The highest stakes in the Ukrainian offensive into Russian territory in Kursk may turn out not to be how far they advance nor whether they can hold it. The advance seems already to be running out of gas and few in the U.S. or NATO have any expectation that Ukraine can hold onto the territory they so quickly took.
The highest stakes in the Ukraine offensive may turn out to be the moral that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is spinning that he says should be learned from the incursion.
Zelensky says that two things should be learned from the Ukrainian armed forces incursion into Russia. The first is that the West must remove its restrictions on the use of long-range weapons into Russian territory. Had Ukraine been able to fire into Russia, Ukraine would not need to have marched into Russia: “If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter… the Kursk region.”
The second is that there is no longer a need for the West to maintain those restrictions. The purpose of the restrictions is to avoid direct western confrontation with Russia by not crossing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines. But “just a few months ago,” Zelensky said, people would have said that invading Russia “would cross the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has.” Now “the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled.”
The Ukrainian invasion into Russia is being presented by Zelensky as the final argument that the West should dismiss all Russian red lines, remove all weapons restrictions and allow Ukraine to fire long range missiles into Russia. The highest stakes in the Kursk offensive may be whether the U.S. is persuaded by the argument.
The initial American response has been a nonsensical inconsistency. Ukraine has crossed into Russian territory with Western tanks and American mobile Patriot missile batteries. U.S. provided HIMARS rocket launchers have been “critical to the advance” and have been used in Kursk to destroy three bridges. Yet, the U.S. says both that “we assess that they’re within the policy boundaries that we’ve set” and that the “parameters” on the use of U.S. long-range missiles “haven’t changed” and that “we don’t support long range attacks into Russia.”
The danger of Zelensky’s argument lies in the weakness of its premise. The argument assumes that the Kursk incursion demonstrates that Ukraine has called Putin’s bluff and that the bluff has collapsed: Putin has no real red lines, so the U.S. need not fear escalation. But, though the U.S. equivocates and backs out of enforcing its red lines, recent history refutes Zelensky and demonstrates that Putin does enforce his red lines.
The very war in Ukraine is an extreme demonstration of Putin’s willingness to enforce red lines. “The brightest of all redlines” for Russia, then ambassador to Russia and now director of the CIA William Burns said, has always been “Ukrainian entry into NATO.” On the eve of the war, on December 17, 2021, Russia, once again, drew that red line. The key demand of the proposal on security guarantees that Russia presented to the U.S. and NATO was the reminder that NATO cannot expand into Ukraine. Russia reminded the U.S. of their red line. They said that crossing it would result in “military-technical measures.” The U.S. crossed it. The result was military-technical measures: one week later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
The roots of this war trace back to the U.S. supported 2014 coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Ukraine and threatened the ethnic Russian Ukrainians of Crimea and the Donbas. Putin responded by enforcing red lines and annexing Crimea. When the West blocked Ukraine from negotiating an end to the war in the first months of the fighting and sent in more weapons, Russia responded by sending in a much larger force and by annexing Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhiya, and Kherson.
Russia has invaded Ukraine and twice annexed large portions of the country, and yet, Zelensky argues to a receptive West that Putin has not enforced his red lines. What’s worse is that Zelensky’s argument does not even face the reality of the current invasion of Kursk. As spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told the press, “just because Russia hasn’t responded to something doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t in the future.” But even that is blind to the reality that Putin already has responded. Russia has enforced their red line by intensifying attacks in the Donbas, especially around Pokrovsk, whose fall would threaten Ukraine’s ability to supply its troops in the east and allow Russian forces to break into open country behind Ukrainian lines and facilitate Russia’s capture of the entirety of the Donbas.
They have enforced their red lines by suspending current and future peace talks, potentially increasing the loss of land, drawing out the suffering of the people of Ukraine, and causing a painfully cold winter, since the current talks in Qatar were aimed at ending both sides’ strikes on the other’s energy infrastructure.
Though the U.S. has failed to enforce its red lines with Ukraine, Russia has not failed to enforce its red lines. The argument that they have rests on three questionable claims. The first is that, since every aspect of Russia’s war needs to be presented as unprovoked, none of Russia’s actions can be seen as reactions.
The second is that if Russia has not responded with nuclear weapons, then claims to enforce red lines are merely bluffs. But that claim ignores that Russia has many ways of escalating before arriving at nuclear weapons, as Ukrainian soldiers are now experiencing at the Pokrovsk front. It also assumes that, if Putin were serious about enforcing Russia’s red lines, an invasion of Kursk would trigger a nuclear response by crossing, in Zelensky’s words, “the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has.”
But the border of Kursk is not the strictest of all red lines. Russia’s nuclear deterrence policy states that Russia “hypothetically” could allow the use of nuclear weapons only if there is “aggression using conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is threatened.” Russia may not have concluded that the temporary loss of Kursk threatens the very existence of the state or even that it constitutes a real or lasting threat to their territorial integrity.
The third is that Russia has enforced its red lines in a more measured, proportionate and responsible way by suspending peace talks and intensifying their advance in the Donbas.
Zelensky’s argument that the Kursk offensive proves that the West can free Ukraine up to use long-range missiles in Russia because the West’s belief that Putin will enforce his red lines is illusory and naïve is based on weak premises that are blind to recent historical counter arguments. His conclusion is necessarily as weak as his premises. The highest stakes in Ukraine’s incursion into Russia, therefore, is not the risk of the incursion itself, but the risk that the U.S. will be persuaded by the conclusion that Zelensky is drawing from it.
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.
