Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Was a Miserable Failure 

August 6, 2024 will forever live in the minds of Russians and Ukrainians as a moment of great consequence. On that day, Ukrainian troops embarrassed Moscow’s army yet again by conducting a mini-blitzkrieg into Kursk, a region in Russia. In the opening days of the operation, Kiev sent between 10,000 and 12,000 troops into Kursk, according to an estimate by Russia expert Dara Massicot. The surprise incursion marked the first time a foreign army invaded Russian territory since Hitler’s armies stampeded toward Stalingrad in World War II.

The Russian troops in the area, mostly young conscripts with no experience in battlefield conditions, were about as confused and demoralized as their superiors. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, were jubilant, pointing to the incursion as an example that Kiev still had a few tricks up its sleeve and retained the combat capability to plan and execute a successful offensive. "Russia brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said two days into the operation.

Seven months later, the picture is much bleaker. Moscow, after losing around 500 square miles of Russian territory, finally got its act together and conducted a counteroffensive of its own in September, throwing tens of thousands of Russian and North Korean bodies into the fray and dropping the same type of glide bombs they have used mercilessly against Ukrainian cities since the war started. 

The Ukrainian army was able to inflict significant casualties as they defended their positions—Kiev’s General Staff reported on February 6 that 16,000 Russian forces were killed—but the onslaught was ultimately too difficult to withstand indefinitely. Russia’s strategy in Kursk was identical to its strategy in Ukraine: throw enough manpower, munitions, and hardware at the problem, and enemy lines will eventually buckle. At the time of writing, the Russian Defense Ministry has re-claimed the town of Sudzha and Ukrainian troops are withdrawing from the region.   

All of this begs the question: in the end, was the Kursk offensive worth it?

Actually, people have posed that question from the very beginning. When Kiev was deliberating over the invasion, some generals doubted the benefits would be worth the cost. Valery Zaluzhny, former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, was opposed because there wasn’t much of a plan for what to do after breaching the Russian border. The troops would essentially be tasked with sitting inside Kursk for the foreseeable future, forever exposed to the inevitable Russian counterattack coming their way. 

There was also a logistical problem. The deeper the Ukrainians got into Kursk, the longer their supply lines would become. If those lines were eventually destroyed or cut off, the Ukrainians would be left with two options: stay in place and hope for reinforcements or organize a scrambled withdrawal to fight another day. 

The objective of the Kursk operation was also a bit mysterious. Ask three separate Ukrainian officials what the purpose was and you were likely to get three different answers. One suggested it was meant to destabilize Russia internally. Another said the attack was geared toward capturing Russian soldiers and using them as bargaining chips to free Ukrainian prisoners of war. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, told CNN in September that the offensive had multiple objectives, including boosting the morale of his forces and stopping Russian cross-border shelling. Zelensky, meanwhile, stressed that holding Kursk was designed to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table and coerce Russian commanders to re-deploy some of their forces away from eastern Ukraine.

Regardless of what the goals were, Kursk was a high-risk operation. Zelensky tends to display supreme confidence, but he too must have known the incursion was a gamble. Perhaps now he understands that it didn’t pay off.

Although the Ukrainians were able to get some of their prisoners back, the other items on the checklist weren’t accomplished. The offensive elevated the Ukrainian army’s morale for a time, but morale only holds up as long as the troops aren’t getting pummeled by the enemy and aren't losing ground. The large-scale Russian troop diversion from the Donbas that Zelensky was aiming for never materialized—since the offensive, Russia’s offensive in Donetsk has at times reached a more aggressive pace than before the Ukrainians had breached the Russian border. The Russians continued making incremental gains in the east, albeit at a high cost. 

In terms of pushing Putin toward negotiations, the incursion had precisely the opposite effect. The Russian dictator knew exactly what Zelensky was trying to do: trade Kursk for parts of the Donbas that Russian troops currently occupy. Putin, however, didn’t want to be perceived as the man with the weak hand and had no intention of being forced into anything, especially on Ukraine’s terms. Instead, he played down the entire episode and pretended like Ukraine’s foray into southern Russia was a minor irritant that would be dealt with over time. When it came down to it, Putin wasn’t going to negotiate while the Ukrainians were sitting inside Russia’s borders. Zelensky either didn’t understand the political dynamic or chose to ignore it.  

The military logic of the entire Kursk operation was mystifying as well. You don’t need to be a graduate from West Point to recognize that diverting some of your most experienced, well-equipped troops to a new vector in hostile territory carried the high risk of negatively impacting other areas of the front. If Ukraine had the luxury of endless manpower, then it wouldn’t need to worry about making smart choices in the field. But the reality is that manpower is a serious issue for Kiev, due to a high casualty rate as well as Zelensky’s reluctance to draft 18–22 year-olds into the ranks (largely because Ukraine’s demographic outlook is already atrocious). Kiev can’t afford to take the Russian approach of treating soldiers as expendable pieces of meat headed to the slaughter. If the objective was to hold the line in the east and stem Russia’s offensive, moving men and resources 560 miles to the north was a curious way of doing it.    

Ronald Reagan had a clever line during his successful 1980 campaign for the presidency: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Ukrainian officials will now be reflecting on a version of this question: is Ukraine better off than it was before August 2024? The answer is a hard no.