James Sherr ⟩ Turning the tables

An aerial view shows smoke erupting from a Russian building on fire following a Ukrainian military operation in Korenevo, Kursk Region, Russia, in this screengrab taken from a handout video released on August 29, 2024. "Black Swan" unit of the 225 Seperate Assault Battalion/Handout via REUTERS Photo: "Black Swan" unit of the 225 Seperate Assault Battalion/via REUTERS

• Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s ‘march for justice’ exposed the openness of Russian territory.
• Today, the FSB has an outsized responsibility, even in military matters.
• Although the Pokrovsk and Kursk operations each have their own grammar, they are closely connected.

Since Russia’s war against Georgia in August 2008, but most dramatically in its full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be a faithful adherent of Catherine the Great’s celebrated axiom: ‘I have no way to defend my borders but to expand them’. Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has exposed the weak link in this approach. Two and a half years of full-scale war against Ukraine have left Russia’s own territory dangerously under-defended, James Sherr OBE, the honorary fellow of the ICDS, writes.

It is not the first time that this has come to light. In June 2023, Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s ‘march for justice’ exposed the openness of Russian territory to incursion and the exploitation of surprise. To be sure, Prigozhin did not march into Russia at the head of a foreign army. The fact remains that in the fortnight after launching the Kursk operation on 6 June, Ukraine captured more Russian territory than Russia managed to capture in all of Ukraine between January and July.

However events unfold, the Kursk operation has overturned assumptions in at least two respects. Until now, the Soviet academy education of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, has widely been held against him. (In contrast, the military-educational background of his predecessor, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, is entirely Ukrainian). It is scarcely incidental that Syrskyi is a graduate of the Moscow Higher Command Combined Arms Command School because the Kursk incursion is a well executed combined arms operation. It has been a stunning application of what was conspicuously lacking in Ukraine’s summer 2023 offensive: the coordination of artillery, drones, armour, air defence, infantry, intelligence (ISR) and special forces. Not least, it has been a classic example of operational manoeuvre: a bold strike through the weak point of the enemy’s line into the rear of his deployment. Finally, the operation was conceived and executed in conditions of near-complete surprise (meaning that whilst the enemy saw much of what was taking place, they did not understand it). The last application of these principles was the Kharkiv counter-offensive of September 2022, also commanded by Syrskyi. In other words, the long cycle of attritional war has been broken.

The second assumption overturned is the belief that Putin has presided over a restoration of the Soviet ‘way of war’, based on the preponderance of mass and resources, that led to victory in 1945. That it has done something of this kind is clear enough. From Bakhmut (which fell in May 2023) to Avdiivka (February 2024) to the approaches of Pokrovsk, the defining feature of Russian offensives has been their inexorable quality, backed by superiorities in matériel and manpower and complemented by wanton destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Moreover, to all appearances at least, Putin’s approach, like Stalin’s, has been casualty averse. According to British Defence Intelligence, Russia is sustaining almost 1,200 casualties a day (in August) — comparable to those of the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War — and has likely suffered over 610,000 casualties since February 2022.

Yet serious students of the Great Patriotic War will draw different lessons. Axis forces were not defeated by attrition and grinding incremental advances but by bold offensives and encirclement operations: Stalingrad (‘Uranus’), Jassy-Kishinev and Vistula Oder to name but three. These were striking demonstrations of combined arms, mobility and manoeuvre. In each of these operations, the Red Army possessed situational dominance. It was able to concentrate overwhelming superiorities of manpower and matériel on narrow breakthrough sectors before the enemy could redeploy his forces and despite the fact that overall force superiorities in the theatre were far less favourable to the Red Army than at the point of breakthrough. Much of this was the fruit of an unencumbered command structure that gave the operational commander authority over all formations and arms of service in his zone of responsibility.

Civilians who were evacuated from the Kursk region border with Ukraine, receive humanitarian aid at the Uspensko-Nikitsky Cathedral in Kursk, Russia, 07 September 2024. Fighting with the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been ongoing in the Kursk Region since 06 August, with around 180,000 people being evacuated by mid-August. EPA/STRINGER Photo: STRINGER/EPA

This is the model that Syrskyi and his subordinates are trying to employ in Kursk and, in far less favourable circumstances, in Pokrovsk. It is the Russians who possess an encumbered command structure: a matrix of command authorities, overlapping zones of responsibility, conflicted lines of subordination, and these deficiencies have dogged them from the beginning. This largely explains why Russia’s sizeable force superiorities have produced such meagre returns. It also explains why the loss of the ‘strategically significant’ cities of Bakhmut (a Vagner operation) and Avdiivka has not translated into operational-level success. Even in Putin’s bunker, it must have registered that 20-30,000 soldiers (comparable to losses in Afghanistan) were sacrificed to secure Bakhmut and that losses in Avdiivka were at least as high. Yet as of this writing, Chasiv Yar (17 km from Bakhmut) and Toretsk (35 km) are still in Ukrainian hands. Add to these examples several spectacular misjudgements, including the redeployment of the 80th Arctic Brigade from the Norwegian-Finnish border to the Dnipro estuary where it was decimated because its specialised skills had no conceivable use.

The salient fact is that the Russians no longer possess the operational-level superiority that their Soviet predecessors demonstrated to such telling effect. At no point have they transformed tactical into operational-level success. But does Putin understand the implications of this? It does not appear so. As he boasted in Tuva on 2 September:

The Russian Armed Forces are no longer controlling territories of 200-300 metres [in the Donbas offensive] but square kilometres.

In short, the grinding offensives are accomplishing their purpose.

What explains the fact that the USSR’s inherited wisdom about operational art has not been inherited? Of many reasons that can be cited, the principal one is the system of state power itself. Today, the FSB has an outsized responsibility, even in military matters. It played the lead role in planning the disastrous February 2022 invasion. It has used its privileged position to remove the most talented and strong-willed officers of the General Staff. And because it is the primary agency for maintaining internal security, it has been entrusted with command authority in Kursk, even though it is not the centre of a ‘terrorist provocation’ but a theatre of war. All of this is the consequence of Putin’s determination to rely upon submissive loyalists rather than individuals of ingenuity and proven capacity. Until 1941, Stalin’s system was the same. But by the end of that year, Generals with Gerasimov’s dismal competence were removed and those with demonstrable brilliance were promoted to the high command from distant postings or the GULAG. Entrusting military authority to the NKVD and KGB was anathema to Soviet leaders, even Stalin. But Putin has not profited from this experience.

The salient fact is that the Russians no longer possess the operational-level superiority that their Soviet predecessors demonstrated to such telling effect.

We would be remiss in failing to add that, over the course of the current year, Ukraine has expelled much of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet to Novorossiysk and rendered the territory of occupied Crimea hazardous to Russia’s air and ground forces and the infrastructure supporting them; it has blunted, though not fully reversed Russia’s spring Kharkiv offensive and despite the West’s restrictions on the employment of its weapons, it also has rendered Russia’s weapons storehouses, oil depots, command centres and logistics hubs increasingly vulnerable to attack. What is more, these very restrictions have been a spurt of adrenaline to Ukraine’s defence industry, whose technological innovation has been complemented by tactical innovation on the field.

The Inescapable Question of Donbas

Nevertheless, until now, none of Ukraine’s achievements have diminished the absolute priority assigned by Putin to the Donbas offensive. He is not necessarily mistaken. Russia’s most combat capable forces are still committed to the seizure of Pokrovsk. If somebody in Kyiv was hoping for a redeployment of these forces to defend Mother Russia, it has not occurred. To be sure, what has occurred is important in itself. The Kursk offensive has rendered an impending Russian offensive into Sumy stillborn. It has forced Russia to scrounge for new units — of mixed subordination and, for the most part, poorly trained — to expel the Ukrainian intruders. Ukraine’s incursion has imposed a substantial redeployment, at least 30,000 forces, to Kursk from Ukraine, and although this redeployment has not diminished the concentration of forces directed against Pokrovsk, it has stymied their augmentation, deprived them of fresh reserves and enabled Ukraine to launch successful counter-attacks in other areas of the front. Whereas the pace of the Pokrovsk offensive accelerated in August, it has slowed in September. Moreover, according to one well-placed Ukrainian expert:

The Pokrovsk direction is recognised by our command as secondary at the moment. To stabilise the situation, National Guard units have been transferred there, and the 25th Airmobile Brigade has been transferred directly to the strike direction at Pokrovsk near Novohrodivka….Logistics does not go through Pokrovsk for quite objective reasons….Much stronger brigades are transferred to other parts of the front.

According to Ukraine’s Centre for Defence Strategies:

The enemy's command on the theater of operations must conduct strategic regrouping between operational zones and reinforce the ‘Tsentr (Center)’ Operational Grouping on the Toretsk direction with at least a corps….Without the involvement of additional forces and resources, [Tsentr’s] 41st Army Command will soon have to either concentrate on narrower directions and sectors or abandon simultaneous offensive actions across the entire operational zone….By the end of this year, the enemy will not only fail to occupy Donetsk Oblast within its administrative borders but also will be unable to seize the ‘fortress belt’ of Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka-Kramatorsk-Slovyansk. 

For all of this, the entire sector south of Pokrovsk and critical to its defence, is at serious risk of falling to the enemy. Pokrovsk might be ‘secondary at the moment’ in the judgement of the General Staff, but this judgement might prove to be mistaken.

Although the Pokrovsk and Kursk operations each have their own grammar, they are closely connected. The dynamic of each of them is highly fluid. In both theatres, the Armed Forces of Ukraine retreat when they must. But they also cede territory by design in order to reinforce more important points and entrap advancing Russian units. Russia’s counterattack in Kursk on 10 September was widely reported. Almost unreported in the West was Ukraine’s second border incursion on the 12th and the fresh advances that followed. Advance and withdrawal, encirclement and breakout, are the stuff of manoeuvre warfare. As of this writing, nothing is settled, and predictions are premature.

A Turning Point or a Valiant Failure?

We should not lose sight of three ‘known knowns’.

First, however battlefield realities unfold, the political factor will be the deciding factor. A principal aim of Ukraine’s Kursk operation is to ‘change the narrative’ outside Ukraine. Yet it is not changing. Whatever happens afterwards, this side of the US election there will be no ‘raising of the game’ or change of policy in Washington. Vladimir Putin remains convinced that time is on Russia’s side and that Ukraine is fully dependent on the West, whose policy will be made in Washington and Berlin, rather than Warsaw, Tallinn — or London — whatever audacity and robustness resides there. Moreover, he is equally persuaded that a limited and containable Ukrainian incursion across one Russian border poses no ascertainable threat to the system of power in Russia itself.

Second, Ukraine and the United States view the war through different lenses and probably will continue to do so. Ukrainians believe that their cause is eminently sustainable if the West is willing to sustain it. They also believe that a meaningful victory — the breaking of the Russian army’s offensive potential and the rolling back of a good portion of its territorial gains — lies within the art of the possible. But in the United States, Germany and many other places, the conviction that ‘Russia cannot be defeated’ is solidly entrenched (as, in total contradiction, is the apprehension that Russia’s defeat would be too dangerous to manage). Whereas Ukrainians and their more committed partners in east-central Europe believe that the war vindicates their historical conviction that Russia is only provoked by weakness, a number of influential figures in the West, even some persuaded of the need to ‘impose costs’ on Russia, believe that the war was provoked by NATO enlargement and the disregard of Russia’s ‘legitimate interests’. Moreover, whilst the Biden administration concedes that the likelihood of nuclear escalation is low, the President and his national security team believe that it is too significant to risk. Avoiding a ‘wider conflict’ takes precedence over victory as Ukrainians understand it. For Ukraine, defeat of the enemy and survival are inseparable. These differences are not easily reconciled.

Ukraine and the United States view the war through different lenses and probably will continue to do so.

Third, and for these reasons, trust between Ukraine, the US and Germany has starkly declined. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s demand — in the midst of the Congressional suspension of US military aid — that Ukraine cease targeting Russia with its own weapons earned a vehement rebuff from Zelensky and was disregarded. It is not surprising that Kyiv concealed its plans for the Kursk operation from Washington. Although CIA Director William Burns warned that the transfer of Iranian missiles to Russia would be a ‘dramatic escalation’, as of this writing, their deployment has not altered Washington’s targeting restrictions one iota. Against this background, Putin’s refrain that the West will wage war to the last Ukrainian has acquired a disturbing resonance.

To these realities, we can add one well-founded prognosis. There will be no change in Russia’s fundamental objectives as long as Vladimir Putin and the pillars of his regime are in place. In 2014, we summarised these objectives as subordinating Ukraine or destroying it. Today Russia is doing its utmost to render Ukraine uninhabitable as well as unsustainable. Nevertheless, Washington adheres to the axiom that all wars end by negotiation. Few in Ukraine believe that Russia will be ready to make meaningful concessions until it is on the point of defeat. Zelensky’s declaration that the Kursk operation is designed to secure negotiating ‘leverage’ might assuage Washington, but it does not correspond with his own convictions or realities in Moscow. The point is not to persuade Russia but to stop it.

Indeed, Ukraine’s Kursk operation has turned the tables. But the grim truth is that this might not matter.