https://bigserge.substack.com/p/back-to-the-bloodlands-operation

Russo-Ukrainian War: The Kursk Operation
Big Serge
Aug 20, 2024

German tanks in Kursk Oblast, then and now

On Tuesday, August 6, the Russo-Ukrainian War took an unexpected twist with the beginning of a brigade-level Ukrainian assault on Kursk Oblast, across the border from Ukrainian Sumy. The decision by Ukrainian command to willingly open up a new front, at a time when their defenses on critical axes of the Donbas are failing, is both aggressive and fraught with peril. The sensational spectacle of a Ukrainian offensive into prewar Russia in a region that is operationally remote from the critical theater of the war has whipped the peanut gallery into a frenzy, and most commentators and observers seem to have fled straightaway to their base narrative instincts. Russian “doomers” have been quick to denounce the affair as a catastrophic failure of preparedness by the Russian Ministry of Defense, accelerationists have trumpeted the immateriality of Russian red lines, while the more disillusioned pro-Ukrainian commenters have despaired of the operation as a wasteful sideshow which dooms the Donbas line to defeat.

People form opinions very rapidly in the current information ecosystem, and the prospect of excitement often leads them to throw caution to the wind despite the orgy of misinformation and deception that surrounds such events. It is worth noting, however, that only two weeks have passed since the beginning of an operation that apparently nobody was expecting, and we should therefore be cautious of certainty and carefully distinguish between what we think and what we know. With that in mind, let’s take a careful survey of the Ukrainian operation as it stands and attempt to parse out both the strategic concept of the assault and its possible trajectories.

The sudden and unexpected eruption of combat in Kursk oblast has, of course, raised comparisons to the 1943 Battle of Kursk, which is often incorrectly called the “biggest tank battle of all time.” For a variety of reasons, that famous battle is a poor comparison. Germany’s Operation Citadel was a constrained and unambitious operation against a fully alert defense, characterized by a lack of both strategic imagination and strategic surprise. The current Ukrainian endeavor may lay on the opposite end of the spectrum - highly imaginative, and perhaps dangerously so. Nevertheless, the return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must raise eyebrows. The current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army. Russia’s southwestern steppe tastes blood again, and the fertile earth opens wide to accept the dead.
Krepost: Strategic Intentions

Before we talk about the strategic concept behind Ukraine’s operation in Kursk, let us briefly ponder what to call it. Repeating the phrase “Ukraine’s Kursk Operation” will rapidly become tiresome and dry, and calling it “Kursk”, or “The Battle of Kursk” is not a good option - both because it raises some confusion as to whether we mean the city of Kursk or the larger oblast around it, and because there has already been a Battle of Kursk. Therefore, I am suggesting that for now we simply refer to the Ukrainian assault as Operation Krepost. Germany’s 1943 offensive towards Kursk was codenamed Operation Citadel, and Krepost (крепость is a Slavic word for a fortress or citadel.

Ukraine has made repeated forays across the Russian border throughout this war - generally suicidal thunder runs into Belgorod Oblast which met with disaster. Krepost, however, stands apart from previous episodes in several ways, chief among them being the use of regular AFU brigades rather than the paramilitary fronts stood up by the GRU (that is, the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate, not Steve Carell’s character in the Despicable Me franchise).

For previous expeditions towards Belgorod, the Ukrainians opted to use thinly veiled irregular formations like the “Freedom of Russia Legion” and the “Russian Volunteer Corps”. These are the sort of sheep dipped units that can be useful in certain contexts by allowing states to maintain a token façade of plausible deniability - a good corollary might be Russia’s own use of unmarked special forces in the 2014 annexation of Crimea. In a time of active war, however, these paramilitaries came across as exceptionally lame. Whatever the “Freedom of Russia Legion” called themselves, they were obviously forces stood up by the Ukrainian government, using Ukrainian weaponry, fighting Ukraine’s war. The paint job fooled nobody, and absurdities like the “Belgorod People’s Republic” did not exist beyond a few bad memes on twitter.

It is notable, however, that the Kursk incursion has been undertaken not by forces disguising themselves (however poorly) as independent Russian paramilitaries but by Ukrainian forces operating as themselves - that is, as regular Ukrainian army brigades. Committing core AFU assets to a ground incursion in Russia, especially during a time of general operational crisis in the Donbas, is something entirely different than flinging a disposable paramilitary battalion at Belgorod.

But why? The obvious thing that stands out about Kursk is how operationally remote it is from the critical theater of the war. The center of gravity in this conflict is the Donbas, and Ukraine’s line of defenses around the cities of Pokrovsk, Kostyantinivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk, with crucial flanking axes in the land bridge and on the Oskil River line. The frontier of Kursk Oblast, where the Ukrainians are now attacking, is more than 130 kilometers away from the subsidiary battles around Kharkov, and more than 200 kilometers away from the main theater of the war. Given the scope of this war and the pace of advances, Kursk may as well be on the moon.

In short, the Ukrainian operation in Kursk bears no possibility of being supportive of the other, critical fronts of the war, and even in the most generous range of outcomes it has no potential to exert a direct operational influence on those fronts. Parsing through the strategic intention behind Krepost, therefore, in that it has no immediate operational bearing on extant fronts. A variety of opportunities have been proposed, which we will review and contemplate in turn.
1) The Atomic Hostage

Sixty kilometers from the Ukrainian border lies the small city of Kurchatov (named after Igor Kurchatov, the father of Soviet nuclear weaponry) and the Kursk Nuclear Powerplant. The proximity of such an obviously significant - and potentially dangerous - installation so close to the scene of the fighting led many to immediately presume that the nuclear plant is the objective of Krepost.

These theories are highly reductive and unsupported, and act as if the powerplant is the object in a game of tag - as if Ukraine can “win” by reaching the plant. It’s not immediately obvious that this is the case. There’s plenty of hand-wringing about Ukraine “capturing” the plant, but the question then remains: to do what with?

The implication would seem to be that Ukraine might use the plant as a hostage, threatening to sabotage it and initiate some sort of radiological disaster. This, however, would seem to be both impractical and unlikely. The Kursk plant is currently in a state of transition, with its four older RBMK reactors (similar to those used at Chernobyl) being phased out and replaced with new VVER reactors. The plant features modern biologic shields, a robust containment building, and other protective mechanisms. Furthermore, nuclear power plants do not explode in the sense that is often feared. Chernobyl, for example, experienced a steam explosion due to particular design flaws which do not exist in currently operable plants. The idea that Ukrainian soldiers could simply flip a bunch of switches and detonate the plant like a nuclear bomb are not realistic.

It is theoretically possible, one supposes, that the Ukrainians could try to bring in colossal amounts of explosives and send the entire plant sky high, spreading radioactive material into the atmosphere. While I am certainly no great admirer of the Kiev regime, I cannot help but doubt the willingness of the Ukrainian government to intentionally create a radiological disaster which would irradiate much of their own country along with swathes of central Europe, particularly because the Kursk region is part of the Dnieper watershed.

The powerplant story sounds scary but is ultimately too phantasmagorical to take seriously. Ukraine is not going to intentionally create a radiological disaster in close proximity to their own border, which would likely poison their own primary river basin and turn them into the most intensely hated international pariah ever seen. Even for a country at the end of its strategic rope, it’s hard to give credence to a harebrained scheme that uses critical maneuver assets of the regular army to capture an enemy nuclear plant and rig it to blow.
2) Diversionary Front

In another formulation, Krepost is construed as an attempt to draw Russian resources away from other, more critical sectors of front. The idea of a “diversion” as such is always appealing, to the point where it becomes something of a trope, but it’s worth considering what this might actually mean in the context of the relative force generation in this war.

We can begin with the more abstract problem here - Ukraine is operating at a serious disadvantage in total force generation, which means that any widening of the front will disproportionately burden the AFU. Extending the frontline with an entirely new - and strategically isolated - axis of combat would be a development that works against the outnumbered force. This is why, in 2022, we saw the Russians contract the frontline by hundreds of kilometers as a prelude to their mobilization. The idea of extending the front becomes a shell game for the Ukrainians - with fewer brigades than the Russians to cover more than 1000 kilometers of frontline, it becomes questionable as to just which army is being “diverted” in Kursk. For example, the spokesman for the 110th Mechanized Brigade (currently defending near Pokrovsk) told Politico that “things have become worse in our part of the front” since Ukraine launched Krepost, with less ammunition coming in as the Russians continue to attack.

The more concrete problem for Ukraine, however, is that the Russians formed an entirely new Northern Army Group covering Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk and is in the process of raising two additional army equivalents. To the extent that Krepost forces the deployment of Russian reserves, it will draw from forces organic to this northern grouping, and not the Russian formations currently attacking in the Donbas. Ukrainian sources are already taking a dour mood, noting that there has been no drawdown of Russia’s grouping in the Donbas. Thus far, the identified Russian units fighting in Kursk have essentially all been drawn from this northern grouping

More to the point, Krepost seems to have meaningfully denuded Ukrainian strength in the Donbas while affecting the Russians very little. A recent piece in the Economist featured interviews with several Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk, all of whom said that their units had been “pulled, unrested, from under-pressure frontlines in the east with barely a day’s notice.” The article goes on to quote a source in the AFU’s general staff who notes that the Russian units scrambling into Kursk are coming from the northern army group, not the Donbas. A recent New York Times piece, which triumphantly announced the redeployment of Russian forces, admitted that none of Russia’s troop movements are affecting the Donbas - instead, it is deploying resting units from the Dnipro axis.

And this is Ukraine’s problem. Fighting an enemy with superior force generation, attempts to divert or redirect the fighting ultimately threaten to become a shell game. Russia has approximately 50 division equivalents on the line against perhaps 33 for Ukraine - an advantage that will stubbornly persist no matter how they are arranged on the line. Adding 100 extra kilometers of front in Kursk is fundamentally contradictory to the AFU’s fundamental interests at this juncture, which hinge on economizing forces and avoiding overextension.
3) Bargaining Chip

Another strand of thought suggests that Krepost may be an effort to strengthen Ukraine’s position for negotiations with Russia. An anonymous Zelensky advisor allegedly told the Washington Post that the point of the operation was to seize Russian territory to hold as a bargaining chip which could be swapped in negotiations. This view was then corroborated by senior advisor Mykhailo Podolyak.

If we take these claims at face value, we perhaps have arrived at the strategic intention of Krepost. If Ukraine indeed intends to occupy a swathe of Kursk Oblast and use it to bargain for the return of prewar Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, then we must ask the obvious question: have they lost their minds?

Such a plan would instantly founder on two insurmountable problems. The first of these would be an obvious misread of the relative value of the chips on the table. The Donbas - the heart of Russia’s war aims - is a highly urbanized region of nearly seven million inhabitants, which - along with Russian annexed Zaporozhia and Kherson - forms a critical strategic link to Crimea and grants Russia control over the Sea of Azov and much of the Black Sea littoral. The idea that the Kremlin would consider walking away from its aims here simply to bloodlessly recover a few small towns in southwestern Kursk is, in a word, lunacy. It would, in the luminary words of President Trump, be “the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.”

If Ukraine thought that seizing Russian territory would make Moscow more amenible to peace talks, they badly miscalculated. The Kremlin responded by declaring an Anti-Terror Operation in Kursk, Byransk, and Belgorod Oblasts, and Putin - far from appearing humiliated or cowed - projected anger and defiance, while Foreign Ministry officials have suggested that the Kursk operation now precludes negotiations.

The other problem with trying to hold Kursk as a bargaining chip is, well, that you have to hold it. As we will discuss shortly, this will be very difficult for the AFU. They managed to achieve strategic surprise and make a modest penetration into Kursk, but there are a variety of kinetic factors that make them unlikely to hold it. For something to be useful as a bargaining chip, it must be in your possession - this would therefore compel Ukraine to commit forces to the Kursk front indefinitely, and hold it to the bitter end.
4) Pure Spectacle

Finally, we come to the more nebulous option - that Krepost was conceived purely to scandalize and embarrass the Kremlin. This is certainly the sensationalized solution that much of the commentariat has converged on, with plenty of vicious delight in the reversal of fortunes and the spectacular reverse uno of Ukraine invading Russia.

This all plays well with foreign audiences, of course, but it ultimately does not matter much. There’s no evidence that the Kremlin’s grip on the conflict or the commitment of Russian society to support the war are wavering. This war has seen a long sequence of nominal Russian “embarrassment”, from the 2022 withdrawals from Kharkov and Kherson, to the Ukrainian air strikes on Sevastopol, to drone and terror attacks deep inside Russia, all the way to the bizarre mutiny of the Wagner PMC. None of these things have detracted from the central objectives of the Kremlin’s war, which remain the capture of the Donbas and the steady exhaustion of Ukraine’s military resources. Did the AFU throw a grouping of its dwindling strategic reserves into Kursk Oblast purely to scandalize and embarrass Putin? Possibly. Would it matter? Highly unlikely.

It’s very common, particularly on social media, to see a sort of reveling in the great reversal of Ukraine liberating Russia, and battlefield updates frequently make reference to the AFU “liberating” Kursk oblast. This is, of course, very childish and meaningless. Once one extracts oneself from the spectacle, the entire enterprise seems obviously disconnected from the larger logic of Ukraine’s war. It’s not at all clear how occupying a narrow slice of the Russian frontier correlates to Ukraine’s self-professed war aims of regaining its 1991 borders, or how widening the front is supposed to promote a negotiated end to the settlement, or - for that matter - how the little town of Sudzha could be a fair trade for the Donbas transit hub of Pokrovsk.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that Krepost is a very odd military development - an overmatched force, already heaving from the strain of a grinding, 700 kilometer front, voluntarily opened a new, independent axis of combat which has no possibility of operationally synergizing with the war’s critical theaters. There is some satisfaction to be derived from bringing the war into Russia and scandalizing the Kremlin. Perhaps Kiev hopes that simply unsettling the situation will cajole the Russian military into making a mistake or redeploying out of position, but so far the Kursk axis has not denuded Russian strength in other theaters. Perhaps they really do think that they can seize enough ground to bargain with, but to do that they will need to hold it. Or perhaps they are simply losing the war, and desperation breeds strange ideas.

History will probably conclude that Krepost was an inventive, but ultimately far-fetched gambit. The crude calculus on the ground shows that the existing trajectory of the war simply doesn’t work for Ukraine. Russian progress across the contact line in the east has been steady and relentless throughout the spring and summer, and the devastating Ukrainian failure in 2023’s counteroffensive showed that banging away against alert and entrenched Russian defenses is not a good answer. Faced with the prospect between slow strangulation in the east, Ukraine has attempted to unlock the front and introduce a more kinetic and open pace.
On the Ground

The biggest problem with the more fanciful and explosive theories of Operation Krepost are fairly simple: the results on the ground are not very good. The attack has been both limited in scale and constrained in its advance, but the shock and surprise of the operation has allowed the narrative to spin out of control, both on the part of exuberant Ukrainian supporters and the usual doomposters in the Kremlin orbit, who have been bemoaning and expecting imminent Russian defeat for years at this point.

Let’s begin with a brief sketch of Krepost, the units involved, and the state of the advance. We should begin with a note about the composition of the Ukrainian assault grouping, and what this tells us about the state of the AFU.

Very soon after Krepost began, the Ukrainian ORBAT began to materialize in a jumbled mess. The basic problem, to put it in the most elementary terms, is that there are far too many brigades represented in the operation. There are currently no less than five mechanized brigades (22nd, 54th, 61st, 88th, 116th), a territorial defense brigade (103rd), two Air Assault Brigades (80th and 82nd) and a variety of attached battalions - something like a dozen total brigade equivalents. To put it bluntly, there are very clearly not twelve brigades (30,000 personnel) in this section of front - we have a puzzle on our hands.

The mysterious ORBAT grows ever moreso when one considers the astonishing variety of vehicles that have been spotted (and destroyed) in Kursk. The list includes at minimum the following assets: KrAZ Cougar Senator Oshkosh M-ATV Kozak-2 Bushmaster Maxxpro MRAP Stryker BTR-60M BTR 70/80 VAB Marder 1A3 T-64 BAT-2 BREM-1 Ural 4320 AHS Krab Buk M777 Grad 2S1 Gvodzika 2k22 Tunguska 2S7 Pion M88AS2 Hercules BMP1 PT-91 BTR-4E MTLB That is a long list. But what does it mean?

There is a disconnect between the number of brigades and different vehicle types identified in Kursk and the actual size of the AFU grouping. What this suggests is that the Ukrainians stripped down the motor pools from a variety of different brigades and concentrated them in a strike package to attack Kursk, rather than deploying these brigades as such.

The situation would appear to be highly similar to the Second World War German practice of forming Kampfgruppen, or Battle Groups. As the Wehrmacht became more and more overstretched, German commanders became accustomed to forming improvised formations comprised of sub-units stripped from the line as necessary: take an infantry battalion from this division, steal a dozen panzers from that division, commandeer a battery from that regiment, and voila: you have a Kampfgruppe.

In the voluminous masses of World War Two literature, Kamfgruppen were often taken as evidence of Germany’s wonderful improvisational powers, and the ability of their cool-headed commanders to scrape together fighting power from threadbare resources. There’s nothing specifically incorrect about that, but this tends to miss the larger point - Kampfgruppe did not become a phenomenon until late in the war, when Germany was losing, and their regular order of battle (ORBAT) was becoming shredded. Cobbling together mutant formations can help you stave off disaster, but it is not a superior option to deploying organic brigades as such.

We appear to have a Ukrainian Kampfgruppe in Kursk, with elements of a variety of different brigades - bringing with them a whole hodgepodge of different vehicles - forming a grouping that is likely not more than 7-8,000 men. Above and beyond the progress that they are making in Kursk, this does not suggest anything good about the state of the AFU. To launch this offensive, they had to strip down units that were actively fighting in the Donbas and rapidly shuttle them to Sumy to accumulate in an improvised strike group. It is a threadbare grouping for a threadbare army.

In any case, the basic shape of the Ukrainian offensive is fairly clear. The mechanized elements (including the mech and air assault brigades) formed the critical maneuver assets, while territorial defense troops from the 103rd provided flank security on the grouping’s northwestern flank.

The Ukrainian grouping was able to achieve something approximating total surprise - a fact that was surprising to many, given the ubiquity of Russian reconnaissance drones in theaters like the Donbas. In fact, the terrain here was highly conducive for Ukraine. The Ukrainian side of the border on the Sumy-Kursk axis is covered with a thick forest canopy which gives the Ukrainians the rare opportunity to conceal the staging of its forces, while the presence of the city of Sumy only 30 kilometers from the border provides a base of support. The situation is highly similar to Ukraine’s Kharkov operation in 2022 (the AFU’s most impressive achievement of the war), in which the city of Kharkov and the forest belt around it provided the opportunity to stage forces largely undetected. These opportunities do not exist in the flat, mostly treeless Ukrainian south, where Ukraine’s 2023 offensive was heavily surveilled and bombarded on approach.

In any case, with strategic surprise achieved, the Ukrainian force managed to get the jump on the thin Russian defense and penetrate the border in the opening hours. Russian defenses in these regions consist mainly of obstacles like ditches and minefields, and do not feature well prepared fighting positions. The nature of these barriers suggests that the Russians were primarily focused on impeding and interdicting raids, rather than defending against an earnest assault. At the outset, elements of the 88th managed to pin the Russian rifle company stationed at the border crossing and take a substantial number of prisoners. The now famous pictures circulating which show many dozens of surrendered Russians comes from this border checkpoint, located literally on the state border.
Russian rifle company captured at the border checkpoint

The dual effect of strategic surprise, along with images of a large batch of captured Russian personnel, let the narrative on the attack break all containment. In the following days, a host of misinformation began to circulate implying that the Ukrainians had captured the town of Sudzha, some 8 kilometers from the border.

In fact, it quickly became clear that the Ukrainian advance on Sudzha had already begun to bog down with the rapid scrambling of Russian reinforcements into the area. Ukrainian forces spent most of August 7th and 8th consolidating positions to the north of Sudzha and working to envelope the town, which sits at the bottom of a valley. They eventually captured the town, but the delay cost them precious days and allowed the Russians to move reinforcements into the theater.
General Situation: August 7-8

The opening days of the operation were very difficult to get a handle on, largely because the Ukrainians flung motorized columns up the road as far as they could, leading to inflated claims as to the depth of the Ukrainian advance.

It has now become clear that the initial Ukrainian advance hinged on both their mobility and strategic surprise, but both of these factors had been exhausted roughly by day five of the operation. By Friday, August 9, Ukrainian advances had largely stopped as the Russians established effective blocking positions, including in the towns of Korenevo and Bol’shoe Soldatskoe. Many of the furthest Ukrainian penetrations, furthermore, turned out to be isolated mechanized columns which had punched as far up the road as possible before either turning back or running into ambushes (the results of one such encounter are seen in the video below), such that the Ukrainians reached several positions that they never actually controlled.

Put it all together, and what you get is a fairly confined and modest Ukrainian breach into Russian territory, running from the approach to Korenevo (still firmly under Russian control) in the west to Plekhovo in the east - a span of just over 40 kilometers (25 miles). Sudzha is under Ukrainian occupation, but their positions have not extended far beyond it - the total depth of the penetration is some 35 kilometers at the farthest point.

Having captured Sudzha, but failing to break out on either of the main axes out of the area, Ukraine now faces a very unpleasant tactical reality. Their brief glimpse of an open and mobile operation has dissipated, and Kursk is calcifying into another front, with all the attendant difficulties. They now occupy a modest salient within Russia, with the town of Sudzha (population 6,000) at its center.
Kursk Salient: General Situation

With progress stalled, the AFU is currently working to solidify and extend the flanks of the salient. The focal point at the present moment appears to be the inner bend of the Seim river, which winds across the border and runs along a course some 12 kilometers inside Russia. The Ukrainians recently struck several bridges across the Seim with the intention of isolating the southern bank. If their ground advance can push to the Seim south of Korenevo (through a front currently defended by the Russian 155th Marine Infantry brigade) they stand a reasonable chance of cutting off and capturing the Seim’s southern bank, including the villages of Tektino and Glushkovo.

All of this is reasonably interesting, in terms of the tactical minutia, but it does not have much bearing on the two important strategic questions for Ukraine: namely, whether their operational successes in Kursk are worth the tradeoff in the Donbas, and whether their gains are worth the losses they are suffering. We’ll take up the latter question first.

The basic problem for the Ukrainians, tactically speaking, is that the fighting in Kursk leaves them highly exposed to Russian strike systems, for a variety of reasons. The Ukrainian position around Sudzha is a road-poor region, connected to the rear area on the Ukrainian side of the border by only a handful of exposed roads which offer no concealment. This leaves the Ukrainian logistical tail highly vulnerable to strikes by Lancets and FPV drones. Furthermore, attempts to properly support the advance require the AFU to bring precious assets close to the border, exposing them to attack.

Ukrainian’s strikes on the Siem bridges are a good example of this. In theory, dropping the bridges and securing the south bank of the Siem makes good sense as a way to secure the western flank of their position around Sudzha, but the strikes on the bridges involved bringing forward precious HIMARS launchers, which were detected by Russian ISR and destroyed.

Trying to provide air defense for the Ukrainian salient is likely to be similarly cost prohibitive, as it entails parking the AFU’s dwindling air defense assets in close proximity to the Russian border. We have already seen the Russians capitalize on this, with a successful hit on a European-provisioned IRIS-T system.

By creating a front within Russia itself, the Ukrainians have voluntarily accepted a long and exposed logistical tail, while fighting within the shadow of Russia’s own base of material support. The results have been largely disastrous thus far. A running total of 96 strikes on Ukrainian vehicles and positions have been recorded and geolocated in Kursk thus far, and Ukrainian vehicles losses are on par with the opening weeks of the Ukrainian offensive at Robotyne last summer.

Unlike Robotyne, however, there is not even a strong theoretical case to be made for incurring heavy losses on this axis of advance. Even a generous sketch of the coming weeks leaves Ukraine at an impasse in Kursk. Suppose they push through to the Seim and force the Russians to abandon the southern bank, capture Korenevo, and carve out a 120 kilometer front in Kursk - what then? Is this a fair trade for the Toretsk-New York agglomeration, or Pokrovsk, where the Russians continue to steadily advance?

Krepost thus threatens to turn into another Volchansk, or Krinky - an isolated attrition pit disconnected from the crucial axes of the war. Control over Sudzha does not exert any leverage over Russia’s ability to sustain the fight in the Donbas or around Kharkov, but it does create another vacuum that will suck in precious Ukrainian resources, banging away on a road to nowhere. If you had suggested a month ago that the Russians could contrive a way to draw off and pin the maneuver elements of no less than five Ukrainian mechanized brigades, along with a variety of disparate support elements, this would have been viewed as a beneficial move for them - yet this is precisely what the AFU has voluntarily done with Krepost.

Krepost ultimately reflects a growing Ukrainian frustration with the trajectory of the war in the east, where the AFU has grown weary of the industrial slugfest with its bigger and more powerful neighbor. By flinging a secretly assembled mechanized package at a lightly defended and previously ancillary sector of front, they briefly managed to reopen mobile operations, but the window of mobility was far too small and the gains far too meager. It has now become clear that the decision to divert forces to Kursk has undermined the already precarious defense of the Donbas. Ukraine hold Sudzha and may very well clear the south bank of the Seim, but if it comes at the expense of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, that is a trade that the Russian Army will be happy to make.

The AFU is expending carefully husbanded and scarce resources in the pursuit of operationally inconsequential objectives. The exhilaration of taking the fight to Russia and being on the attack again can certainly work wonders for morale and create a spectacle for western backers, but the effect is short lived - like a broke man gambling away his last dollar, all for the momentary thrill of chance.