Ukraine’s raid into Russia has shifted the tactical narrative

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Ukraine’s surprise cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last week caught Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals unprepared. In some quarters, there’s already lofty talk of this being a turning point not just in the Ukraine war but in history, with one former British army officer even drawing on the fact that the battles raging in Kursk are taking place where an epic World War II tank battle was fought between Russia and Germany.

The Battle of Kursk in 1943 was the single largest battle in the history of warfare, and for American academic Walter Clemens, the current fighting is an omen: “The 2024 Battle of Kursk warns the Putin regime: Your tyranny is fragile and cannot continue on its present track.”

For a week now, elite Ukrainian units drawn from four brigades have been broadening their bridgehead in what amounts to the first invasion of Russia since World War II. And on Monday, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed Ukraine had seized almost 1,000 square kilometers of territory inside Russia. “We continue to conduct an offensive operation in the Kursk region,” Syrsky declared in a video posted on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s social media accounts.

Eventually, Russia’s defense ministry admitted Ukrainian troops had, indeed, advanced up to 30 kilometers inside the Kursk region — a concession that only came after Russia’s pro-war military bloggers poured scorn on initial claims that Ukraine was being pushed back. The bloggers have been venomous in their denunciations of how the defense ministry sought to minimize the scale of the incursion, how easy it was for Ukraine to sidestep border fortifications manned by inexperienced conscripts, and just how slow counteroffensive reinforcements were deployed. Even the Kremlin-controlled Russia Today outlet questioned how such a major border breach could have been permitted — although much of its output has focused on the humanitarian aid being rushed to the region’s 180,000 evacuees.

In just a few short days, this raid demonstrated that Ukraine maintains some waspish offensive capabilities, while also somewhat undermining talk of how high-tech battlefields are now transparent. Moreover, with the incursion, Ukraine has pulled off a textbook exercise in combined arms warfare tactics — sometimes known as fourth generation warfare — something Western military officials faulted Ukrainian commanders for failing to observe in their disappointing counteroffensive last summer. The operational secrecy was simply remarkable, its swiftness bringing to mind the country’s successful recapture of territory in Kharkiv in the autumn of 2022.

But for all that, will the Kursk breach destabilize Putin and maybe even lead to his ouster? Zelenskyy himself suggested on Monday that this is a possibility, arguing the major cross-border raid would mark the end of Putin’s rule. And his prediction coincided with redoubled pleas for Western allies to allow Ukraine to shoot Western-supplied long-range missiles much deeper inside Russia.

Will the Kursk breach destabilize Vladimir Putin and maybe even lead to his ouster? | Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov via AFP/Getty Images

But this isn’t World War II. Zelenskyy isn’t looking to conquer Russia, just to protect his nation from Russian aggression. And the operation that’s underway in Kursk isn’t on the scale of Barbarossa or anything like it. Truth be told, it likely has much more limited aims, such as forcing Russia to redeploy some of its units from the Donetsk region, where their offensive has been grindingly advancing, and on Tuesday U.S. officials said Russia has been doing just that.

Also, against the backdrop of increased Western muttering about the need for talks, the incursion seems aimed to position Ukraine in a stronger negotiating position. The Ukrainian president underscored that point himself this week, stating that “Russia must be forced into peace if Putin wants to continue waging war so badly.”

One of his key advisers, Mykhailo Podolyak, was even more explicit, suggesting that the surprise incursion would boost Kyiv’s position in any potential future negotiations: “You can only squeeze something out, get something, if they understand that [the war] is not going according to their scenario,” he said. “Any possible Ukrainian operations in ‘Russian border regions’ will have an impact on Russian society and improve Kyiv’s position in future peace talks with Moscow.”

So, for all the talk of Putin’s end, the incursion’s aims are more limited — and that’s the right way to think about it. However jolting or embarrassing this has been for the Kremlin, it’s unlikely to spark Putin’s downfall. Moreover, it may even assist him, much like the infamous apartment bombings in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999, which killed more than 300 people and injured a thousand more.

 Putin was prime minister at the time of the murky bombings, and his handling of the situation — as well as a jihadist invasion of Dagestan — boosted his popularity, triggered the Second Chechen War and persuaded then President Boris Yeltsin to anoint him successor. Some suspect that Russia’s own security forces may have had a hand in the bombings — that they were acts of false-flag terror committed against his own people for political purposes. Whatever the truth, the attacks and the war helped Putin surf a wave of patriotism.

Predictably, the Russian leader and his chorus of Kremlin propagandists are already pointing to the Kursk incursion as evidence of their longstanding claims that the West and NATO are the real aggressors and intend to subjugate Russia. It’s a line that taps into the country’s perennial sense of victimhood and fear of being encircled by enemies. And historically, Russian patriotism shouldn’t be underestimated — especially when the fight is on home soil.

In just a few short days, this raid demonstrated that Ukraine maintains some waspish offensive capabilities, while also somewhat undermining talk of how high-tech battlefields are now transparent. | Roman Pilipey/AFP via Getty Images

During the World War II, Russian soldiers didn’t fight out of love for Stalin. In fact, inept leadership, incompetent campaigning and enormous losses should have spelt a military disaster. But as American historian Roger Reese showed in his 2011 book “Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought,” the Soviet Union was still able to recruit thanks to the continued influence of patriotism, Soviet ideology and, ultimately, fealty to the idea of historic Russia.

This also offers a warning for the present day — Russia will maintain a numerical advantage over Ukraine, which is still struggling with mobilization and morale. And while Kyiv hopes to force Russian commanders to switch units from the Donbas to Kursk, Ukrainian commanders have had to redeploy units to mount and sustain the cross-border incursion as well. A war of attrition still favors Russia and Ukraine’s Western backers need to be honest about that and offer speedier and commensurate support if they don’t want the war to prolong indefinitely.

Of course, the Kursk incursion has understandably boosted Ukrainian morale — much as the commando raids Winston Churchill ordered in the early days of the World War II did for Britons — and it may well encourage some tiring allies to hold to purpose. But without much more proactive and forward-leaning supplies of advanced weaponry, and lifting restrictions on the use of Western-supplied long-range missiles, it’s hard to see how the war can be tipped in Ukraine’s favor. And with Moscow warning the West that this could trigger a wider conflict, escalation fears will likely prompt hesitation over how far to push a nuclear-armed rogue state.

Overall, Kursk has turned the tables on Russia, changing the tactical narrative — but it hasn’t altered the strategic one.