On March 16, The New York Times reported that “Ukrainian forces have pulled almost entirely out of the Kursk region of Russia.” After seven months, one Ukrainian soldier told the BBC, “Everything is finished in the Kursk region.”
Back on August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian armed forces surprised both Russia and Western analysts with a lightning advance across the Russian border into 500 square miles of Russia’s Kursk region. Although the offensive caught the Russian military by surprise – and the area had been left relatively undefended – the territory concerned contained little of strategic significance.
If the offensive achieved anything straight away, it was to cause some embarrassment for the Russian government that Ukrainian forces could take pre-2022 Russian territory. At the same time, it certainly provided some short-term propaganda benefit at home and in the West: a small morale boost to Ukrainian military and its wider population that was no doubt getting used to bleak news from the frontline after the failure of Ukraine’s much vaunted summer 2023 counteroffensive.
Like in so many battles in this war, and like in so many battles in Russian and Soviet history, the Russian armed forces accommodated to changing circumstances. As in the war as a whole, after a seemingly reckless – or in this case careless – initial phase, they started to introduce more resources, set realistic expectations for success, became more methodical in their approach and introduced innovative new weapons and appropriate tactics to best utilize them.
Back in August 2024, there may also have been a deliberate decision of the Russian military command to push the Ukrainian troops out of Kursk in slow motion because their prolonged presence there kept the best trained and best equipped Ukrainian troops off the battlefield that really mattered in eastern Ukraine. The decision to accelerate the operation and push them out very recently was no doubt motivated by the prospect of seemingly inevitable ceasefire negotiations driven by the U.S. Trump administration.
The final stages of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive certainly did not go well for Ukraine. Only days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that the Ukrainian troops were “completely isolated and under complete fire control.” He also suggested that getting out was increasingly “impossible.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that Putin was “lying.” Ukraine’s military was adamant that “[r]eports of the alleged ‘encirclement’ of Ukrainian units by the enemy in the Kursk region are false and fabricated by the Russians… There is no threat of encirclement of our units.”
Hellbound and Down 