Decoding Kursk: Is the End in Sight in Ukraine?

Underground in an anonymous building in the Kharkiv Oblast is one reason for Ukraine’s defensive prowess against a numerically stronger and well-armed aggressor. Military teams work from makeshift briefing and ops rooms leading off corridors stacked with dusty and discarded office furniture, intently focused on an array of computers that access, control and act on live feeds from the battlefield.

‘Attention’, says one member, standing up, his voice slightly raised, and the room instantly stills. ‘There will be a Russian helicopter attack at 1230’. His warning gives soldiers on the front a mere 10 minutes to pack up their artillery and move it discretely away.

It is a high-stakes gaming saloon, complete with Ninja-pro gaming chairs and many donning heavy metal goth T-shirts. ‘The toughest lesson’, remarks one commander, codenamed ‘Cuba’, is the ‘cost of a mistake, in many cases irreversible’.

The previous day, 11 Russian tanks had attacked the Khartiia Brigade positioned north of Kharkiv. Five tanks were knocked out by a mix of missiles, artillery and mines dropped by drones.

Upstairs, the unit wargames Russian positions and movements, with intelligence fed by a combination of reconnaissance, open sources, local knowledge and intercepts. A chart with toy soldiers covers the table, while a three-dimensional depiction is screened on the wall behind. The aim is to interpret patterns from even one single troop movement, as the unit tries to discern Russian intentions.

A war of national survival has transformed some units to enable them to operate at ‘NATO standard’, one soldier explains. This war is producing, pound for pound, possibly the most effective armed forces in the world in Ukraine – even if not the best-equipped or trained – and certainly the most resourceful, innovative and now with significant battlefield experience.

The flip side of this, however, is that the Russians have also learned fast, although not quite at the same tempo as the Ukrainians. Their development of glide-bombs, each with 2,000 kg warheads, now being produced at a monthly rate of 30,000, has delivered a cheap, immensely destructive shock weapon. Russia’s size and improving prowess should keep European defence planners up at night and remind them that they have an enduring strategic stake in Ukraine’s success, no matter how much some Western politicians may want to cut and run from Kyiv.

No Time to Micro-Manage Kyiv

Now is not the time to micro-manage the risk in Ukraine’s actions, hold back supplies or maintain strict caveats on the use of equipment, especially against military targets in Russian territory, out of fear that Putin might escalate, perhaps with a nuclear option.

Over the past few years, Ukrainians have learned that the externally imposed stipulations of keeping the war inside the boundaries of Ukraine have only enabled Russia, and tragically left Ukraine in a lethal war of attrition. It is still too early to say if Kyiv’s surprise military incursion into Kursk Oblast, launched in early August, was the right approach, although it has succeeded in buoying Ukrainian troops and civilians alike, especially after the failure of its vaunted 2023 counteroffensive against stubborn (and closely knit) Russian defences. Ukrainians and allies have all been concerned that the maths of overwhelming Russian numbers would over time only serve to give Russia the upper hand against the plucky but quantitatively disadvantaged Ukrainians. Even though Russia has already suffered 600,000 casualties, with as many as 15–20% of them killed, its population is at least four times that of Ukraine and its economy 15 times the size. This is reflected in comparative mobilisation personnel numbers, as well as the ability of Russia’s defence industry to scale up.

The Ukrainian intervention into Kursk has several aims, says Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Kyiv’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, including relieving the pressure on the front elsewhere and offering a physical buffer zone for hard-pressed Ukrainian army units around the eastern town of Sumy.

Strategically it also shows, he says, ‘that we can turn the tide … and show the results to Western taxpayers’. He is hopeful that the Kursk operation will provide a similar impact as the ‘Prigozhin mutiny’, referring to the drive from Rostov-on-Don towards Moscow in June 2023 by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group. It ended in negotiations with a surprised Kremlin, but if nothing else, illustrated just how hollowed out and vulnerable the Russian state is.

The Kursk advance offers space for diplomatic brinkmanship to seize the moment. Until now the political dimension for peace has been behind the military curve.

Linking War and Peace

Ukraine’s move into Russia should not be seen in isolation from the 10-Point Peace Plan proposed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But for peace to take root, not only will Ukraine have to demonstrate to the Russians that there is more to be gained from peace than continuing the war, and that there is a method by which this can be achieved, but also that all external powers are pushing the parties to the negotiating table.

‘Experience’, says Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in a meeting with us in Kyiv in August 2024, ‘teaches us that Russia only negotiates in good faith when it is placed under pressure, and negotiation is the only option. And we also have learned from our own history that facilitators want to end the war rather at the expense of Ukraine, which is also often true for cases of war in other parts of the world’.

Enormous challenges remain, not least among the group of states that put narrow interests before people, and where politics trumps human rights. A number of key African and Latin American states, for instance, fall into this category, including Colombia and South Africa. The latter has been willing to pressure Israel over Gaza through the world courts, but not Russia, its ally in BRICS, over its invasion of Ukraine. Egypt and Ethiopia are similarly among the African fence-sitters, indicating as much about their preference for Putin’s type of democracy as their interests in arms transfers and geopolitical allegiances. Brazil and China, with their own peace formula, are running essentially a rival to Ukraine’s own process – one which might even have Russia’s tacit approval as a fellow BRICS country.

Rival processes usually expect Ukraine to make concessions that China, Brazil or any other BRICS member would be unwilling to concede. Most Ukrainians are committed to a single negotiating principle: the return of all Ukrainian territory as per the 1991 borders, including Crimea. That Ukraine is striving for its sovereignty should be important to African states in particular, given the continental propensity for weak borders that criss-cross ethnic allegiances and communities.

Neutrality in this war usually means being in favour of Russia. And victory for Russia would lead only to the conclusion that, as Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister, explains to us, ‘Dictators International would be’. This has consequences for democrats everywhere, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe, as civilians struggle against authoritarianism.

Goals also matter.

Ukraine’s demands are not just about territory and its return. As the Ukrainian Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk clarifies in the same meeting, it offers ‘an historic opportunity to change the approach to justice for war crimes’.

War usually visits poor places, making them even poorer. Ukraine’s daily reality of war is brought home walking the streets of Kharkiv, where one drives by ravaged apartments and buildings eviscerated by supersonic missiles, and hears the distant thundering of artillery shells in battlefields north of the city. These distant booms are regularly interrupted by ear-piercing wailing sirens, alerting incoming air raids.

The Costs of Double-Standards

The cost of discounting Russia’s wanton destruction of communities across eastern and southern Ukraine lies not only in the loss of civilian lives and destruction of civilian infrastructure. It’s that war puts the interests of the state above – and seemingly beyond – those of the individual, the opposite of the very premise of the human rights regime that followed the Second World War where, in the jurist Hersch Lauterpacht’s words: ‘The well-being of an individual is the ultimate object of all law.’

Lauterpacht was born close to Lemberg, now Lviv, in modern-day Ukraine. Other Ukrainians have taken up the same struggle, not least Matviichuk, whose Center for Civil Liberties has documented more than 78,000 war crimes so far. Digital technologies offer huge advances in tracking perpetrators, from soldiers to commanders and even the silicon chips and production lines responsible for the missiles and drones raining down on Ukrainian cities.

Ukraine will need safeguards, such as through eventual Ukrainian membership of the EU and NATO (with NATO-like security guarantees in the interim). The Ukrainian ambition is to achieve the former by 2029 ahead of the next round of European parliamentary elections, confirms Maria Mezentseva, a Rada member from Kharkiv tasked with Euro-Atlantic integration. NATO membership should be easier ‘since it is a political decision’ she says, although admitting Ukraine while it is at war is unlikely. But even if the political risks of inclusion into Alliance remain, the obvious levels of NATO–Ukraine interoperability are routinely demonstrated by the likes of the Khartiia Brigade, among others.

Accelerating Integration

The Russian invasion has offered, in this way, an accelerant to Ukraine’s Western integration. This has not only been expedited through accession talks, but also through the movement of people – there are now more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe – and through the deepening logistics chains with the West, not to mention Ukraine’s now leading position in defence technology innovation. Much remains to be done, not least in improving governance, but the advantages of this inclusion are clear: Ukraine’s per capita wealth is just $2,200, well below the Eurozone average of $37,400.

The pace of Ukraine’s progress post-war will depend on the continued flow of money, and that will hinge on its role as a bulwark against Russia, but also its capacity to clean up its governance and put in safeguards against corruption.

Until then, the priority remains keeping money and arms flowing from the West, while talking peace, a balancing act so far carefully managed by Zelenskyy, with seemingly inexhaustible energy. This is driven by the fear of the costs of failure. When asked what he thinks about first thing in the morning, the governor of the Lviv Oblast, Maksym Kozytskyi, responds, ‘My overriding daily fear when I wake up is learning that a close friend has been killed’. Everything else can be managed’.

Ukraine illustrates just how much technology matters to modern war. Without the internet and advances in drone technology, soldiers would be operating virtually blind. But it is also a reminder of war’s constants, of the importance of logistics, training, mass, manoeuvre and fighting spirit. A Khartiia officer proudly described his troops’ prowess with the Browning ‘5-oh’, he said, termed a ‘strategic weapon’ by the Russians at its sharp end. But he also bemoaned the shortage of artillery ammunition, especially of ‘NATO standards’.

Ukraine itself can do more, not least in mobilising troops, despite improvements through its Reserve-Plus and Army-Plus apps. Only infantry can hold ground, not (yet) drones. Even so, Kyiv feels very different to a wartime city – eerily normal as opposed to some version of London in 1942. Managing debt volumes and spending finances well require sacrifices, everywhere. Sometimes ‘your best isn't good enough’, cautioned Churchill. ‘You must do what is required.’

Ukraine should take care in this regard not to take offers of outside assistance for granted. Afghanistan is a recent reminder of the fickleness of friendships, no matter the catastrophic consequences.

Four Scenarios

Amid the ongoing Kursk intervention, leaving out the likelihood of Putin’s departure and Russian economic implosion, four peace scenarios are imaginable. The first would be Ukraine’s ejection of Russia, through military means or negotiations. This requires the on-time delivery of weapons promised by the West and required by Kyiv, and, for its part, Ukraine to turn out more trained and refreshed brigades. The second would be for Kyiv to negotiate from a position of weakness. A third would be to meet Putin’s demands, and not strive for Ukrainian security guarantees through NATO (or EU) membership. But this presumes that Putin abandons what former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, who survived dioxin poisoning by Russian agents, describes to us as an ‘imperial project to recreate the Russian empire, an ambition of Putin’s which is impossible without including Ukraine’.

The fourth, wild-card, possibility is that an outsider – Donald Trump (should he win the US election) or even President Xi perhaps – threatens Russia and Ukraine respectively with an escalation and a reduction of support to Kyiv in order to cut a deal.

All this presumes, of course, that most Ukrainians would back negotiations. While support for Zelenskyy has decreased from his peak of over 90% at the start of 2023 to just 54% in June this year (albeit before the Kursk invasion), fewer Ukrainians support negotiations if they involve conceding post-1991 territory. The share preferring to seek a compromise to negotiate an end to the war fell from 43% to 26% in favour when respondents were asked to choose between negotiating with Russia and continuing to fight.

Peace will fundamentally be a political decision. ‘We have lost too many Ukrainian lives’, says the Mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, speaking to us while sirens wail outside, ‘which is why peace has to be accepted by society as a whole’.

Decoding Kursk

The Kursk incursion is intended to offset Russia’s inexorable economic and numerical advantage through surprise, manoeuvre and Ukrainian tactical cunning. Until Kursk, ‘it appeared that Ukraine was going to fall,’ confesses Oleksandr Lytvynenko, a veteran intelligence officer and now the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Defence and Security Council, ‘one hundred to two hundred metres per day, very slow, but apparently unstoppable’.

Translating the tactical opportunity Kursk offers into strategic success will depend on many factors, not least, as Zelenskyy has pointed out, the scale, speed and type of international assistance. ‘It is undoubtedly important for us that our partners remove the barriers that prevent us from weakening Russian positions as required by the course of the war’, he said on 17 August, 11 days after launching the Kursk operation. ‘The long-range capabilities of our forces are the answer to all the most important, to all the most strategic issues of this war.’

To this imperative can be added the need to construct a diplomatic case, support and method, maintain current and future economic integrity, and build and rebuild armed forces capable of resisting Russia’s war machine.

While militarily fraught with risk, Kursk has successfully changed the narrative of the war. Whether that is in itself enough to keep the taps of international support turned on through and beyond the November 2024 US election will depend on Kyiv holding its ground to use as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

Whatever the political spin, support for Ukraine or Russia is about support for or against the current international rules-based order, in particular the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. While Russia and its supporters want to deepen that principle internally, permitting the right to conduct their own affairs free from the threat of international condemnation on the grounds of human rights for example, they want to retain the right to interfere externally.

With Kursk, the stakes have got higher. And they could be raised even further if other similar surprise Ukrainian actions, such as over Crimea or elsewhere, were to follow.

Lytvynenko says that Russia’s approach towards his country is premised on the need to reject Ukrainian identity. But’, he smiles, ‘we don’t think this way because, axiomatically, we are not Russian’. But he also warns against Ukraine trying to slug it out in perpetuity with Russia, given its relative numerical strength. Rather, Kyiv needs to focus on an asymmetric strategy, fighting a smart war. ‘We have no territorial claims against Russia’, he adds. ‘We don’t want to intervene in Russia to change its government or its way of life. We just want to determine our own future’.

This depends on success on the battlefield. Given the implications inside and outside Ukraine for the rule of international law, human rights and justice, and even more than Putin deserves defeat, Ukrainians deserve victory.

The authors visited Ukraine in August 2024 to launch the Foundation’s latest publication The Art of War and Peace (Penguin, 2024), and to research the security situation in the country. A video of this visit can be viewed here.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors’, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

Have an idea for a Commentary you’d like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we’ll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. Full guidelines for contributors can be found here.