Making Sense Of The Ukrainian Invasion Of Kursk
The First Sober Appraisal Of The Ukraine's Kursk Operation
Since the Ukrainian military crossed the border into Russia's Kursk oblast two weeks ago, the fog of war has been filled some hysterical claims by both sides. Sergei Witte has written what may be the first sober appraisal of this operation and what it means. It's a long, detailed post, but Big Serge has generously given me permission to excerpt key parts of it here.
Before we get to that, two quick follow ups on my previous post ("Looks Like The Bull Market's Back (For Now)").
- Of the four bullish trades I mentioned there, I got filled on three yesterday, and the fourth one remains open. You can read about them here.
- I lowered the price of the Portfolio Armor hedging app back to $5.99, as demand cooled off a bit with the market rally. You can download it here, or by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below.
Now on to Sergei Witte's excellent post.
Excerpted from Big Serge Thought
Back To The Bloodlands: Operation Krepost
Kursk Salient: General Situation
[Krepost, Slavic for "Citadel", is Serge's term for the Ukraine's current incursion into the Kursk oblast]
On Tuesday, August 6, the Russo-Ukrainian War took an unexpected twist with the beginning of a brigade-level Ukrainian assault on Kursk Oblast, across the border from Ukrainian Sumy. The decision by Ukrainian command to willingly open up a new front, at a time when their defenses on critical axes of the Donbas are failing, is both aggressive and fraught with peril. The sensational spectacle of a Ukrainian offensive into prewar Russia in a region that is operationally remote from the critical theater of the war has whipped the peanut gallery into a frenzy, and most commentators and observers seem to have fled straightaway to their base narrative instincts. Russian “doomers” have been quick to denounce the affair as a catastrophic failure of preparedness by the Russian Ministry of Defense, accelerationists have trumpeted the immateriality of Russian red lines, while the more disillusioned pro-Ukrainian commenters have despaired of the operation as a wasteful sideshow which dooms the Donbas line to defeat.
People form opinions very rapidly in the current information ecosystem, and the prospect of excitement often leads them to throw caution to the wind despite the orgy of misinformation and deception that surrounds such events. It is worth noting, however, that only two weeks have passed since the beginning of an operation that apparently nobody was expecting, and we should therefore be cautious of certainty and carefully distinguish between what we think and what we know. With that in mind, let’s take a careful survey of the Ukrainian operation as it stands and attempt to parse out both the strategic concept of the assault and its possible trajectories. [...]
Krepost: Strategic Intentions
In this section, Serge addresses a few suggested strategic objectives of the Ukrainian incursion.
1) The Atomic Hostage
Sixty kilometers from the Ukrainian border lies the small city of Kurchatov (named after Igor Kurchatov, the father of Soviet nuclear weaponry) and the Kursk Nuclear Powerplant. The proximity of such an obviously significant - and potentially dangerous - installation so close to the scene of the fighting led many to immediately presume that the nuclear plant is the objective of Krepost. [...]
The powerplant story sounds scary but is ultimately too phantasmagorical to take seriously. Ukraine is not going to intentionally create a radiological disaster in close proximity to their own border, which would likely poison their own primary river basin and turn them into the most intensely hated international pariah ever seen. Even for a country at the end of its strategic rope, it’s hard to give credence to a harebrained scheme that uses critical maneuver assets of the regular army to capture an enemy nuclear plant and rig it to blow.
2) Diversionary Front
In another formulation, Krepost is construed as an attempt to draw Russian resources away from other, more critical sectors of front. The idea of a “diversion” as such is always appealing, to the point where it becomes something of a trope, but it’s worth considering what this might actually mean in the context of the relative force generation in this war. [...]
Krepost seems to have meaningfully denuded Ukrainian strength in the Donbas while affecting the Russians very little. A recent piece in the Economist featured interviews with several Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk, all of whom said that their units had been “pulled, unrested, from under-pressure frontlines in the east with barely a day’s notice.” The article goes on to quote a source in the AFU’s general staff who notes that the Russian units scrambling into Kursk are coming from the northern army group, not the Donbas. [...]
And this is Ukraine’s problem. Fighting an enemy with superior force generation, attempts to divert or redirect the fighting ultimately threaten to become a shell game. Russia has approximately 50 division equivalents on the line against perhaps 33 for Ukraine - an advantage that will stubbornly persist no matter how they are arranged on the line. Adding 100 extra kilometers of front in Kursk is fundamentally contradictory to the AFU’s fundamental interests at this juncture, which hinge on economizing forces and avoiding overextension.
3) Bargaining Chip
Another strand of thought suggests that Krepost may be an effort to strengthen Ukraine’s position for negotiations with Russia. An anonymous Zelensky advisor allegedly told the Washington Post that the point of the operation was to seize Russian territory to hold as a bargaining chip which could be swapped in negotiations. This view was then corroborated by senior advisor Mykhailo Podolyak.
If we take these claims at face value, we perhaps have arrived at the strategic intention of Krepost. If Ukraine indeed intends to occupy a swathe of Kursk Oblast and use it to bargain for the return of prewar Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, then we must ask the obvious question: have they lost their minds?
Such a plan would instantly founder on two insurmountable problems. The first of these would be an obvious misread of the relative value of the chips on the table. The Donbas - the heart of Russia’s war aims - is a highly urbanized region of nearly seven million inhabitants, which - along with Russian annexed Zaporozhia and Kherson - forms a critical strategic link to Crimea and grants Russia control over the Sea of Azov and much of the Black Sea littoral. The idea that the Kremlin would consider walking away from its aims here simply to bloodlessly recover a few small towns in southwestern Kursk is, in a word, lunacy. It would, in the luminary words of President Trump, be “the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.” [...]
4) Pure Spectacle
Finally, we come to the more nebulous option - that Krepost was conceived purely to scandalize and embarrass the Kremlin. This is certainly the sensationalized solution that much of the commentariat has converged on, with plenty of vicious delight in the reversal of fortunes and the spectacular reverse uno of Ukraine invading Russia.
This all plays well with foreign audiences, of course, but it ultimately does not matter much. There’s no evidence that the Kremlin’s grip on the conflict or the commitment of Russian society to support the war are wavering. This war has seen a long sequence of nominal Russian “embarrassment”, from the 2022 withdrawals from Kharkov and Kherson, to the Ukrainian air strikes on Sevastopol, to drone and terror attacks deep inside Russia, all the way to the bizarre mutiny of the Wagner PMC. None of these things have detracted from the central objectives of the Kremlin’s war, which remain the capture of the Donbas and the steady exhaustion of Ukraine’s military resources. Did the AFU throw a grouping of its dwindling strategic reserves into Kursk Oblast purely to scandalize and embarrass Putin? Possibly. Would it matter? Highly unlikely. [...]
Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that Krepost is a very odd military development - an overmatched force, already heaving from the strain of a grinding, 700 kilometer front, voluntarily opened a new, independent axis of combat which has no possibility of operationally synergizing with the war’s critical theaters. There is some satisfaction to be derived from bringing the war into Russia and scandalizing the Kremlin. Perhaps Kiev hopes that simply unsettling the situation will cajole the Russian military into making a mistake or redeploying out of position, but so far the Kursk axis has not denuded Russian strength in other theaters. Perhaps they really do think that they can seize enough ground to bargain with, but to do that they will need to hold it. Or perhaps they are simply losing the war, and desperation breeds strange ideas.
History will probably conclude that Krepost was an inventive, but ultimately far-fetched gambit. The crude calculus on the ground shows that the existing trajectory of the war simply doesn’t work for Ukraine. Russian progress across the contact line in the east has been steady and relentless throughout the spring and summer, and the devastating Ukrainian failure in 2023’s counteroffensive showed that banging away against alert and entrenched Russian defenses is not a good answer. Faced with the prospect between slow strangulation in the east, Ukraine has attempted to unlock the front and introduce a more kinetic and open pace.
Read the rest here.
Life In Moscow During The Kursk Incursion
The video below, about a big swim club in Moscow, was uploaded after the Kursk incursion started. As of last week, the war crossing Russia's borders hadn't seemed to impact the capital much, judging by this. I'll be curious to see if her next video references last night's drone attack on Moscow though.
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