s nuclear bluff in the most public way. In theory, a nuclear power being directly invaded is one of the key triggers for nuclear weapons use. But Putin won’t go there unless he absolutely has to because it’s basically an admission of military defeat. That matters more than any threat of NATO retaliation, which he might actually want in any scenario where he was contemplating nuclear use, in order to force the US to negotiate about Ukraine without Ukraine.
Once more, Ukraine has proven that Putin’s nuclear arsenal can and must be ignored. Though it sounds backwards, only by assuming that Putin isn’t serious unless he proves that he is can deterrence hold now. Nobody actually knows where the true red lines are, which is a situation that positively begs for someone to take an awful risk in the future.
Only fear of nuclear war can bring about nuclear war - rational actors like States don’t initiate nuclear use against a rival unless their survival is unambiguously on the line. The Cold War didn’t go hot because the USA and USSR never wanted to get in a direct fight in the first place, at least not after Stalin died. Why? For the same reason that gangs and mobs aren’t always fighting to the death. It’s much, much more efficient to establish clear territories to exploit, with violence kept at the margins and mostly performative.
It’s when that delicate balance gets disturbed in a crisis that things escalate. Witness Israel and Iran, locked in an escalation spiral with no apparent end in sight.
The con that Moscow and D.C. have been living off of for eighty years is falling apart, though. That’s the root of the primal fear which rises across the Beltway whenever Ukraine does anything off script like this.
The Biden-Harris administration’s extreme discomfort with what’s happening is already bleeding over into allied media, commentators on CNN and other Democratic Party stalwarts questioning Ukraine’s logic. Make no mistake: the people who believe they have a God-given right to tell Americans what to think about global affairs do not like what Ukraine is up to.
According to the standard script in play over the past year, Ukraine’s spirited resistance is doomed to end in stalemate and loss of territory. It is inconceivable to Beltway types that a country which looks as strong on paper as russia could perform this poorly in a war.
In the mindset of an American policy professional (which I’d probably be if I weren’t such an avowed heretic), russia is a permanent fixture of life on planet Earth. Decades of effectively pro-Moscow academic scholarship has created a false image of Putin’s empire in the minds of American officials. This narrative system holds that russia is a unique country unlike the other European colonial powers that comprise the so-called Western World. Its many proponents are some of Putin’s most tools.
No country is eternal or blessed by God - particularly not russia or America. The majority of Americans think their own democracy is unlikely to survive. The President of the United States openly doubts whether there will be a peaceful outcome if the guy from the other party loses the upcoming elections. Totalitarian dictatorships like Putin’s rarely persist for more than a generation or two. North Korea is an exception, but there are always outliers - and it’s only to generation three. At least in parts of China there’s an old saying that the first generation builds, the second lives in luxury, the third squanders it all, and the fourth is poor.
Moscow on the other hand has seen a series of empires rise and fall. The fact that Putin felt the need to invade Ukraine at all says a great deal about the inherent fragility of his regime. It only looks strong because it’s enabled, partly by China, but far more by a US-led international order that needs an aggressive, forever menacing Putin to distract attention from the degradation of democracy at home.
America’s leaders have never wanted Ukraine to win. They all but sold Kyiv out in 2022 by not even threatening to send troops, even to evacuate American citizens like my cousin and his family. Since then they have forced Ukraine to fight in zip ties, validating all of Putin’s arguments about how weak and spineless western leaders are and totally justifying his choice of making nuclear threats that have totally eroded what these are supposed to mean.
Since 2022 the groundswell of popular support for Ukraine in the USA has been deliberately kneecapped by journalists, historians, pundits, and politicians who fear what Ukraine’s victory might inspire. Ukraine is fighting a war of popular liberation against a colonial occupier. This really is the Rebellion against the Empire, the Free Peoples against Sauron of Mordor. And that’s the sort of thing that can easily get out of control, forcing leaders to take action they don’t in fact want to.
Virtually all of the blather you hear about nuclear escalation and world war three is just that. Ignorant of how power politics actually works because educators aren’t allowed to teach the whole truth, too many facts being taboo or politicized, Americans are led to believe that any conflict between nuclear powers is automatically bound to end in the apocalypse.
This idea is then used to argue that the US shouldn’t - or more accurately can’t - do more to defend Ukraine. The excuse is so cowardly and self-destructive that it defies words. By that logic, if Putin wants Alaska, then he should have it. Why sacrifice New York, which has more people and generates more tax revenue, for one of the newer states? And people are to believe that Americans will die to defend Latvia!
Again and again, across two and a half years, nearly every effort Ukraine makes to improve its position on the battlefield - a prerequisite for success in negotiations - is met with a wave of negging from English-speaking media sources. No matter what Kyiv tries, all it gets is skepticism from people who know better - like they did when Kyiv was going to fall in three days.
Contrast this to the treatment Israel receives, the media talking up its ability and even right to attack anyone, anywhere. The whole system is brutally self-destructive.
The framing that US media in particular uses whenever Ukraine appears on the front pages anymore is so insincere and manufactured that I genuinely question the integrity of anyone who works at Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. Over the past few years I have seen media types routinely contradict themselves, failing to get simple details correct in an effort to produce attention grabbing content that manufactures a sense of reality for their narrow audience.
Ukrainian media is not immune, with Kyiv Independent in particular mirroring American trends. Ironically, Ukrinform, owned and operated by the Ukrainian government, is more reliable than any US media outlet. Heck, even when Ukrinform articles are machine translated they’re more detailed and informative than virtually anything written in America. Ukrainska Pravda continues to put out excellent soldier-focused interviews that highlight a broad range of opinions at the front.
In any case, whenever Ukraine does something that the US doesn’t particularly like the media coverage is always baffled. Analysts ask questions that sound reasonable but are actually rhetorical, like why isn’t Ukraine using these troops near Pokrovsk? The other standard one is to imply that Ukraine is throwing people into a sketchy operation put on for show.
That might be true, but the timing makes this unlikely. Ukraine acted almost immediately after receiving F-16s, once the US couldn’t find another excuse to delay delivery. At the same time, Biden is now in a difficult position, Ukraine suddenly showing itself to be stronger than expected and not on the verge of defeat, as many media types want to imply. It begs the question of why the USA isn’t doing more, as it could and should. Instead, Americans worry about whether there will be enough weapons to use against China if Ukraine gets them. Sorry, folks, but if Ukraine doesn’t, it won’t matter anyway.
Negotiations and ultimately peace talks are what will end this horrible war. But with Putin insisting that occupied Ukraine and even parts not taken are actually russia, and Ukraine’s population overall willing to keep fighting, Putin and his empire have to feel a lot more pain before they’ll accept that retreat is better than the alternative. Ukraine has little choice in the matter, because if Putin isn’t stopped, he’ll attack again.
Something else that Ukraine is reminding its allies and enemies is that borders don’t mean anything unless each side chooses to respect them. With Ukraine and russia sharing a long and nuanced border, if the two are to remain enemies forever then Ukraine has to consider simplifying its frontier.
From a geographic perspective, there are any number of threatening territorial tumors that it would be wise to excise if possible. Not only that, but if you want to get into history Ukraine’s borders ought to be set well east of where they were in Soviet times. There’s a good argument to be made that the future security of Ukraine and even all of Europe depends on extending Ukraine’s borders to include most or all of Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Rostov districts.
In the short term, it would be convenient if the Rylsk bulge was in Ukrainian hands. Considering the threat Moscow’s aggression poses to Sumy, a buffer zone extending at least 60km around the city is ideal.
Fair is fair, orcs. All you have to do is go home and the pain will end. It’s as simple as that.
Trust me - NATO isn’t coming to play regime change in Moscow. That’s the very last thing it wants. The irony is, with or without a nuclear arsenal, whether it has a dictator ruling from Moscow or the various parts of the federation become autonomous, russians are safer than they’ve ever been in history. No Mongol or Nazi horde is coming. The old Muscovite paranoia isn’t relevant anymore.
Unfortunately it appears that the bulk of the people who remember the Soviet era fondly will have to die before the old ways the rest of Europe largely shuns fade. Which means that Ukraine and its democratic allies have to remain vigilant, and press the monster wherever they can.
That being said, I sure hope that Syrskyi has a rigid and realistic exit plan. Because once the element of surprise is lost, a bold plan can fall to ruin.