Ukraine’s Kursk gamble doesn’t pay off | Opinion

Volodymyr Zelensky he’s a lonely man these days.

The last passage of the Ukrainian president through Western capitals, where he met with the president Joe Biden in late September and various European heads of state in October, produced few new security commitments from his foreign backers. Kiev’s request to use Western-made missiles against targets deep in Russia remains on hold. of Zelensky the so-called “victory plan” impressed no one—it’s less of a “plan” and more of a weapons wish list that Ukrainian officials have been reciting every week for the past two and a half years.

The battlefield doesn’t look great for the Ukrainians either. Although the Russian army continues to take a beating — it is said that September was its deadliest month since the war began — his offensive in Donetsk reduce Ukrainian defensive positions. The President of Russia Vladimir Putin he is determined to conquer the Donbas region and more than willing to sacrifice a lot of young Russians to do it. The strategy, however brutal, appears to be working, albeit more slowly than Putin would like. In early October, the Russian army captured Vuhledar after a months-long offensive there; this week, they took Selydovea small town on the way to the logistics center of Pokrovsk.

Ukraine’s August offensive in Russia’s Kursk region should have prevented some of that, or at least forced the Kremlin to make some difficult decisions about where to allocate its troops and resources. Zelensky’s decision caught the United States, his biggest military backer, by surprise and caused divisions within the Ukrainian military establishment. According to a September report in Politico Europe, Valery Zaluzhny, Kiev’s top military commander during the first two years of the war, objection because he thought the plan was not well thought out enough. Zelensky, however, saw the incursion as a way to turn things around after a year of bruising losses.

The real objective of the Kursk operation, however, was a mystery. There has never been a unified theory of the case. When Zelensky spoke about it, he gave various reasons for launching it. First of all, it was about pushing the Russians back from Ukraine’s northern border to ensure that the Sumy region will not be subjected to daily Russian missile attacks. Then it was about capturing Russian soldiers and using them as leverage to force the release of Ukrainian POWs. Then Zelensky spoken about how seizing parts of Kursk would increase Kiev’s power at the negotiating table, when Putin finally decided to engage in serious diplomacy.

Whatever the game plan was, the Kursk offensive it was a bet. The operation could work brilliantly, putting the Russian military on the back foot again and forcing Putin’s inner circle to rethink its war strategy. Or it would prove counterproductive, exacerbating Ukraine’s labor problem and moving away from negotiations to end the war.

Unfortunately, more than two months later, the Ukrainian Kursk gambit is closer to the second scenario.

After a few downright miserable weeks, the Russians have regrouped – or at least regrouped enough. A Russian counter-offensive at Kursk was launched about a month after Ukraine’s initial incursion into the region. Although it is true, Ukrainians remain rooted in some areas, Russians they took over about half the field previously lost. It is difficult to determine the extent of Ukraine’s casualties, but one can safely assume that they are considerable, given the amount of ordinance the Russians dropped on Ukrainian positions (one can assume the same about Russian casualties, by the way).

More significant than the reality on the ground, however, is how wrong the Ukrainian government’s calculations turned out to be.

One of Kiev’s underlying assumptions was that Russian pressure on its own territory would be such a monumental embarrassment to Putin that he would redeploy tens of thousands of troops from eastern Ukraine back to the home front. This, in turn, would reduce the pressure Ukrainian troops face in Donetsk. However, this turned out to be a rosy scenario; Putin really did redistributed troops from Ukraine to support the defense in Kursk, but not from the places in Donetsk that the Ukrainians were hoping for. The front line in Donetsk is even more active today than it was before the Kursk offensive began in August, and the Russians now control more territory in this Ukrainian province than they did in the summer.

Is Putin Closer to Discussing a War Settlement? Ukrainians hoped it would be. But preliminary talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials about ending attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure were blown up when Zelensky ordered the Kursk offensive. Predictably, Putin saw the incursion as a stab in the back and pulled the plug, with Moscow labeling the Ukrainian offensive an escalation. This should not have come as a surprise to Zelensky or those who advised him; whenever Putin has been put under pressure, he has responded by upping the ante rather than bowing. Zelensky, perhaps recognizing his initial error, now try to get those discussions back on track.

It’s always easy to have a Monday morning quarterback a war from thousands of miles away. But it doesn’t take much foresight to see how Ukraine’s bet on Kursk could go disastrously wrong.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer.