The Kursk attack in Ukraine could change the way the war is fought, erode Russia’s edge

Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have not invested significant resources in protecting the country’s border, focusing instead on getting troops into Ukraine.

Ukraine is much smaller than Russia and until recently has not proven otherwise, seemed to lack the capacity for any significant offensive on Russian soil. In addition, its Western allies have imposed restrictions on how Ukraine can use the weapons they provide. Thus Russia had a kind of sanctuary at home, making it apparently unnecessary to send troops and arms to defend her long borders.

But the invasion of the Kursk region “challenges and invalidates some of Putin’s planning assumptions for what is needed to fight this war,” Barros said.

He said that over the past two years, the Russian military has decided “not to protect the border region of northeastern Ukraine.”

Barros said there are about 620 miles of border “that the Russians haven’t adequately equipped, haven’t defended in depth and so on.”

He explained that “the Russians really had the luxury of not having to defend that border and were able to use the people who would otherwise be protecting that border in operations elsewhere in Ukraine.”

That appears to be changing, and as a result could change the nature of this war, he said.

Ukraine advanced into Russia

Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Kursk on August 6 and by Monday was in control of more than 480 square miles of Russian territory, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The development is extremely embarrassing for Russia. The amount of territory Ukraine’s commander-in-chief said the country captured in the first week was almost as much territory as Russia had captured in Ukraine in all of 2024 so far. Ukraine surpassed this figure on Tuesday.

The shock move stood in stark contrast to Ukraine’s typical way of fighting Russia.

Previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia have typically targeted only specific military assets and have not involved any troops actually crossing into Russia. Instead, drones and long-range weapons hit military bases and stores, planes and oil refineries.

Ukrainian soldiers described easy passage into the country, a sign that Russia is not adequately protecting its borders.

A deputy of the Ukrainian commander involved in the invasion said this the soldiers who guarded the borders of Russia “mainly children were doing their mandatory service” and other Ukrainian service members said the BBC that they were able to enter easily.

Russian troops begin to be stretched

Barros said Russia’s need to rethink how it protects its borders is a long-term consideration, in part because doing so at scale will take time and in part because the amount of effort Russia must exert will depend of how much territory Ukraine keeps and owns. .

But Ukraine is already finding success in expanding Russia’s troops, he said.

He said Russia needs to carefully consider “which front-line units in Ukraine will be redeployed to go to Kursk.”

Those decisions are still in the early stages, he said, but reports and open-source intelligence indicate that Russia has withdrawn some troops from some of its lower-priority combat zones in Ukraine.

This includes units that are withdrawn from Kharkiv in northern Ukraine and other areas such as Kherson, Zaphorizia and Luhansk.

US officials told CNN last week that Russia appears to be moving thousands of troops from Ukraine to Kursk. And one NATO country said Russia had moved troops from its Kaliningrad enclave to Kursk.

Barros said Russia was not seen taking forces from its priority areas in eastern Ukraine, in Donetsk, where Russia is gaining ground. He said he “doesn’t expect the pace of operations there to slow down” anytime soon.

War experts told Business Insider that the stretch and strain on Russia’s forces is likely a motivation for Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.

Barros said that “if the Russians really decide that they need to redeploy a lot of forces and properly defend another thousand kilometers of the border, that’s a substantial change because that’s not a trivial amount of manpower and resources that must now be blocked. for a larger enterprise”.

“It will reduce the flexibility of the Russian command to plan operations within Ukraine,” he said, “and ideally, in the long term, it will drastically increase the cost of prolonging and expanding this war.”

Russia had huge advantages

Barros said the length of time Russia has spent without protecting its borders demonstrates how much of an advantage it has had for so long.

He described Moscow as the “beneficiary of a list of luxuries” that allow the Russian military to focus its resources on Ukraine.” Those luxuries include how Ukraine is not allowed to use some Western weapons on Russian soil, he said.

In addition, for Russia, he said, “there is a minimum requirement to protect the home front, a minimum requirement to hide any activity that they are doing. There’s very little cost to support and protect, and that’s kind of a sick irony, right?”

He said Ukraine, on the other hand, must invest heavy resources in protecting its power plants, rail lines, airspace and aid arriving from the West.

“The Russians categorically don’t really have to deal with any of this,” Barros said, with the only real exception being Ukraine’s drone strikes, which pale in comparison to the might of the weaponry Russia is using against Ukraine.

He said the West should remove the arms restrictions it places on Ukraine. “If we were to remove all these advantages, then it forces the Russians to have to spread the resources,” Barros said, noting how unfair a fight this war has been.

“Russia is a belligerent and a combatant in war under the norms and laws of armed conflict,” he explained, adding that “Ukrainians are fully within their rights to wage war on Russian territory to engage in legitimate military actions on Russian territory. So far, for the most part, Russia has enjoyed a relatively free war for two and a half years.”

But the situation now is changing rapidly and it is not clear how it will end.

Rajan Menon, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies, told BI that Ukraine’s actions could change how the war is fought.

He said that Russia, with its much larger force, has so far been able to stretch Ukrainian forces along the front line and put them under great pressure. Now, “in a sense, the Ukrainians have turned the tables,” Menon said.

He said it was unclear what would happen in such a quick operation and how it would unfold.

But so far, he said, for Russia, “it’s an embarrassing moment because it shows that Russia’s response to this — whether it’s in terms of evacuating people or dealing with this Ukrainian incursion on multiple fronts — has been disastrous. There’s just no other way to say it.”

Barros said that so far, Russia’s invasion has been a victory for Ukraine, after it spent months on the defensive, holding off against Russian attacks, with little territory changing hands.

Ukrainians, he said, “are no longer stuck on the road where they no longer have the initiative.”

“Now the Ukrainians are no longer lying on their backs for over nine months at a time, they’re just doing their best to sort through,” he said, and “they’re faced with a buffet of bad decisions and dilemmas that the Russian command served. .”