Just over a year ago, I argued in The National Interest that the Russian victory against Ukraine’s 2023 summer counteroffensive would grant the Kremlin tremendous political capital. Moscow would be able to continue mobilizing Russian society and the economy to prosecute the war to the utmost. A Russian military that returned to maneuver warfare after exhausting the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) could even enable a Russian victory “by the sword”, which would be a strategic and reputational disaster for the U.S. and NATO. 

Facing intractable strategic and operational dilemmas, the Ukrainians attempted to alter the strategic balance in August by launching a lighting invasion of Russia’s Kursk region. This audacious and carefully prepared operation draws inspiration from German tactics in the latter stages of World War II. By then, the Germans would assemble ad-hoc Kampfgruppe, a battle group, from existing units, thus creating improvised veteran maneuver formations. The best example is the Battle of the Bulge, which used all remaining German armored and aircraft elements. As innovative as they were, the Kampfgruppe often drained German combat power faster than a purely defensive stance would have. 

Today, the Ukrainians are doing much of the same, assembling an iron fist out of the remaining NATO-trained and equipped AFU brigades. As in World War II, assembling this fist comes at a steep cost. After several days of deep penetrations by Ukrainian mobile groups, the Russians scrambled special forces to cordon the invasion site, ceaselessly rained down missiles and drones on Ukrainian troops, and rushed in reinforcements. Fighting has again devolved into yet another positional, attritional struggle. Russian forces in Kursk are drawn from conscripts and uncommitted reserves, not the units fighting in the Donbas. Now the density of Russian troops, firepower, and defensive systems makes it difficult for the AFU to return to maneuver. 

Worse yet, stripping the Donbas of its best defenders enables increasingly rapid Russian advances on multiple axes. The Russian breakthrough in the Pokrovsk direction is the most dramatic. Merely besieging Pokrovsk nullifies Ukraine’s prime logistics hub in the east, while enabling Russian flanking operations north and south that could envelop the remaining Ukrainian positions in the Donbas. 

The calculated risk of the Kursk operation aims to alter Ukraine’s grim strategic situation by raising morale at home and making the case for further military aid abroad. There are hard limits to both after two and a half years of war. U.S. and NATO arsenals, especially European, are bare, and replenishment times are long. Proposals such as allowing unrestricted strikes deep into Russian territory ignore that this is exceedingly unlikely to change the course of the war. In any case, the needed long-range precision weapons are in short supply and in high demand in other theaters. Meanwhile, serious losses of trained personnel are degrading the fighting capabilities of the AFU. It takes months to train a capable infantryman and years for a fighter pilot. 

The U.S. and NATO are at a crossroads. The speed of the eventual Russian capture of Pokrovsk is the benchmark for the remaining offensive potential of the Russian military. Should the city fall after limited fighting, the Russians stand a good chance of returning to maneuver warfare and large territorial gains east of the Dnieper and beyond. A purely military Russian victory in Ukraine would normalize a vicious new status quo where conflicts are resolved “by the sword” without any room for U.S. and Western diplomacy and interests. From Iran and its Axis of Resistance, especially Hezbollah and the Houthis, to China in the Western Pacific, revisionist actors will become emboldened that all they need to do to win is to run out the clock on Western capabilities. 

About the Author 

Dr. Alexandr Burilkov is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Democracy (ZDEMO), Leuphana University of Lüneburg.  He obtained his PhD in political science from the University of Hamburg. He is an expert on military and security issues in Russia, China, and the post-Soviet space. He is also a member of the European Expert Network on Terrorism Issues.  

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