In November 2023, Ukraine’s then top general, Valery Zaluzhnyi, admitted in an essay published in The Economist that the war against Russia had become positional, that is, one fought in a defensive posture along static lines. This attritional warfare does not favor Ukraine, as it has fewer troops and less ammunition compared to Russia. In this type of war, gains are measured in meters and units incur heavy casualties, like in World War I.
Some 10 months later, on August 6, Ukraine tried to break out of this defensive crouch by becoming the first foreign army to enter Russian territory since 1941. Ukraine committed at least 10,000 troops to the mission, according to Western estimates. It jammed Russian drones and communications and used Western tanks to cross the minimally fortified border into the Kursk Oblast. Ukraine’s troops were then able to advance through rural Russia at lightning speed, capturing poorly-trained conscripts along the way to trade for in prisoner-of-war exchanges. (267 Ukrainian POWs have returned home recently.) Kyiv claims to control about 1,300 square kilometers of Russian territory. Western weapons have facilitated Ukraine’s holding of this area, allowing Ukraine to blow up pontoon bridges that Russia had tried to build.
So far, the operation has been a success. Like the retaking of the Kharkiv Oblast in 2022, Kyiv maintained operational silence and moved into a vacuum. While Ukraine failed to retake its own territory in summer of 2023 during the much-hyped “counter-offensive”—Russia had laid kilometers of dense defensive lines—Ukraine has achieved its largest territorial gain since 2022 by taking parts of the Kursk Oblast. The operation also likely saved civilian lives: Ukraine has said that the Kursk offensive denied Moscow a place to launch cross-border attacks and prevented an offensive into Ukraine’s north or east. However, to continue holding this territory, Kyiv has pushed Western countries for more long-range missiles and permission to use them deep inside Russian territory—thus far to no avail.
The United States and Germany have pledged to support Ukraine “as long as it takes.” However, Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of time: The longer the war goes on, the more people die, and the more cities are destroyed. A confidential Ukrainian estimate published in the Wall Street Journal put the number of dead troops at 80,000 and injured at 400,000, a staggering amount for a country where an estimated 25-27 million remain. In addition, Russia doubled its defense spending from 2023 to 2024, and the West is holding polarizing elections. The Kursk Offensive is not fighting “as long as it takes”—Ukraine is fighting to win.
Positional War Continues
The positional war continues in Ukraine's east, and Russia is gaining territory. It claimed advances of about 1,000 square kilometers in August and early September, threatening the road and rail hub of Pokrovsk, which had a pre-war population of about 60,000. Pokrovsk is poised to suffer the same fate as other towns in Eastern Ukraine, like Bakhmut and Avdiivka, which fell to Russia after heavy casualties and were turned into wastelands.
Yet, the speed at which Pokrovsk has been destroyed upset Yegor Firsov, a member of parliament who joined the army: “Despite resembling Avidviika, Pokrovsk was not so different from Kyiv. There were cafes open and children running in parks a month and a half ago.” Firsov spoke at the annual Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on September 13-14, which is hosted by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. (Pinchuk is a Ukrainian businessman.)
Ukraine has lost these fiercely-fought battles because it lacks air superiority in the east of the country, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defense secretary of Ukraine, told IPQ. “The Russians are hammering positions with bombs, and after that, they try to get in,” he said. While Russia takes heavy casualties in these scorched-earth tactics—one Western estimate puts Russian casualties at 60,000 to take Bakhmut, a town with a pre-war population of about 80,000—Russian President Vladimir Putin is willing to throw men at the problem.
The Kursk Offensive, therefore, is also an attempt to deviate Russian forces out of the positional war and bring the war to Russia, said Zagorodnyuk, who now runs a think tank, the Centre for Defense Strategies: “If you want to fight and kill your people, kill on the territory of Russia. Don't kill on the territory of Ukraine.” He added that “some, but not many” Russian units had been pulled out of Donbas to defend Kursk. More Russian units redeployed would help Ukraine in the positional war, as well as potentially open up more gaps in Russia’s lines.
Some five weeks after Ukraine first entered Kursk, Russia launched a counteroffensive to try to retake its own territory. The contours of this operation remain difficult to assess, but observers suggest that the troop numbers are far lower than what is needed. The US has assessed that Russia would need about 50,000 men—Ukraine puts the number at 65,000-70,000—to expel the Ukrainians from Kursk. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on September 13 that the Russian numbers were actually around 35,000-40,000.
To amass larger numbers, Russia would have to redeploy more forces from other areas. Putin, so far, has been unwilling to pull more units out of Donbas. At first glance, this calculation would seem puzzling: Why prioritize taking foreign territory versus defending the homeland? However, Russian state media has hyped pyrrhic victories in Donbas. And Putin has mostly ignored the consequences of the Ukraine war on the home front, including mass casualties and the shelling of the border city of Belgorod. This ignorance also fits with a pattern throughout his 24-year-rule of downplaying state failures, beginning with a submarine disaster, also named Kursk, which sank in 2000 and killed all 118 men aboard.
The Impact of Elections
Perhaps more than developments on the ground, elections appear to be having an effect on the Ukraine policy of Western governments. The two largest military suppliers to Ukraine—the United States and Germany—both face turbulent political periods. US President Joe Biden leaves office in January 2025. There remains a 50-50 chance of Donald Trump being elected in November to replace him. In the September 10 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, wasn't asked the same question, but she seems likely to continue the Biden administration policy of arming Ukraine, albeit too slowly for Zelensky's liking.
German regional elections in September showed the strength of far-right and far-left pro-Russian parties, who want to end Ukraine support altogether. If not challenged internally (some Social Democrat, or SPD, figures would prefer Defense Minister Boris Pistorius as the party’s next “candidate for chancellor”), Olaf Scholz is likely running for re-election in 2025. While repeating his mantra that support for Ukraine would continue “as long as necessary”, Chancellor Scholz’ “no” to supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles (“Taurus”) seems final. And there is little to suggest that Berlin would lead the way in ramping up military support for Ukraine.
However, the Kursk operation appears to have been designed, in part, to destroy Western fears about the danger of nuclear escalation: Russia has been attacked on its own territory and it hasn't used nuclear weapons. But Zelensky hasn't been able to translate the battlefield gain into changing Western leaders’ minds. “Ukraine has got great battlefield outcomes, but that hasn't manifested in a significant change in the strategic and political situation,” Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general who writes the Futura Doctrina newsletter, told IPQ. Zelensky traveled to the US for the UN General Assembly meetings on September 22-23 and has said he will present a “victory plan” to Biden in the White House to force Putin to negotiate an end to the fighting—and not the other way around.
At the strategy conference in Kyiv, Ukrainians displayed a palpable sense of urgency missing from many Western discussions on the war. Zelensky warned against “promising to consider what steps are needed from meeting to meeting, as if it is still not clear for someone.” Maria Nazarova, a battlefield medic, echoed the message. “Time means everything,” she told the conference. “[In] one day of postponing something, it's not that we kill fewer Russians, it’s that we bury more Ukrainians.”
Luke Johnson is a freelance reporter living in Berlin, who frequently writes about Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
