Ukraine's surprise offensive into Kursk has not only caught Russia off guard but also shocked its allies, exposing the contrast between Ukrainian boldness and the West's timidity.
The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians. There are many reasons for this, including Russia not assembling all the available pieces of intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian attack, the Ukrainian deception plan, and a failure of humility on the part of Putin’s regime and military.
The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.
Ukraine has shown that, fortunately, strategic audacity is not entirely dead in democratic nations.
In early August, reports emerged of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast. For the first 24 hours, most observers – and the Russian high command – assumed that this was just another small-scale, unconventional Ukrainian operations of the kind it has mounted twice into Belgorod.
It soon became clear that this was something larger in scale and aspiration. Multiple Ukrainian brigades, or elements of brigades, were identified taking part in the operation through open-source intelligence. Those identified as leading the way were first-rate, well-equipped formations such as the 22nd and 80th Brigades. The Ukrainians, in what appears to have been an efficient combined-arms breaching operation, rapidly punched through the Russian defensive lines.
Russian forces in the region were quickly overwhelmed. Ukrainian forces poured across the border through gaps created in the breaches and captured nearly 1,500 square kilometers of Russian territory. By comparison, Russian forces have captured less than half this amount of territory in Ukraine this year – at a cost of nearly 200,000 casualties.
Even in the early phase of this 21st-century Battle of Kursk, the Ukrainians have demonstrated that they have learned the hard lessons of last year’s failed counteroffensive. Their preparations had been meticulous. The Ukraine preserved operational security, denying the Russians crucial information about where it might strike and with what strength. Importantly, using a defensive operation in Sumy as a cover story, they denied the Russians the knowledge that Ukrainian offensive operations were even under consideration. Ukraine also used very experienced formations for the initial phases of the operation, unlike in their 2023 counteroffensive. They maximised the use of drones and snuffed out the Russian drone forces across a huge swathe of Kursk in the lead up to and in the early hours of their operation. This denied Russia crucial and timely intelligence.
The operation is not without risks. The Russian advances in the Donbas are taking ground and threatening a key line of defended cities in eastern Ukraine. Losing these would cause significant challenges for the Ukrainian defensive campaign and political challenges for President Zelenskyy. Their capture by Russia would have significant propaganda value and reinforce Russian narratives of an ‘inevitable victory’.
Ukraine is in the process of reconstituting its forces in the wake of the 2023 counteroffensive and after nearly nine months of Russian offensives in eastern Ukraine. Most external observers assumed they did not have the forces available for such an operation. By not using their reserves to reinforce troops in the Donbas, and instead using them in Kursk, Ukraine has taken a major risk, but an informed risk. No outside observer of the war has all the data available to the Ukrainian general staff that is making such decisions.
The status quo of the war before the offensive was not sustainable for Ukraine. It is incurring unacceptable humanitarian and strategic costs. Appreciating that NATO strategy for supporting Ukraine is unlikely to shift beyond its ‘defend Ukraine’ approach; that no significant shift in US policy is likely before next year; and that Putin retains his aspiration to exterminate its sovereignty and culture, Ukraine knew that it was the only actor that could change the status quo in the war. The surprise attack into Kursk, with its political, strategic and military objectives, is the result.
The Russians were not the only ones who were surprised. Politicians, officials and diplomats from Brussels to Berlin, Warsaw to Washington were caught off guard by the Ukrainian attack and rapid advance through Kursk. Lulled into a false sense of security by those who peddle the nonsense of a transparent battlefield, and by their assumptions about Ukrainian capacity, almost none imagined that such an operation was possible.
Another factor that partially explains Ukraine’s strategic and battlefield surprise is that Western politicians and bureaucrats, having assumed a posture of ‘strategic slumber’ since the end of the Cold War, can no longer imagine such battlefield and strategic audacity. From the perspective of western politics, it is very risky behaviour, and certainly would not poll well. None of the challenges faced by the West in the past 30 years, even the wars spawned by 9/11, have required the mobilisation of people, industry and new ideas – or the taking of massive strategic risks.
Western governments assumed the Ukrainians think like them. Fortunately, they do not.
The strategic timidity that has produced a lack of imagination in the the West’s national security community has brewed over decades; it was on display in Afghanistan. Very few countries involved were willing to commit significant resources to the campaign. Almost all had significant caveats on the employment of their forces. Some troop-contributing nations were bearing a larger load – and suffering higher casualties – than others. At a 2007 meeting of NATO politicians, Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer asked NATO member states to lift the restrictions on the use of their forces in Afghanistan. NATO members, however, did not perceive the Afghanistan war as central to their national security endeavours and acted therefore with indecision and timidity throughout the course of what eventually was a failed campaign.
Unfortunately, Afghanistan did not amply demonstrate the costs of strategic timidity. It reappeared early after the Russian large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Debates about escalation by the US and European nations, in 2022 and 2023, are a study in strategic risk aversion, and a lack of understanding about the dynamics of war among most of the western political class and bureaucrats.
In the most recent display of strategic indecision and risk aversion, Biden administration officials have apparently admitted that they continue to deny Ukraine’s pleas for the full use of US weapon systems inside Russia because of a desire to ‘reset relations with Moscow’ at some point in the future. This strategic risk aversion and a lack of audacity will only prolong the war and lead to greater humanitarian suffering in Ukraine.
This is why President Zelenskyy has recently mentioned the concept of imaginary Russian red lines in his recent speeches. US officials recently noted that many of the Russian aircraft that Ukraine wants to target with American long-range weapons have now moved out of range. This justification drips with irony; had Ukraine been able to use the weapons when it originally asked months ago, these aircraft would not have moved, they would have been destroyed. Aid to Ukraine has been too slow and too little to prevent the war becoming a forever war in which Ukrainians die, Russians slowly take territory, and ‘war-weary’ Westerners can go back to their comfortable lives and ignore (for a fleeting time) aggressive authoritarian regimes.
In his 1985 book, Race to the Swift: Thoughts on 21st Century Warfare, British military officer and theorist Richard Simpkin argued that war had to be examined and understood through three interrelated areas. The first was classical physics, and which involved the dynamic impacts of manoeuvre and the constraints of terrain and technology. The second area was risk, which included the dimensions of chance and surprise. And the final area of the three is the imposition of a commander’s will and the clash of wills. The physics, risk and will that are inherent parts of human conflict are all at play in the Kursk offensive.
There are humanitarian and strategic imperatives to helping Ukraine win this war, defeat Russian aspirations for expansion beyond their current borders, and do so quickly. The ‘high risk-high return’ offensive underway by the Ukrainians is an attempt to shift the current status quo in the war, show Ukrainian capacity to undertake offensive operations and force Ukraine’s supporters to reassess their limitations on the use of weapons and the levels of support being provided to Ukraine.
The West’s strategic timidity prevents it from imagining, let alone conducting, the kind of audacious, high risk and high reward actions that Ukraine is taking in Kursk. The Kursk offensive, which is yet to draw Russian forces from its advance in the Donbas, may well fail to achieve some of its objectives. If so, it won’t be because the Ukrainians didn’t try. Western politicians and bureaucrats have much to learn from the strategic audacity shown by Ukraine in recent weeks. Let us hope they have the character, humility, and risk-tolerance to do so.
Mick Ryan is a recently retired Australian Army Major General. He is currently an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is the author of War Transformed, a book on future war published February 15, 2022, by U.S. Naval Institute Books.
