Ukraine’s unprecedented assault on Russia threatens the safe haven Moscow has enjoyed for much of the war, potentially forcing the Kremlin to rethink how it wages the conflict.
Ukraine’s advance into Russia’s Kursk region will force Russian military leaders to take into account some things they haven’t had to since launching a full-scale invasion in February 2022, said George Barros, a Russian military expert at the Institute for the Study of War in the United States who has closely watched the war.
Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have not invested significant resources in protecting the country’s borders, focusing instead on sending troops into Ukraine.
Ukraine is much smaller than Russia and, until recently, seemed to lack the capacity to launch any significant attack on Russian territory. Moreover, its Western allies imposed restrictions on how Ukraine could use the weapons they supplied. Thus, Russia had a kind of safe haven at home, which apparently made it unnecessary to send troops and weapons to defend its long border.
But the invasion of the Kursk region now “challenges and invalidates some of Putin’s planning assumptions about what it would take to fight this war,” Barros said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sits with defense officials at a meeting regarding the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region on August 7, 2024. Sputnik/Alexei Babushkin/Kremlin via Reuters
He said that the Russian military had decided over the past two years “not to protect the border area in northeastern Ukraine.”
There are about 620 miles of border that the Russians “have not adequately secured, have not defended in depth, etc,” Barros said.
“The Russians really had the luxury of not having to defend that border, and they were able to use the guys who were supposed to be defending that border for operations elsewhere in Ukraine,” he explained.
He added that this seems to be changing, and that this could change the nature of this war.
Ukraine advances towards Russia
On August 6, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Kursk, and by Monday had taken control of more than 480 square miles of Russian territory, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
This development is very embarrassing for Russia. The amount of territory that the Ukrainian commander-in-chief said the country had seized in the first week was very large. Almost as much territory as Russia has seized in Ukraine in the entire year of 2024 so far. Ukraine surpassed that number on Tuesday.
Crossing point on the border with Russia in Ukraine August 11, 2024. Reuters/Vyacheslav Ratinsky
This surprise move stands in stark contrast to Ukraine’s typical approach to fighting Russia.
Previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia have typically targeted specific military assets and not involved any troops crossing the border into Russia. Instead, drones and long-range weapons have struck military bases, depots, aircraft and oil refineries.
Ukrainian soldiers described crossing the border into the country as easy, suggesting that Russia is not adequately protecting its borders.
One of the Ukrainian deputy commanders involved in the invasion said: Soldiers guarding the Russian border “They were mostly children doing their compulsory service,” and other Ukrainian service members. He told the BBC: They were able to get in easily.
Russian forces are beginning to be stretched thin
Russia’s need to rethink how it protects its borders is a long-term issue, Barros said, partly because doing so on a large scale would take time, and partly because the amount of effort Russia would have to put in would depend on how much territory Ukraine holds and controls.
But Ukraine has already had success in wearing down Russian forces, he said.
He said Russia needed to carefully consider “which units from along the front line in Ukraine would be redeployed to go to Kursk.”
He said these decisions are still in their early stages, but reports and open-source information indicate that Russia has withdrawn some of its forces from some of the lower-priority combat areas in Ukraine.
A local volunteer looks at a building damaged by Ukrainian strikes in Kursk on August 16, 2024, following a Ukrainian attack on the western Kursk region of Russia. Tatiana Makeeva/AFP via Getty Images
This includes units being withdrawn from Kharkov in northern Ukraine and some other regions, such as Kherson, Zavoryzhia and Luhansk.
US officials He told CNN, Last week, Russia appeared to be shifting thousands of troops from Ukraine to Kursk. A NATO member state also announced He said Russia has moved its forces from its Kaliningrad enclave to Kursk.
Barros said Russia had not been seen withdrawing troops from its priority areas in eastern Ukraine, in Donetsk, where Russia is gaining ground. He added that he did not “expect the pace of operations there to slow down” any time soon.
War experts told Business Insider that the exhaustion and fatigue of Russian forces may have been the motivation behind Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.
“If the Russians do decide to redeploy a lot of forces and properly defend an additional 1,000 kilometers of border, that would be a big change because that is not a trivial amount of manpower and resources that now have to be exploited for a larger mission,” Barros said.
He added that this would “reduce the flexibility of the Russian leadership in planning operations inside Ukraine, and ideally, in the long term, would greatly increase the cost of prolonging and extending this war.”
Russia had huge advantages.
The time Russia has spent without protecting its borders shows how much of an advantage it has had for so long, Barros said.
Putin described Moscow as “the beneficiary of a long list of luxuries” that allow the Russian military to focus its resources on Ukraine. He added that these luxuries include Ukraine not being allowed to use some Western weapons on Russian territory.
A Ukrainian soldier from the 47th Mechanized Brigade looks out of the driver’s hatch of an M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle in Ukraine’s Donetsk region in February 2024. Vitaliy Nosach/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
For Russia, he added, “there are minimal requirements to protect the home front, minimal requirements to hide any of the activities that you do. And there are very few costs to maintaining and protecting that, and that is kind of a sick irony, isn’t it?”
Ukraine, on the other hand, has to invest huge resources in protecting power plants, railway lines, airspace, and aid arriving from the West, he said.
“The Russians don’t have to deal with any of this at all,” Barros said, the only real exception being Ukrainian drone attacks, which pale in comparison to the force of weapons Russia is using against Ukraine.
He said the West should lift arms restrictions on Ukraine. “If we remove all these advantages, it will force the Russians to spread resources,” Barros said, noting how unfair the war is.
“Russia is a belligerent and combatant in the war under the rules and laws of armed conflict,” he explained, adding that “Ukrainians have the full right to transfer the war to Russian territory to engage in legitimate military operations on Russian territory. So far, for the most part, Russia has enjoyed fighting this war relatively free of charge for two and a half years.”
But the situation is now changing rapidly, and it is not clear how this situation will end.
Ukraine’s actions could change the way the war is fought, Rajan Menon, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies, told Business Insider.
Russia, with its much larger force, has so far been able to deploy Ukrainian forces along the front lines and put them under great pressure, he said. “Now, in a sense, the Ukrainians have turned the tables,” Menon added.
A destroyed Russian tank outside the Ukrainian-controlled Russian town of Sudzha in the Kursk region. IAN DOBRONOSOV/AFP via Getty Images
He said it was not clear what would happen in such a fast-paced process and how things would develop.
But so far, he said, for Russia, “it’s an embarrassing moment because it shows that the Russian response to this — both in terms of evacuating people and dealing with this Ukrainian incursion on multiple fronts — has been disastrous. There’s no other way to put it.”
Barros said Russia’s invasion has so far been a victory for Ukraine after it spent months on the defensive, withstanding Russian attacks with little change of territory.
He added that the Ukrainians “are no longer stuck in a dead end where they no longer have the initiative.”
“Now it’s no longer about Ukrainians lying on their backs for nine-plus months at a time trying to do their best to deal with a set of bad decisions and dilemmas that the Russian leadership was presenting them with,” he said.