The Kursk Offensive Did Not Reverse Ukraine’s Challenges in the Donbas

By Jen Kirby  |  September 9, 2024 | 9:52am
Photo by Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images
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The Kursk Offensive Did Not Reverse Ukraine’s Challenges in the Donbas

A month ago, Ukraine launched an audacious offensive into Russia’s Kursk region, breaking through Russia’s weak defenses and capturing dozens of settlements. In bringing the war directly to Russia, Ukraine took a risky gamble; its outcome is still murky.

As Ukraine’s top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi tells it, the Kursk offensive is working as intended, and Russian advances inside Ukraine have slowed. As Russian President Vladimir Putin tells it, Kursk was no biggie, and maybe even helped him out in his goal to take eastern Ukraine. “The enemy weakened itself in key areas, our army has accelerated its offensive operations,” Putin said Thursday.

Both can’t be right, but maybe each isn’t completely wrong. This is the split screen that Ukraine faces right now: a morale-boosting victory on Russian territory, while under serious pressure on the Ukrainian soil it has to defend. 

Right now, Russia is pushing toward Pokrovsk, once a city of some 60,000 and a critical logistics and railway hub, in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s armies are also making dents along other parts of the frontlines – in nearby Toretsk, and its suburbs, like Niu-York (what it sounds like); around Chasiv Yar, toward Kramatorsk; and Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region. 

As Ukraine gets squeezed in multiple directions, the Kremlin has bombarded its cities and towns, including, in August, one of the largest aerial attacks since the start of the full-scale invasion. The Russians targeted energy infrastructure, which has already suffered from widespread damage from past strikes. More than 50 people died when Russia hit a military training facility and hospital in Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, last week. Russian strikes reached as far as Lviv, in western Ukraine, near the Polish border, as Putin punishes Ukrainian civilians for Kursk.

Kursk has not dramatically transformed Ukraine’s various challenges, at least not yet. The incursion has slowed, just a few kilometers here and there, and forces are mostly consolidating the areas already under their control –  about 500 square miles, according to the Ukrainian military. Russia hasn’t been able to drive Ukraine out, but it has contained them after the initial blitz. Experts and military analysts still caution that it’s too soon to draw any definite conclusions, but the Kursk operation has hinted at some of the tradeoffs Ukrainian troops are making, especially in manpower and equipment. 

And Kursk has not halted Russia’s march in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, where Ukraine has struggled to stop Russian troops all year.  In recent weeks, Russia has accelerated its drive toward towns and cities outside of Pokrovsk, including seizing the small city of Novohrodivka after Ukrainian troops withdrew. 

“Usually cities like that, or towns like that, don’t fall in less than a week,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military historian and open-source intelligence analyst with the Black Bird Group. “The Russians have been able to exploit the issues in the Ukrainian defense pretty effectively.”

The goal is Pokrovsk, with vital rail and roadways that Ukraine uses to supply the frontlines in this region. Russia does not have to take it outright to attack those links and make it very difficult for Ukraine to operate. Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top commander, said Thursday that Russia had not “advanced a single meter in the Pokrovsk direction.” The New York Times reported that Ukrainian reinforcements have stymied Russia’s advances along one key front toward Pokrovsk this week, though Russia is still making gains elsewhere. But the front line is already about six miles outside of the Pokrovsk, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands as Russian troops close in. 

Has Kursk Hurt Russia? Or Ukraine?

Ahead of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion, Russia had been making steady gains in the Donbas. Ukrainian troops were exhausted, low on personnel and equipment – a lingering hangover from delayed U.S. weapons aid. Ukraine was making Russia’s advance costly, but not enough to halt Moscow’s momentum. 

The Kursk offensive tried to shake up the status quo, taking the war directly to Russia and potentially forcing the Kremlin to pull troops out of Ukraine to protect Kursk, thus relieving some pressure on the frontlines in eastern Ukraine. The incursion also showed the world that Ukraine could still surprise, and its forces had the capacity for this kind of offensive operation (albeit in a relatively poorly defended area). It humiliated Putin, while taking a chunk of Russia could be a potent bargaining chip for Ukraine – and it still might be.

But Kursk, so far, has not, achieved the most urgent goal: interrupting Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine.

Russia did move troops from the frontlines; the Ukrainian military estimates some 30,000 soldiers, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said 60,000, though both may be overestimates. Either way, Moscow is mostly relying on conscripts and brigades from less critical areas of Ukraine, and because of that, it could largely keep its Ukrainian offensive going on a wide front. 

Russia probably doesn’t want to rely on conscripts to defend its territory forever, but it may be enough for now because of the constraints Ukraine faces. The manpower and equipment problems Ukraine experienced before Kursk didn’t disappear, and now they are spread out over multiple fronts. 

“The main challenges for Ukraine at this very moment are, especially from a military standpoint, are the mastering of additional resources, both in terms of personnel and equipment,” said Federico Borsari, Leonardo Fellow, Transatlantic Defense and Security at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

One of the big questions in the wake of the Kursk invasion is how Ukraine is committing resources, and where. A Ukrainian artillery brigade commander told the Financial Times in August that his soldiers were rationing shells because of needs in Kursk. Ukraine also used thousands of its elite fighters to conduct the Kursk operation. These soldiers were not actively defending the front lines in Pokrovsk, but they were the potential backup, who could be deployed to bolster Ukraine’s defense or relieve depleted troops. But not if they’re in Kursk – and Ukrainian forces were already outnumbered by Russian troops in the Donbas.

Russia has not exactly solved its manpower problems, either. Its troops are often inexperienced and poorly trained, and though they are moving more aggressively right now, they are not achieving uncontested breakthroughs. But even if Ukraine can wear down Russian forces, the dark reality of war is that, at times, it can be a numbers game. “When you’re outnumbered five to one, you can have all the experience that you want, but at a certain point it will be difficult,” Borsari said. “It will be difficult for Ukraine to  sustain the fight – and that’s precisely what is happening in and around Pokrovsk.”

This could have been Ukraine’s fate with or without the Kursk offensive. Ukraine’s defensive lines protecting Povrosk collapsed, in part, because Kyiv did not have enough experienced personnel to secure those fortifications. The question — unanswerable right now — is whether it has further degraded Ukraine’s ability to dig in around Povrovsk and other areas. 

Again, right now Ukraine says no, and Russia says yes.

There is no debate that Pokrovsk is strategically important to both Ukraine and Russia. It would be Russia’s most significant victory since taking Avdiivka in February, and the fall of that city made this Pokrovsk advance possible. It would put Russia in a much better position to seize even more territory in Donetsk.

For Ukraine, Povrosvk’s rail lines and key roadways gave it a protected base to supply troops and equipment to the frontlines in the Donbas. As experts said, Russia doesn’t need to fully capture the city to degrade these arteries and put Ukraine under so much pressure that it can’t keep operating there. 

If that does happen, it doesn’t mean game over for Ukraine, either. “If Pokrovsk falls, it doesn’t immediately mean that all of [Ukraine’s] supply routes are gone. You just need to move the logistics toward worse roads, and it may take more time,” said Kastehelmi. “Also, when you’re using bad roads and you don’t really have the railway connections going as far as before, there’s also the problem that it takes a toll on the equipment.” These are issues that add up over time: vehicles break down more, and you might need to rely on them more because you can’t use trains. Losing Pokrovsk is a problem today, but it may hurt even more tomorrow. 

Ukraine has defied the odds before, and it could again. But so far, its forces have not been able to seriously deny Russia’s advance. Russia’s aerial glide bombs are in range of its outskirts. Ukraine is hastily constructing more defensive lines, in case their main fortification can’t withstand this Russian onslaught, but it also needs soldiers and artillery to defend them.  

And Ukraine is still struggling to stop Russia elsewhere, with Moscow taking tiny pieces of territory from different parts of the front line. None are tremendous breakthroughs – Ukraine says its Kursk operation seized more land in a week than Russia did in a year – but Ukraine is still struggling to halt, or more critically, reverse those gains.

As Kastehelmi said, Russia’s power is not endless. If Ukraine continues to degrade its forces, it will need to regroup at some point. Russia may be throwing everything at Pokrovsk, which Putin can frame as a huge political win, but may be depleted, in Donetsk, and possibly elsewhere. Kursk could be more vulnerable than it seems right now, and Russia may, ultimately, need to fortify it, and that may change the battlefield dynamics. So far, Putin has downplayed Ukraine’s presence in Kursk, and it has not looked like a major threat to his power. Yet CIA Director Bill Burns told the Financial Times the offensive has raised questions “across the Russian elite about where is this all headed.”

There is also a sense of urgency for both Ukraine and Russia, because what happens in the U.S. election this November could reshape the war as much as what happens on the battlefield. Which may be why Ukraine took a tremendous gamble on Kursk: not because it would definitely shift the course of war, but because it offered the best chance to do so now. Losing Pokrovsk may have been inevitable after months of manpower and equipment shortages. But for Ukraine, losing Pokrovsk when you’re controlling a few hundred square miles of Russia is still a much more complicated and unpredictable story.

 
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