Tag: perpetual war

August 6, 2024 will forever live in the minds of Russians and Ukrainians as a moment of great consequence. On that day, Ukrainian troops embarrassed Moscow’s army yet again by conducting a mini-blitzkrieg into Kursk, a region in Russia. In the opening days of the operation, Kiev sent between 10,000 and 12,000 troops into Kursk, according to an estimate by Russia expert Dara Massicot. The surprise incursion marked the first time a foreign army invaded Russian territory since Hitler’s armies stampeded toward Stalingrad in World War II.

The Russian troops in the area, mostly young conscripts with no experience in battlefield conditions, were about as confused and demoralized as their superiors. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, were jubilant, pointing to the incursion as an example that Kiev still had a few tricks up its sleeve and retained the combat capability to plan and execute a successful offensive. “Russia brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said two days into the operation.

Seven months later, the picture is much bleaker. Moscow, after losing around 500 square miles of Russian territory, finally got its act together and conducted a counteroffensive of its own in September, throwing tens of thousands of Russian and North Korean bodies into the fray and dropping the same type of glide bombs they have used mercilessly against Ukrainian cities since the war started. 

The Ukrainian army was able to inflict significant casualties as they defended their positions—Kiev’s General Staff reported on February 6 that 16,000 Russian forces were killed—but the onslaught was ultimately too difficult to withstand indefinitely. Russia’s strategy in Kursk was identical to its strategy in Ukraine: throw enough manpower, munitions, and hardware at the problem, and enemy lines will eventually buckle. At the time of writing, the Russian Defense Ministry has re-claimed the town of Sudzha and Ukrainian troops are withdrawing from the region.   

All of this begs the question: in the end, was the Kursk offensive worth it?

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On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with a small force of around 142,000 troops. Not enough to conquer Ukraine, the invading force was sufficient to persuade Ukraine to the negotiating table. Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that was the original goal of the military operation: “[t]he troops were there to push the Ukrainian side to negotiations.”

And it nearly worked. Within weeks, in Istanbul, a negotiated peace was within reach. It was only after the United States, the UK, Poland and their NATO allies pushed Ukraine off the path of diplomacy and onto the continued path of war that Putin mobilized more troops and more resources.

As Alexander Hill explains in the newly published book, The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies, in the initial phase of the war, Russia struggled without the advantage of overwhelming numerical superiority and without committing their latest, most advanced equipment. With the U.S. and its NATO partners providing the Ukrainian armed forces not only with their most advanced weapons systems, but with the intelligence to effectively use them, Ukraine actually had “an overall technological edge during the initial phases of the war.” But the Russian armed forces proved to be very adaptable. They adopted new tactics and a much more methodical approach to the war, introduced advanced weapons systems, and demonstrated a capability to adapt to and destroy the most advanced Western weapons and equipment.

By the time the Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed to meet any of its goals, the tide had turned, and Russia was irreversibly winning the war.

At the beginning of the war in Istanbul, before the inconceivable loss of life, a negotiated end to the war could have been signed. Three years later, after the loss of more land and hundreds of thousands more lives and limbs, a similar negotiated peace will be signed, only adjusted to the current realities on the ground. Ukraine could have had a similar deal but maintained all their territory but Crimea. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died or been injured in vain in pursuit of America’s fantasy of a NATO without limits and a weakened Russia.

Russia went to the negotiating table in Istanbul in a weaker position than it goes to the table today. It has survived the war of sanctions and isolation and won the war against Ukrainian soldiers and NATO weapons on the battlefield. Russia will be willing to enter a ceasefire, but only if they can accomplish without fighting everything they can accomplish with fighting.

Tragically, three years later, the ceasefire talks will pick up where the Istanbul talks left off. Everything in between was in vain. Witkoff has said that “[t]here were very, very what I’ll call cogent and substantive negotiations framed in something that’s called the Istanbul Protocol Agreement. We came very, very close to signing something.” He then added that “I think we’ll be using that framework as a guidepost to get a peace deal done between Ukraine and Russia.”

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