Ukraine’s unprecedented attack on Russia threatens the protective space Moscow has enjoyed throughout most of the war and may force the Kremlin to rethink its approach to the conflict.
George Barros, a Russian military expert at the U.S. Institute for the Study of War who has closely followed the war, said Ukraine’s advance into Russia’s Kursk region will force Russia’s military leadership to consider certain things it has not had to since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Russia and its President Vladimir Putin have not invested any significant resources in protecting the country’s borders, but have instead focused on sending troops to Ukraine.
Ukraine is much smaller than Russia and until recently did not appear to have the capacity for a significant offensive into Russian territory. Moreover, its Western allies have imposed restrictions on Ukraine’s use of the weapons they supply. Russia thus had a kind of sanctuary at home, making it seemingly unnecessary to send troops and weapons to defend its long borders.
But the invasion of the Kursk region now “challenges and refutes some of Putin’s planning assumptions about the means needed to wage this war,” Barros said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sits with defense officials during a meeting about Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, August 7, 2024. Sputnik/Aleksey Babushkin/Kremlin via REUTERS
He said the Russian military had decided over the past two years “not to protect the border region in northeastern Ukraine.”
Barros said there was a 990-kilometer stretch of border “that the Russians did not adequately man, did not thoroughly defend, and so on and so forth.”
He explained: “The Russians really had the luxury of not having to defend that border, and they were able to use the men who would otherwise have protected that border in operations elsewhere in Ukraine.”
This appears to be changing and could, as a result, change the character of this war, he said.
Ukraine advances into Russia
On August 6, Ukraine launched a surprise invasion of Kursk and by Monday controlled more than 1,270 square kilometers of Russian territory, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
This development is extremely embarrassing for Russia. The amount of territory that the country had conquered within the first week, according to the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, was almost as much territory as Russia has conquered in Ukraine so far in the whole of 2024. Ukraine surpassed that number on Tuesday.
A border crossing at the border with Russia in Ukraine, August 11, 2024. REUTERS/Vyacheslav Ratynskyi
This surprising move was in stark contrast to Ukraine’s usual approach in the fight against Russia.
Previous attacks by Ukraine on Russia have typically targeted only specific military facilities and have not involved actual troop incursions into Russia. Instead, drones and long-range weapons have struck military bases and depots, aircraft and oil refineries.
Ukrainian soldiers spoke of easy entry into the country, which was a sign that Russia was not adequately protecting its borders.
A deputy Ukrainian commander involved in the invasion said: the soldiers guarding the Russian borders “were mainly children doing their compulsory service,” and other Ukrainian soldiers told the BBC that they could enter without any problems.
Russian troops are increasingly under pressure
Barros said that Russia needs to rethink its border protection measures in the long term. This is necessary both because large-scale border protection takes time and because the effort Russia has to make depends on how much territory Ukraine owns.
However, Ukraine has already succeeded in expanding Russian troops, he said.
He said Russia must carefully consider “which units along the front line in Ukraine should be moved to Kursk.”
Those decisions are still in the early stages, he said, but reports and open-source information suggest that Russia has withdrawn some troops from some of its lower-priority combat zones in Ukraine.
A local volunteer looks at a building damaged by Ukrainian attacks in Kursk on August 16, 2024, following Ukraine’s offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region. TATYANA MAKEYEVA/AFP via Getty Images
This includes the withdrawal of units from Kharkiv in northern Ukraine and some other areas such as Kherson, Zaphoritsia and Luhansk.
US officials told CNN last week that Russia appears to be moving thousands of its Ukrainian troops to Kursk. And a NATO country said Russia had moved troops from its Kaliningrad enclave to Kursk.
Barros said Russia has not withdrawn troops from its priority areas in eastern Ukraine, from Donetsk, where Russia is gaining ground, and he does not expect the pace of operations there to slow down in the near future.
War experts told Business Insider that the overwork and exhaustion of Russian forces was likely a motive for the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk.
Barros said: “If the Russians actually decide to redeploy large numbers of troops and adequately defend another thousand kilometers of border, that would be a substantial change, because that is not an insignificant amount of people and resources that now have to be set aside for a larger undertaking.”
“This will limit the flexibility of the Russian command in planning operations in Ukraine,” he said, “and ideally, in the long run, the costs of prolonging and expanding this war will increase dramatically.”
Russia had great advantages
Barros said the period when Russia did not protect its borders showed what a great advantage it had for so long.
He described Moscow as “beneficiary of a long list of luxuries” that allow the Russian military to concentrate its resources on Ukraine. Among those luxuries is the fact that Ukraine is banned from using certain Western weapons on Russian territory, he said.
A Ukrainian soldier of the 47th Mechanized Brigade looks out of the driver’s hatch of an M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast in February 2024. Vitalii Nosach/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
Moreover, he said, Russia has “minimal need to protect the home front, minimal need to conceal its activities. The cost of maintaining and protecting it is very low, and that’s kind of the sick irony of it, isn’t it?”
He said that Ukraine, on the other hand, must invest large resources in protecting its power plants, railway lines, airspace and aid supplies coming from the West.
“The Russians basically don’t have to deal with any of this,” Barros said. The only real exception is Ukraine’s drone attacks, which pale in comparison to the strength of the weapons Russia is using against Ukraine.
He said the West should lift the arms restrictions it imposed on Ukraine. “If we were to lift all these advantages, it would force the Russians to distribute their resources,” Barros said, pointing out how unfair the war had been.
“Russia is a belligerent and combatant in this war in accordance with the norms and laws of armed conflict,” he said, adding that “Ukrainians have every right to bring the war to Russian soil and to engage in legitimate military actions there. So far, Russia has been able to wage this war for two and a half years largely at no cost.”
But the situation is changing rapidly and how it will end is unclear.
Rajan Menon, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, told BI that Ukraine’s actions could mark a turning point in the conduct of the war.
He said that Russia, with its much larger forces, had so far been able to spread Ukrainian forces along the front lines and put them under great pressure. Now “the Ukrainians have in some ways turned the tables,” Menon said.
A destroyed Russian tank outside the Ukrainian-controlled Russian town of Sudzha in the Kursk region. YAN DOBRONOSOV/AFP via Getty Images
He said it was not clear what would happen or how such a rapid operation would end.
But for Russia, this has so far been “an embarrassing moment because it shows that the Russian response to this – whether in terms of evacuating people or dealing with this Ukrainian incursion on several fronts – has been disastrous. There is simply no other way to put it.”
Barros said Russia’s invasion was so far a victory for Ukraine, after it had been on the defensive for months and withstood Russian attacks without any significant territorial change.
The Ukrainians, he said, “are no longer stuck in the impasse where they no longer have any initiative.”
“Now it’s no longer the Ukrainians who are sitting around for nine months or more, just doing their best to triage,” he said, “and having to deal with a buffet of bad decisions and dilemmas served up to them by the Russian command.”
