A little more than a month ago, the Ukrainian military showed that it was not afraid to take the fight to Russia on Russian soil. The offensive push into Kursk Oblast caught Vladimir Putin and the rest of the world by surprise, and Russia is still trying to muster forces to mount a viable defense against the Ukrainian incursion.
The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) recently held a session where it shared thoughts on Ukraine’s offensive, what it means for Russian troops on the ground, and how this phase of the war could be a defining moment.
In late August, Ukraine’s airborne assault troops released a video showing scenes from within Russia’s Kursk region. The footage also showed Russian troops apparently surrendering to the Ukrainians.
Nico Lange, a senior fellow at CEPA, said this prompted larger conversations among both those in the fight and those watching from afar.
“The longer this goes on, the more questions will be there, what to do with the local population, how to organize the continued work of the villages and cities that are now in the Ukrainian military sphere of influence, because the city administrations, by and large, ran away,” Lange said. “The Russians plundered their own shops. This will last for a few days, but what will come after? There are difficult questions to be answered for the Ukrainian military.”
For the first time, some of those questions could be coming from Russian citizens. While Putin can keep the news of Russian soldiers dying in Ukraine by the hundreds of thousands out of Russian media, it is more difficult when the fight is inside Russia’s borders.
“Ukraine [is] seizing the initiative in the information space in general,” Lange said. “I think that’s the biggest success of this offensive so far, it changes everything, because in German media, like in other European media, it’s about cost. Now it’s about Russia bombing its own cities. It’s about Ukraine putting pressure and creating problems for Putin.”
Signs of that pressure appeared in reporting by the independent investigative Russian outlet Important Stories, which first detailed Putin’s decision to send patchwork units comprised, at least in part, of logistics companies, engineers, mechanics, and radar station operators to the fight in Kursk.
“That’s the reason why they have all sorts of radar troops, conscripts, troops that belong to the Ministry of Interior now in Kursk Oblast,” Lange said. “The problem with them is that they are not faced with light Ukrainian units. This is Ukrainian brigades, mechanized, some of them heavily combat experienced. So the Russians, very often we see them surrendering because this is something they are not able to deal with, especially not conscripts.”
In light of that fact, Russia scrambled to find the troops needed to maintain their push into eastern Ukraine while mitigating the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region. Yet in June, Putin boasted of having 700,000 soldiers in the fight, something Pavel Luzin now says seems like wishful thinking at best.
“Now they’re trying to find several thousand troops to counteract Ukrainian forces in Kursk region. What does it mean? That means that this 700,000 troops do not exist, and that means Russia faces a lack of manpower,” Luzin said.
After more than 900 days of war, neither side has shown any signs of letting up or moving closer to the negotiating table.
So what will the next pressure point be? If things hold as they are, it is likely weather will be a factor, particularly winter weather.
“I think it’s very likely that a large Russian contingent will be outside of Pokrovsk and outside of Toretsk on the open field, while the Ukrainians, the cities might be in ruins and inhabitants evacuated, but they will be in the city,” Lange said. “And that makes, in winter, that makes a decisive difference if you have to be out there, or if you are in a place that is urban. So Russia will have the harder time on the battlefield.”
Winter conditions are months away, and things will undoubtedly shift on a regular basis. For example, in late August, the Institute for the Study of War released a map showing Russia had begun to reclaim some of what was lost in Kursk. Whether they can continue to hold it is the most recent question in a war filled with very few answers.
Access the full Weapons and Warfare episode here.
Access all Weapons and Warfare podcast episodes here.
