On March 16, The New York Times reported that “Ukrainian forces have pulled almost entirely out of the Kursk region of Russia.” After seven months, one Ukrainian soldier told the BBC, “Everything is finished in the Kursk region.”
Back on August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian armed forces surprised both Russia and Western analysts with a lightning advance across the Russian border into 500 square miles of Russia’s Kursk region. Although the offensive caught the Russian military by surprise – and the area had been left relatively undefended – the territory concerned contained little of strategic significance.
If the offensive achieved anything straight away, it was to cause some embarrassment for the Russian government that Ukrainian forces could take pre-2022 Russian territory. At the same time, it certainly provided some short-term propaganda benefit at home and in the West: a small morale boost to Ukrainian military and its wider population that was no doubt getting used to bleak news from the frontline after the failure of Ukraine’s much vaunted summer 2023 counteroffensive.
Like in so many battles in this war, and like in so many battles in Russian and Soviet history, the Russian armed forces accommodated to changing circumstances. As in the war as a whole, after a seemingly reckless – or in this case careless – initial phase, they started to introduce more resources, set realistic expectations for success, became more methodical in their approach and introduced innovative new weapons and appropriate tactics to best utilize them.
Back in August 2024, there may also have been a deliberate decision of the Russian military command to push the Ukrainian troops out of Kursk in slow motion because their prolonged presence there kept the best trained and best equipped Ukrainian troops off the battlefield that really mattered in eastern Ukraine. The decision to accelerate the operation and push them out very recently was no doubt motivated by the prospect of seemingly inevitable ceasefire negotiations driven by the U.S. Trump administration.
The final stages of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive certainly did not go well for Ukraine. Only days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that the Ukrainian troops were “completely isolated and under complete fire control.” He also suggested that getting out was increasingly “impossible.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that Putin was “lying.” Ukraine’s military was adamant that “[r]eports of the alleged ‘encirclement’ of Ukrainian units by the enemy in the Kursk region are false and fabricated by the Russians… There is no threat of encirclement of our units.”
Putin did not say that the Ukrainian troops were surrounded. He said they were “isolated” and that “if the physical blockade will happen within the next few days, only two options will be left: either surrender or die.”
Ukrainian troops reported that they were “being pressed from three sides” and that the one road between Sudzha in Kursk and the Sumy region in Ukraine was “all under the fire control of the enemy.” It was no longer possible to “move equipment in or out of Kursk without being targeted by a hail of Russian fire, making systematic evacuation of the wounded or reinforcement near impossible.” The road was “already littered with burned-out cars, tanks and armored vehicles,” and was being targeted by “swarms of drones.” Many of the drones were of a new kind, guided by fiber-optic cables that make them, unlike radio-controlled drones, impervious to electronic jamming.
Cutting off the one road out meant that “men, logistics and equipment” could no longer safely move in or out. “Logistics no longer work – organised deliveries of weapons, ammunition, food and water are no longer possible,” one Ukrainian soldier told the BBC. Ukrainian military equipment and weapons brought into Kursk, some of the most advanced provided by the U.S. and its NATO partners, were indeed in many instances, as Putin claimed, “completely abandoned,” – “It is impossible to evacuate it. It will remain over there. That is guaranteed.” Footage on Russian television confirmed that the Russian haul had, by the standards of the war to date, been far from insignificant.
On March 14, Zelensky said that the operation in Kursk had “accomplished its task.” It is, however, difficult to see what metric he was using. The plan carried out by Zelensky and his commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, seems to have paid no lasting dividends for a very high cost.
The Kursk strategy may have had three intended goals beyond any immediate propaganda benefit. Ukraine may have hoped for a deeper incursion into Russian territory with more obvious value, perhaps even capturing the Kursk nuclear power plant. The hope, then, was perhaps that Russia would have to negotiate to reacquire a nuclear power plant that would be too dangerous to win back militarily.
Ukraine certainly also hoped that the unexpected crisis in Kursk would force Russia to divert troops and weapons from Ukrainian territory to Russian territory, relieving pressure from the heavily pressured Donbas front.
In addition, Zelensky also certainly hoped that holding land in Kursk would strengthen his hand at the negotiating table by allowing him to “swap one territory for another.”
While Western politicians at the time made encouraging noises about the offensive, there is little doubt that Zelensky had hoped that their words would have been backed up with more substance. While the Biden administration did subsequently allow US long-range precision weapons to be used against military targets on Russian territory, it is difficult to believe that Zelensky hadn’t hoped for more. At the time, there almost seemed to be the delusion on the Ukrainian side that it would provoke more significant Western involvement in the war. Thankfully, despite the best efforts of ‘hawks’, that was not the case.
Clearly, Ukraine didn’t achieve any of the above objectives, but paid a very high cost. Though stunningly successful at first, the incursion was quickly checked by the Russian armed forces, and it ran out of momentum well short of the nuclear plant.
Rather than diverting Russian troops and weapons from the Donbas, the incursion had the opposite effect: the best trained and best equipped troops of the Ukrainian armed forces had to be diverted from the Donbas front, where the real war is being fought and where they have been sorely missed. Instead, they were sent to Kursk to seize land – or increasingly simply hold on to some of it – that few in the U.S. or NATO, behind the scenes, thought they could hold indefinitely.
While the invading Ukrainian force was tied down in Kursk – slowly being pushed back with great loss of life and advanced Western military equipment – Russian forces took advantage of the decision. Able to contain the crisis in Kursk while diverting only limited forces from the Donbas, the Russian armed forces exploited the anemic Ukrainian line and pushed further west, further deteriorating and weakening Ukraine’s defenses along the Donbas front and capturing heavily fortified population centers that were the anchor for defenses in a wider area.
The hope that captured territory in Kursk would be a bargaining chip that would strengthen Ukraine’s hand at the negotiating table also evaporated in two ways: one that became clear immediately, and one that has become very clear only now.
The immediate price Ukraine paid at the negotiating table was the collapse of talks that could have protected Ukraine’s energy system. The Washington Post reported at the time that Russia and Ukraine had both “signaled their readiness to accept the arrangement in [a] lead-up to the summit” in Qatar that would have seen both sides agree to cease strikes on the other’s energy and power infrastructure. The negotiations would have been the first since the peace talks and grain deal in Istanbul in the first months of the war. There were “just minor details left to be worked out” when the Qatar talks “were derailed by Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region.”
It has become excruciatingly clear that Ukraine now has little to bring to the ceasefire negotiations. With the loss of Kursk, Ukraine cannot justify the horrible loss of life and military equipment with land in Russia to attempt to trade for pre-February 2022 Ukrainian territory.
The decision made by Zelensky and Syrsky now seems to have brought little or no benefit to Ukraine at a terrible price. It failed to divert Russian troops from the front in Ukraine while weakening the Ukrainian defense of the front, contributing to increasingly effective Russian pressure along the entire length of the line in Ukraine. And it failed to provide Ukraine with a bargaining chip that could be exchanged for lost Ukrainian territory at any future negotiations.
Committing their best trained and equipped troop to Kursk seems to have purchased Ukraine nothing at a very high cost in both lives and equipment. Any short-term embarrassment the offensive caused Vladimir Putin was short lived – and he now can bask in having ‘liberated’ Russian territory from a Ukrainian enemy who handed him a propaganda coup. For Putin, from the very beginning of the war, Ukraine was seen as an existential threat to Russia – and what better way to ‘prove’ it to a domestic audience than for it to invade pre-2022 Russian territory.
If there has been a positive for the Kursk offensive and its failure for all sides, it has been that it has hastened the willingness of both sides to at least start talking about more meaningful negotiations. Those negotiations have yet to start in earnest. To quote Winston Churchill from another era and war, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning” of a bloody war that has dragged on for far too long.
Alexander Hill is Professor in Military History at the University of Calgary, and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies published in February this year, and a number of other books and articles on Soviet and Russian military affairs.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
