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Ukraine attacks the Russian region of Kursk, changing a war that was actually fought by only one country.
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Russia had advantages because it could focus on Ukraine instead of expending heavy resources on the border.
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This change could force Russia to reassess its resources, creating a level playing field.
Ukraine’s unprecedented attack on Russia threatens the sanctuary Moscow has enjoyed for much of the war, and may force the Kremlin to rethink how it this conflict is being fought.
George Barros, a Russian military expert at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War, which is closely monitoring the war, said Ukraine’s advance in Russia’s Kursk region will force Russian military leaders to take into account certain things that they have not had to consider since the large-scale invasion in February 2022.
Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have not invested much in securing the country’s borders, focusing instead on deploying troops in Ukraine.
Ukraine is much smaller than Russia and, until recently proven otherwise, did not appear to have the capacity for a significant offensive on Russian territory. Furthermore, the Western allies have imposed restrictions on how Ukraine can use the weapons they supply. Russia thus has a kind of refuge within its own country, making it seemingly unnecessary to send troops and weapons to defend its long borders.
But the invasion of the Kursk region “now challenges and undermines some of Putin’s planning assumptions about what it takes to wage this war,” Barros said.
He said that over the past two years the Russian military had decided “not to protect the border region in northeastern Ukraine.”
Barros said there are about 620 miles of border “that the Russians don’t have adequately manned, not adequately defended, and so on.”
He explained that “the Russians have really been able to afford the luxury of not having to defend that border, and they have been able to deploy the men who would otherwise have had to guard the border to operations elsewhere in Ukraine.”
That appears to be changing and could change the nature of the war as a result, he said.
Ukraine advanced towards Russia
Ukraine launched a surprise invasion of Kursk on August 6 and on Monday they had taken control of more than 1,200 square kilometers of Russian territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
The development is a huge embarrassment for Russia. The amount of territory Ukraine’s commander-in-chief said it had captured in the first week was almost as much territory as Russia has conquered in Ukraine so far in all of 2024. Ukraine surpassed that figure on Tuesday.
This shocking move contrasts sharply with Ukraine’s typical approach to fighting Russia.
Ukraine’s previous attacks on Russia have typically targeted specific military assets and have not involved troops actually entering Russia. Instead, drones and long-range weapons hit military bases and shops, aeroplaneAnd oil refineries.
Ukrainian soldiers said the crossing into the country was easy, a sign that Russia was not protecting its borders properly.
A Ukrainian deputy commander involved in the invasion said that the soldiers guarding the Russian borders “were mainly children doing their compulsory service,” and other Ukrainian service members told the BBC that they could get in easily.
The Russian troops are becoming increasingly exhausted
Barros said Russia needs to think long-term about how it protects its borders. That’s partly because large-scale measures take time, and partly because the amount of effort Russia has to put forth depends on how much territory Ukraine retains and controls.
But Ukraine is already having success in expanding Russian troops, he said.
He said Russia should carefully consider “which units from the front line in Ukraine will be sent to Kursk.”
According to him, the decisions are still at an early stage, but reports and public information indicate that Russia has withdrawn some troops from some of the less important combat zones in Ukraine.
This includes units being withdrawn from Kharkov in northern Ukraine and from other areas such as Kherson, Zaphorizia and Luhansk.
American officials told CNN last week that Russia appears to be sending thousands of its troops from Ukraine to Kursk. And a NATO country said that Russia moved troops from its Kaliningrad enclave to Kursk.
Barros said Russia has not been observed withdrawing troops from its priority areas in eastern Ukraine, in Donetsk, where Russia is gaining ground. He said he does not expect “the pace of operations there to slow down anytime soon.”
War experts told Business Insider that Stretching and taxing the Russian armed forces is likely a motivation before the invasion of Kursk by Ukraine.
Barros said that “if the Russians do decide that they need to redeploy a large number of troops and properly defend a thousand kilometers of additional border, that is a substantial change. After all, it is not a trivial amount of manpower and resources that now have to be deployed for a larger undertaking.”
“It will limit the flexibility of the Russian command in planning operations in Ukraine,” he said, “and ideally, in the long run, it will dramatically increase the costs of prolonging and extending this war.”
Russia has had enormous advantages
Barros said the amount of time Russia spent failing to protect its borders shows how much of an advantage it had all along.
He described Moscow as “the beneficiary of a litany of luxuries” that allow the Russian military to focus its resources on Ukraine. These luxuries include Ukraine being banned from using certain Western weapons on Russian territory, he said.
Moreover, he said, for Russia, “there is a minimal requirement to protect the home front, minimal requirement to hide any activity that it does. There is very little cost to maintain and protect, and that’s kind of the sick irony of it, isn’t it?”
He said that Ukraine, on the other hand, should invest a lot of money in protecting its power plants, railways, airspace and aid from the West.
“The Russians absolutely do not need to engage in all these attacks,” Barros said. The only real exception to this is the drone attacks by Ukraine, which are dwarfed by the power of the weapons Russia is deploying against Ukraine.
He said the West should lift the arms restrictions it imposes on Ukraine. “If we were to lift all those advantages, that would force the Russians to spread the resources,” Barros said, noting how unfair this war has been.
“Russia is a belligerent and combatant in the war according to the norms and laws of armed conflict,” he explained, adding that “the Ukrainians are fully within their rights to bring the war to Russian soil to carry out legitimate military actions on Russian soil. So far, Russia has largely enjoyed a relatively cost-free war for two and a half years.”
But the situation is changing rapidly at the moment and it is unclear how this will end.
Rajan Menon, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, told BI that Ukraine’s actions could change the way the war is fought.
He said that Russia, with its much greater power, has so far been able to stretch Ukrainian troops along the front lines and put them under great pressure. Now, “in a sense, the Ukrainians have turned the tables,” Menon said.
He said it is not clear what will happen in such a quick operation and how it will end.
But so far, he said, for Russia “it’s a moment of shame because it shows that the Russian response to this — whether it’s evacuating people or dealing with this Ukrainian invasion on multiple fronts — has been disastrous. There’s just no other way to say it.”
Barros said Russia’s invasion has so far been a victory for Ukraine, after the country had to withstand Russian attacks for months and had barely changed hands for territory.
Ukrainians, he said, “are no longer stuck in a rut where they no longer have the initiative.”
“It is no longer the Ukrainians who lie on their backs for nine months or more just trying to get the right diagnosis,” he said, and “who have to deal with a buffet of bad decisions and dilemmas that the Russian leadership presents to them.”
Read the original article at Company Insider
