The highest stakes in the Ukrainian offensive into Russian territory in Kursk may turn out not to be how far they advance nor whether they can hold it. The advance seems already to be running out of gas and few in the U.S. or NATO have any expectation that Ukraine can hold onto the territory they so quickly took.
The highest stakes in the Ukraine offensive may turn out to be the moral that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is spinning that he says should be learned from the incursion.
Zelensky says that two things should be learned from the Ukrainian armed forces incursion into Russia. The first is that the West must remove its restrictions on the use of long-range weapons into Russian territory. Had Ukraine been able to fire into Russia, Ukraine would not need to have marched into Russia: “If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter… the Kursk region.”
The second is that there is no longer a need for the West to maintain those restrictions. The purpose of the restrictions is to avoid direct western confrontation with Russia by not crossing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines. But “just a few months ago,” Zelensky said, people would have said that invading Russia “would cross the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has.” Now “the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled.”
The Ukrainian invasion into Russia is being presented by Zelensky as the final argument that the West should dismiss all Russian red lines, remove all weapons restrictions and allow Ukraine to fire long range missiles into Russia. The highest stakes in the Kursk offensive may be whether the U.S. is persuaded by the argument.
Hellbound and Down 