Ukraine’s Kursk Gamble—Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Local volunteers walk past a building damaged by Ukrainian strikes in Kursk, Russia, on Aug. 16, 2024. Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Ukraine’s successful surprise attack into Russia’s Kursk Oblast is, I believe, a very high-stakes example of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

By pulling men and equipment from other battlefronts, Ukraine was able to attack into and gain a presence in lightly defended Russian territory. The attack’s success hinged on Russia not reinforcing the border despite reportedly being given two weeks’ advance warning by its intelligence service that Ukraine was building up men and equipment near the Kursk border.

Presumably, the Kremlin leadership, including the Chief of Staff of all Russia’s armed forces, were so confident that the United States would not allow Ukraine to violate the prohibition against using Western-supplied equipment and vehicles to attack across Russia’s border that they did not send reinforcements, nor did they reportedly think it was important enough to inform President Vladimir Putin.

Consequently, the incursion was initially quite successful, with Ukraine’s military claiming it has gained  control of 1,263 square kilometers in just a few weeks. This stands in sharp contrast to what we have seen in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson, where it took Russia from January to July 2024, about seven months, to wrest control of 1,175 square kilometers of territory from Ukraine.

But this is an apples-and-oranges comparison, as gaining control of undefended or lightly defended territory is completely different from taking territory from troops supported by artillery and drones ensconced in networked fortifications that have been built up over a matter of months and/or years, as is the case in the Donbas.

Nevertheless, the incursion has boosted Ukrainian morale, diverted attention away from the increasingly grim situation in the Donbas, given Western media something it wants to write about, and has provided grist for those who want to continue sending additional countless billions of dollars of aid for as long as Ukraine is willing to fight.

However, this does leave us with important questions. Where did Ukraine get the men and equipment to mount such an operation? Does Ukraine have the countless thousands of well-equipped, experienced troops that would allow it to take and hold enough land to create the militarily relevant buffer zone that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed to be the reason for the incursion? Has the incursion changed the fundamentals that have been driving the war?

First, let’s consider Ukraine’s widely documented manpower shortage that shows no signs of being alleviated by Ukraine’s controversial, well-documented conscription campaign. As it stands, prior to the Kursk incursion Ukraine was failing to conscript enough men to replace the frontline troops lost to Russia’s grinding assaults in the Donbas region. Opening up another front and exposing more troops to Russia’s massive advantage in artillery, airpower, manpower, drones, and electronic warfare ensures Ukraine will lose troops at an accelerated rate.

Moreover, the Ukrainian forces that charged into Kursk and were initially competently executing combined arms maneuver warfare weren’t conscripts with a few weeks of training. Instead, they were hard-to-replace, experienced troops, some of whom have almost certainly been pulled from regions over which Ukraine is struggling to maintain control.

Another impact of the Kursk incursion is that the Kursk front has, and continues to require, lots and lots of ammunition, including artillery ammunition, that continues to remain in short supply. Thus, it is unsurprising that reports from the Donbas indicate that supplying the Kursk incursion is starting to hurt. Indeed, a Ukrainian artillery brigade commander fighting in the Donbas told the Financial Times “that part of the reason for the Russian advance was Kyiv moving its scarce resources north [into Kursk].” And a spokesman for Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade in Donetsk, Ivan Sekach, told Politico that since Ukraine launched the Kursk offensive “things have become worse in our part of the front. ... We have been getting even less ammo than before and Russians are pushing.”

Exacerbating the situation in the Donbas, Ukraine has shifted hard to replace units such as the HIMARS/M270 multiple-launch rockets systems (MLRS) to positions near the Kursk border to support the incursion. Additionally, in order to prevent Russian airpower from unleashing devastating attacks on the Ukrainian forces in Kursk, Ukraine had to shift scarce, irreplaceable air defense units into positions close to the Ukraine–Kursk border. These kinds of redeployments, no matter how judiciously executed, diminish the combat power of Ukrainian forces fighting to hold back the Russian forces in the Donbas.

Another problematic aspect of the Kursk incursion is that while moving units like the HIMARS rocket artillery and air defense units close to Russia’s Kursk border was absolutely necessary for the operation to have any chance of success, doing so significantly increases the chance they will be located and destroyed, and at a minimum means they are not available for use on other fronts.

Hence, far from relieving pressure on the Ukrainian forces fighting to maintain some control over the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces that declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 and to delay Russia closing in on Ukraine’s critical supply hub city Pokrovsk, it is my opinion that the Kursk incursion has weakened Ukrainian forces in the Donbas.

Indeed, according to Yohann Michel of the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies in Lyon, the Russian advance in the region “has accelerated in recent weeks, with a pace of progression that is becoming even more concerning than before.” An example of this is Novohrodivka, a town of 14,000 located just seven miles from Pokrovsk, which has been taken by Russian forces much more quickly than anyone expected.

Furthering Ukraine’s difficult situation is that the Russian military’s hugely successful recruitment of volunteers, and its massive ramp up in weapons production, has ensured that Russia has the resources to continue advancing in the Donbas and to push Ukraine out of Kursk. That means that the pressure Ukraine was hoping to relieve on its troops in the Donbas will remain and be harder to resist because scarce Ukrainian manpower and weapons resources are being diverted to Kursk.

Ultimately, while the incursion diverted attention from losses in the Donbas and boosted morale, it is still an operation conducted on a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” basis that was initiated in a desperate attempt to slow Russia’s advances in the Donbas. It has failed to do so. Consequently, it has not changed the fundamentals of an attrition-based war in which Russia maintains an overwhelming advantage.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.