The lessons from Ukraine’s offensive in Kursk show an ongoing failure by the West to grasp Putin’s and Russia’s motives, a failing that prevents policy success now and in the future. This will have to change if the West is ever to help Ukraine survive and bring peace once again to the European continent.
First, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, Ukraine intends no permanent occupation of these lands but rather intends to use them as a buffer zone facing Russia. This suggests that Zelenskyy, under pressure from domestic and allied external sources, views the territories acquired as negotiating instruments to leverage an exchange for lands seized by Russia, i.e., Crimea and the Donbas.
The underlying presumption here also appears to be that retention of these territories in Kursk Oblast will ultimately compel Putin and Russia to negotiations where this will be consummated. However, as Zelenskyy and his team probably know, negotiations remain an unlikely prospect. Indeed, Putin and his government have ruled negotiations out, confirming their unchanged objectives — the termination and destruction of an independent Ukraine.
Neither are negotiations likely. For Putin, to begin genuine talks means acknowledging the legal-political reality and legitimacy of Ukraine’s statehood, the negation of which is and has been an obsession and fundamental point of Putin and Russian policy. That amounts to acknowledging defeat, which is obviously unacceptable to Putin if not his government.
By invading Ukraine, Putin bet the farm, or in European terms he went va banque as in a baccarat game. He knows that throughout Russian history, protracted war has invariably strained the foundations of the state to the point of defeat — which is what negotiations with Kyiv means — and generated either regime change or systemic pressure for reform. And this war is and will be no different, as is clear from any study of Russia’s economy, now wholly militarized, and condemned to years of stagnation, labor shortages, persistent inflationary pressures, and mounting dependence on China.
Meanwhile, groundless excuses for inactivity (such as the oft-mentioned but never-realized Russian nuclear response to the crossing of its supposed red lines) lead us to the second motive or outcome of the Kursk operation.
That is a shot across the bows of Ukraine’s allies and partners. Ukraine kept them in the dark regarding planning for this offensive lest they start trying to restrain Ukraine. As Zelenskyy has said, Russia has not retaliated, there is no new escalation, and this should galvanize Washington, Berlin, London, and Paris to let Ukraine use weapons like the Storm Shadow and ATACMS to strike deeper into Russian territory and destroy key energy and military installations.
Indeed, European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Josip Borrell now echoes Kyiv’s demands for the freedom to use these weapons to their full. After all, this is what we have seen in Crimea and the Black Sea, where Ukraine has negated any possibility of using Crimea as a military base and forced Russia’s Black Sea Fleet into hiding in Novorossiysk and beyond.
Nevertheless, at the time of writing, the US still refuses to lift most restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range weapons inside Russia. This lagging support represents a powerful motive for Ukraine to seize the initiative as it did in Kursk. But it must also remind the administration of the urgency of a strategy for victory over Russia and for giving Ukraine what it needs to win without the unending stop-go policies that have prolonged this war and benefitted Russia. Germany too appears to have adopted this position, first hesitating, then sending large amounts of aid, and then hesitating again; it is now cutting funding for Ukraine, and still cannot grasp that it too is under attack.
It sometimes seems to be forgotten that this is a war not only against Ukraine but against the whole idea of international order, possibly the greatest such challenge since the Cold War.
The third consequence of Ukraine’s Kursk operation has been to reveal the hollowness of Russia’s rhetoric and the defects of its military policy that left a key border unguarded.
This has helped expose not only the empty threats of nuclear weapons use but also highlights Russia’s very significant military manpower issues — its soldiers’ average age is now 38, not that far from the 43 year age for Ukraine’s troops. Russia cannot continue this forever. Its losses in men and materiel — it has lost more than 3,300 tanks alone— are extraordinary; and are not limitless, whatever the Russia whisperers argue (some of the Russians killed in Kursk were hurriedly composed scratch units of air force technicians from nuclear-capable bomber bases and radar nuclear-warning personnel, which both demonstrated the shortages of trained people and the hollowness of the regime’s nuclear rhetoric.)
The fourth consequence naturally follows from this. It demonstrates that Ukraine can, as Zelenskyy has stated, carry the fight to Russia and win. But for that to happen, there must be a genuine strategy and plan for victory (see above.)
Arguments intended to avoid or defer action reflect a continuing and comprehensive failure to grasp the threat of Russian victory or Putin’s objectives. As he and his entourage have often stated, this is an existential war for Russia and its survival as a state, i.e., his system and empire. Policymakers must clearly understand that the continuation of a Russian empire is incompatible with any concept of a security order in Europe, if not Eurasia as a whole.
Putin’s obsessive quest to restore tsarism (not Soviet power) and the Russian empire constitutes an abiding threat not solely to Russia’s neighbors but to any concept of international order. It means more invasions and more wars.
Putin’s friends in China likewise have territorial claims on neighbors from Japan to India to the Philippines, claims it uses to bully and intimidate.
Therefore, victory over Russia is, as Ukraine is trying to prove, not only attainable with proper and continuing support but also strategically necessary for this and the next administration.
It should be clear that the absence of a Western strategy allows Putin to retain escalation dominance and thus much if not all of the strategic initiative. One major achievement of Ukraine’s attack on Kursk has been to negate Russia’s rhetoric and open the way for the West to take a clearer and more coherent position.
These considerations reveal the fifth consequence of this offensive. This transcends the theater of war and embraces the global agenda — Russia’s aggression and Ukraine’s fight for survival are stimulating trends across the globe.
On the one hand, Russia has forged or further developed ties with international outlaw states like North Korea and Iran, and deepened its alliance and military-economic, if not political, dependence on China, thereby bringing about a more truly genuine authoritarian axis. As Eliot Cohen wrote on September 3: “The Beijing-Moscow-Tehran-Pyongyang axis is not yet a full-fledged oppositional alliance, but it has gone well beyond being a purely transactional and temporary set of relationships. The US has not faced the like since the end of the Cold War, and in some ways, not since its early phases.”
On a more positive note, as this axis has coalesced so too have alliances like NATO and the US-Asian alliance systems.
Thus, this war has fostered a rebirth of bipolarity in world politics even as much of the developing world, possibly as Putin calculated, refuses to support either side. This war’s impact on international order is palpable.
Moreover, it raises the further specter of the collapse not only of arms control agenda among the superpowers but also of the collapse of the non-proliferation order. Ukraine has just announced the readiness of its own ballistic missile.
This points to the growing global proliferation pressures on countries that fear themselves being at risk from aggressive neighbors, e.g., South Korea. This is only one example of the global ramifications. The Kursk offensive highlights the need for the US and its allies to demonstrate the credibility of their security guarantees.
Indeed, as the Norwegian analyst, Hans Peter Midtun has written, the most compelling assistance for Ukrainian security would be immediately accepting its NATO membership application. This kind of strategy undermines the anti-Western challenge and restores credibility to the Western alliance system and the non-proliferation order.
These five conclusions from the Kursk Offensive all underscore the compelling need for a coherent and unified Western-Ukrainian strategy for victory. At its core, there must be a full-throated support of Ukraine to meet the challenges of keeping its economy, energy systems, and military going, i.e., giving it the weapons it needs without misconceived restrictions on their use.
We can see clearly now, if many could not earlier, that the alternative to victory is not just the defeat of Ukraine but of the very idea of a global order. Since Putin will not negotiate unless compelled by the specter of defeat, only a strategy of victory can achieve those goals.
The great architect of allied victory against Napoleon, the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, said of his country’s work that “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”
Today, it falls to Washington and Kyiv to emulate England in countering a threat not only to Europe but to the world. We have the responsibility to act sooner rather than later.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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