Three weeks after Ukraine’s bold assault on Russia’s Kursk region, experts are still trying to determine the long-term impact on a war that has dragged on for more than two and half years.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the offensive has created a “buffer zone” to curb Russian attacks on the cities of Kharkiv and Sumy while also draining Russian reserves. Those goals did not stop Russia from launching a massive attack with missiles and drones across Ukraine on Monday, killing at least five people and cutting off power and water to millions around the war-battered nation.
“Like most previous Russian strikes, this one was just as vile, targeting critical civilian infrastructure,” Zelenskyy said.
Even before Monday’s attack, Ukrainians were evacuating areas of the Donetsk region as the Russian army continued its eastern advance. Still, the Ukraine forces that swept into Kursk and took hundreds of Russian soldiers prisoner maintained their grip on almost 500 square miles, a small fraction of the region that is home to more than 1 million Russians.
Ukraine incursion:What’s behind Russia’s sluggish response to Ukrainian raid?
Russia gets ‘taste of its own medicine’
Zev Faintuch, head of Research and Intelligence at the Global Guardian international security firm, told USA TODAY the offensive has a “taste-of-your-own-medicine logic to it.” Faintuch questions the tactical benefits but says the offensive has boosted Ukrainian morale and diminished Russian morale.
The offensive also signals to Western supporters that with more support it can do serious damage to Russia’s military and economic infrastructure, Faintuch says. And it could fuel domestic dissent in Moscow while providing an opportunity to trade land in a diplomatic settlement.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, in an assessment of the war, said Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be demanding his military take back the seized territory without sacrificing the stability of his regime or slowing the Russian offensive into eastern Ukraine. Also off the table: “firing his incompetent but loyal lieutenants,” the assessment says.
The results of such a strategy are too early to forecast, the assessment adds.
Putin blames US, West for Kursk incursion
Putin has blamed the West for the stunning breach, although U.S. officials have said they had no prior knowledge of the incursion. Putin called it a ‘major provocation” and once again accused the U.S. of using Ukrainians as proxies. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a top Putin adviser, said Russia should now expand its goals to include seizing all of Ukraine and to “mercilessly defeat and destroy the enemy.”
Joe Chafetz, an intelligence analyst at Global Guardian, says the incursion – while far from decisive – has forced Russia to make difficult choices. It also reveals the possibility that Putin might not be able to end the war on his own terms, Chafetz said.
“If nothing else, Kyiv’s foray into Kursk has demonstrated that Ukrainian forces are capable of complicated mechanized advances,” he said. And if Ukraine can replicate the success, Russia’s strategy of incremental and irreversible advance could fail, he said.
Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, was an adviser to Putin foe Alexei Navalny before Navalny’s mysterious death in a Russian prison six months ago. Luzin says he is unsure what the reports that Ukraine is controlling more than 90 Kursk villages really mean. If a few Ukrainian soldiers drive into a town and no one stops them, do they control it?
“Villages and cities … are now in the Ukrainian military sphere of influence because the city administrations, by and large, ran away,” he said at a forum last week, adding that “we don’t know if we are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of this military operation (that) will only be understood over time.”
Putin blasts ‘provocation’:Ukraine troops cross into Kursk
Russian citizens may have little interest in Ukraine
Luzin also says the apparently complete indifference of Russian society toward the Ukraine offensive might be an indicator of indifference for the Putin’s goals of seizing the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts − provinces – in Ukraine and holding on to Crimea, territory Russia seized a decade ago that Ukraine is struggling to recover.
That raises the question of how much sacrifice Russian citizens are willing to make in Ukraine.
“What does it mean for us? What does it mean for Ukraine?” Luzin said. “It means that if Russians do not care about Kursk, they will never care about Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and other occupied territories of Ukraine.”
Read More: Ukraine’s strike on Kursk may mean Russia can’t end war on its terms