John Jefferson
Ukraine, like any belligerent nation that finds itself heavily dependent on external forces, is waging two wars: the actual, corporeal war against Russia, and the information war to court, consolidate, and deepen Western support. The second is just as important as the first, as there can be no viable Ukrainian war effort without a program of sustained Western succor. These two poles have an uneasy relationship, with imperatives of diplomatic and political courtship all too often grinding against the rigors of cold military logic. To see these dynamics at work, one needs only to turn their gaze to the war-torn Donbas region, where the Zelensky government has been loath to withdraw from besieged cities out of concern that the optics of large Ukrainian retreats would dampen Western political enthusiasm.
Kiev is, in this sense, fighting on two fronts, and the net-sum of Ukrainian decision-making must be seen through this dialectic of having to pursue optimal military policies while keeping Western audiences committed and engaged over the long haul.
Ukraine’s shock decision not to double down on its defenses in Donbas amid Russian advances but, instead, to launch an incursion in August through the northwest into Russia’s neighboring Kursk region should be understood as a brainchild of that strangely dualistic strategic mindset.
And the Kursk incursion has yielded precisely its intended effect, at least on the information front. The heroic drama of a small, beleaguered nation daring to take the fight to its larger foe was received in the West with the kind of appetite one might expect. The incursion is “bold, brilliant, beautiful,” said Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). It is also “devastating for the Putin regime,” according to Sweden’s recently resigned foreign minister, and has made nonsense out of Russia’s supposed red lines.
This litany of soothing effusions has little to do with the much grimmer reality of what is happening on the ground in Kursk and elsewhere along the lines of contact in Ukraine, but it is part and parcel of a war that was, since its inception, partitioned between two economies: the narratives being skillfully, one deigns to say beautifully, crafted for Western audiences, and the actual conduct of the war. The Zelensky government enjoys a total monopoly in the former market, but, as more invested observers tacitly acknowledge, commands an alarmingly small and ever dwindling share in the former.
There is, to be sure, a way in which the Kursk venture reflects a fundamentally sound judgment on the part of Ukrainian officials about the course of the war. It is as powerful a recognition as any that Ukraine cannot win the war of attrition Russia has prosecuted since the end of 2022. Its sense of breakneck urgency, felt keenly enough by Ukrainian officials to warrant such a gamble, puts the final nail in the coffin of ill-conceived theories that Kiev can cobble together something approximating a victory by pursuing a defensive strategy into 2025.
The Kursk offensive was, apparently, an attempt to end the war on Ukraine’s terms by cutting a swathe through a sparsely populated and even less well-guarded southwestern region of Russia, swiftly capturing land that can be used as a bargaining chip to be traded for Russian-occupied territories in eastern and southeastern Ukraine. The exchange would be lubricated by sheer shock value, with the Kremlin, reeling from the humiliation visited upon it and wracked by a sense of sudden vulnerability, tripping over itself to initiate ceasefire talks. Voilà tout.
But the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) failed to penetrate deep into the Kursk region within the crucial first 48–72 hours that constituted their window of surprise. Their northward thrust stopped well short of the local Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, the seizure of which would have presented the Kremlin with a serious dilemma; the Ukrainians also spent longer than they could afford capturing the strategically situated border town of Sudzha. Russia, meanwhile, did not play into Ukraine’s hands by redeploying a significant chunk of its Donbas forces to Kursk, but has instead saturated the area with a groundswell of fresh recruits, many of whom may not have participated in the war at all if not for Ukraine’s incursion. These deployments, combined with Russian quantitative advantages in firepower, prevented the AFU from significantly expanding its zone of control in Kursk beyond its initial gains in mid-August.
Yet a land trade scheme along the lines envisioned by Oleksandr Syrskyi, the AFU’s commander-in-chief, runs into a more fundamental problem. The lands to be exchanged are not of comparable value, not just because Russia’s military presence in Ukraine dwarfs the AFU’s Kursk foray by several orders of magnitude, but because Ukraine, unlike Russia, lacks the long-term capacity to occupy the foreign territory it controls. Why would the Russians scurry into peace talks on Kyiv’s terms just to repatriate a strip of land they believe, not without strong cause, they can eventually claw back without offering any concessions to Ukraine? There is evidence that Vladimir Putin’s favorability has dropped somewhat since the incursion, but the domestic mood in Russia is nowhere near a tipping point and not even close to a situation wherein Putin may feel pressured to explore diplomatic offramps. One must likewise consider that this newfound domestic discontent, subtle as it is, likely emanates not just from dovish types but also from a decidedly hawkish contingent that blames the Kremlin for, in their view, not prosecuting the war vigorously enough.
Indeed, as reflected by a wave of recent mass firings and resignations of top officials, including Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, it is the Zelenskyy government that now finds itself in an even more difficult position. The AFU controls a pocket inside Russia that they know cannot be held over the long term, and the present effort to do so is already costing Ukraine closer to home. Even as the Russians slowly bleed the AFU in Kursk, they advance with uncharacteristic briskness in parts of the Donbas region. They appear to be well on their way to seizing the key city of Pokrovsk, and with it, effacing one of Ukraine’s last major vectors of resistance in Donbass and setting Russia up for large-scale offensives in other theaters. The Zelensky government cannot simply pack up and leave Kursk, well-advised as that would be, out of deference to the same logic that impelled this venture: one of Ukraine’s principal goals is managing Western perceptions, and it would not be possible to present a retreat under these circumstances as anything other than a failure.
The Kursk incursion proceeded from the correct assumption that Ukraine is running out of time to end this conflict on advantageous terms, but this strategically muddled attempt to force a negotiated settlement through maneuver warfare has only bolstered Russia’s prosecution of an attrition war that, as both sides know, Ukraine cannot win.
There is now a clear sense of strategic urgency in Kiev, but there are no signs yet that this nascent sentiment is on a path to crystallizing into what Ukraine and its Western backers need the most: a clear-headed, practical framework for drawing the curtains on a ruinous war in which there are no winners, but one that poses real and growing risks for U.S. interests and fabric of European security.
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