The Kursk Invasion

What may be happening

Note: much of this is speculative and based on OSINT posts on Xitter and links from them. The fog of war absolutely applies here, I could be completely wrong

Ukrainian occupied Kursk (maybe) - source

I'm getting a certain amount of deja vu from what we saw 2 years ago as Ukraine kicked the Russians mostly out of Kharkiv. If Ukraine has attrited the Russians as much as I suspect they have, there really isn't anything to stop them going where ever they feel like assuming they have the logistics - primarily fuel and ammo resupply.

As of Monday (Aug 12 - Japan time) it seems that the Ukrainians have had a lot of significant successes and relatively few (if any) serious set backs. That’s not to say they are unscathed - there are pictures of destroyed APCs and other Ukrainian equipment - but the losses are limited and nothing like the destruction they have dealt to Russian forces. For a contrary view (which I believe to be comprised mostly of Russia Stronk copium) see this substack. I’m fairly sure Ukraine has Russia on the back foot and panicking, but it is not impossible that the Kursk incursion is a Ukrainian version of the Battle of the Bulge with Ukraine playing Nazi Germany.

Goals

What are the goals of this attack? People mention that this incites Russia to get serious about negotiating a peace, and that may be a longer term goal, but there are a bunch of short term goals that are far easier to measure and achieve.

Disrupting Supply to Dombas

One of the obvious short term goals is to relieve pressure on the front lines in Ukraine, particularly the northern parts of the Dombas and the small bits of occupied Ukraine near Kharkiv. This can be achieved by cutting supply lines - specifically railways. The primary supply hub is Belgorod and that has two major lines going to it. One of those has already been cut off as it passes through Sudzha. The other goes south from Kursk city. Given that Ukraine also recently blew up Lipetsk airfield just to the north of Voronezh this is not a supply route that looks secure. It’s not entirely clear (this is no accident) where the Ukrainians are in Kursk but I would expect that line to be in easy reach of drones if not HIMARS or similar. It is worth noting that Ukraine has already attacked this line at the start of May between Oryol and Kursk so it could be that it is still not returned to operation.

It is worth looking at this railway map to get a feel for where the Russian mainlines are. Bluntly if the Ukrainians can actually interdict the line south of Voronezh as well as the lines they have already cut/threatened then it isn’t just Belgorad operations that are impacted. The main route from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don goes via Voronezh and there’s another route in between going through Stary Oskol that goes to Lukhansk.

Right now the Voronezh route is still active. But (see drone comment below) this may not last. Taking out critical infrastructure on those Russian main lines is sure to be a major priority for Ukraine.

Forcing Russian Force Redployment From Elsewhere

The other thing that this attack does is force Russia to respond. It absolutely has to. But that’s a problem. Russia dare not move too many troops from the current front lines as a coherent lump because of the risk a Kharkiv-like attack as Ukraine figures out there are no troops defending some critical section of line.

Well, you may say, Russia can use some troops from somewhere other than Ukraine for this. This is technically true. but it seems likely that many of the better units have already been stripped of their manpower and equipment to go fight in Ukraine so there aren’t (m)any reserves. And of course the places that really aren’t affected (such as the far east) are days of travel away along a very few rail lines that are, as we read on X, already stretched due to maintenance issues. Plus a bunch of units may not be at the strength they are claimed to be because Russian officers prefer to pocket the wages for ghost troops under their command.

As Streiff at RedState points out, the Russians don’t seem to be using their airpower massively either. David Axe (archive) reports that the Russians are using (inaccurate) glide bombs to attack the Ukrainian positions in Kursk, but that seems to be at the expense of attacks elsewhere - so on the air side the forced redeployment is working. Sure Ukraine would prefer its troops not to be glidebombed but given how inaccurate yet destructive they are, Ukraine definitely wants them used on Russian soil rather than Ukraine. Partly this relative lack of air attack may be because thanks to the Lipitsk raid and the prior one on Morozovsk, they don’t have much readily available. Plus the other critical airbase - Khalino, just east of Kursk city - has not only been hit by drones relatively recently, it is also nearly in range of more traditional rocket artillery from the invading Ukrainians. One suspects that Khalino is busily planning and executing operation bug out and is doing that rather than using its forces to attack.

On the ground, such Russian reinforcement columns as there are, seem to be being detected by the Ukrainians and then destroyed.

So Russia has an immense problem and, assuming the Ukranians keep their current advantages in artillery, air defense and drones, one that is going to take a long time and killing Russian troops on Russian soil and forcing Russians to bomb and shell their own towns and villages instead of Ukrainian ones is a wonderful thing. David Axe at Forbes (archive) reports that Ukraine is digging in trenches (and presumably mining in front of them) to make kicking them out harder, Axe also notes:

And according to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, Russia’s Northern Grouping of Forces is trying to move 10 to 11 battalions to the front line—perhaps 4,000 troops in all.

Those 10 or so Russian battalions are just the initial echelon, however. On paper, the Northern Grouping of Forces oversees 48,000 troops. Many of them are bogged down in Vovchansk, the locus of Russia’s own attack across the Russia-Ukraine border that kicked off in May.

But if it gives up trying to advance in Vovchansk and other front-line towns and cities, the Russian military could shift significant forces to Kursk.

Having the Russians withdraw from the Kharkiv border (Vovchansk) would be a major win for Ukraine.

Phillips P O’Brien also points out that it is in fact worse still for Russia. Hitherto Russians seem to have believed that Ukraine would not in fact invade in force and therefore left much of their Ukrainian border relatively unguarded. Furthermore, as he writes in a related article at The Atlantic (archive), the Prigozhin abortive coup/raid on Moscow showed that there are very few internal defenses in Russia once you have pierced the border. In order to stop this happening again Russia needs to have considerable manpower available along the entire Russia/Ukraine border and to have serious nodal defenses on key routes inside the country. The Russians simply do not have the manpower to do that and continue the meatwave assaults in the Dombas.

It is not at all impossible that, despite what I said about avoiding Kharkiv 2022 levels of manpower reduction, Russia is going to stop attacking across a lot of the lines and redeploy many of the troops to fight in Kursk. Indeed there is evidence that the tempo of attacks elsewhere has faded:

Opening Attack Routes for Drones

The aforementioned lack of defenses inside Russia means that in addition to Ukrainian troops being able to move more or less at will, there is the opportunity for Ukrainian drones to now get in behind the Russian air defenses and radars and strike at pretty much anything they feel like. We have already seen that Ukraine can strike a long way from the border - the attacks on distant airfields, such as the one near Murmansk, and oil/gas infrastructure in various distant places shows that once a drone penetrates Russian air space it is likely pretty safe as long as it avoids obvious air defense spots like Moscow itself. If Ukraine has enough drones that they can funnel through the Kursk area they can really cause a lot of destruction of critical Russian infrastructure all over the country. There are already reports that the Kursk NPP is partly offline because related electrical distribution points have been attacked.

I mentioned above the rail line south from Voronezh. If I were Ukraine I’d be sending drones to take out the electric substations that power that line as well as bridges and other hard to fix infrastructure on it. Taking out the Russian electrical grid in the way the Russia has targeted Ukraine’s would undoubtedly be an effective tactic. Probably more so than in Ukraine because Russia probably lacks the transformers and other spares it needs (the spares may exist on paper but not in reality) as well as the trained manpower to do the repairs.

Testing

Finally, O’Brien in the substack linked above has a Ukrainian former defense minister as saying that one motivation for the attack is to test things. That was not a thing I thought of, but the more I think about it the more I agree with it. Kursk is an ideal place to test all sorts of things: drone operations, combined arms tactics including drones, Russian air defense, Russian ability to react and more. In fact it will not surprise me if we see a small Ukrainian force try some kind of “thunder run” raid going perhaps 100km deep into Russian territory and then returning to a different part of Ukrainian held territory. In fact we might see multiple such simultaneously because if Russia has problems handling one raid it will have even more problems with multiple raids.

Results So Far & What Happens Next

We’re almost a week in. I think it is fair to say that some of the testing has worked. The redeployment of Russian troops from other front lines is in progress. Very likely (we don’t really know) a fair chunk of the supplies to Dombas are impacted. Plus it is undoubtedly adding to the stress on the creaking Russian infrastructure.

Presuming the Ukrainians stay, and the reports of Ukraine digging in suggest they plan to, then we have plenty of time to see more. If I’m wrong and this is Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge then in a week or two Russia will have successfully made a breakthough somewhere. If I’m right that this is an attack made from a position of (relative) strength then I expect exciting explosions in critical areas further away from the border and large obvious failures are Russian troops attempt to counter-attack.

One thing to note is that if Ukraine retreats slightly this is likely to be intentional. I would expect Ukrainians to set up large ambushes that they draw Russian troops into and for them to leave behind spotter drones and other sensors that help them pinpoint targets of interest.

If Ukraine is able to route drones through the Kursk area then I expect lots of howls from Moscow about damage to civilian infrastructure and about civilian casualties as Ukraine takes out railways, power stations and so on. These will be ignored. If the Voronezh - Rostov on Don route is successfully taken out for a while if not permanently we may see a massive collapse in southern Ukraine as forces in Kherson/Zaporizhzhia run out of supplies. There are already reports that these troops are suffering from Cholera and the whole area is chronically short of water so they may be neart collapse anyway. Of course since there are still all the static defenses and minefields Ukraine may take a while to regain territory there, but if there are few defending troops that will be a lot easier.

Update: one result of Russia’s evacuation of parts of the region is that the Russian forces "defending" Kursk are looting the abandoned homes and businesses there. The looting obviously makes the defenders less mobile or capable and, presuming that it becomes known in Russia, it may well also help seed the distrust required for regime change. So far this is for the most part small towns and villages of relatively low population but if Ukraine is able to, say, threaten the city of Kursk or for that matter Belgorad and cause mass evacuations from there then when those resident return to looted houses they will be far more numerous and more likely to have acquaintances in Moscow

Trump Considerations

One thing that occurs to me is that both sides in the Ukraine war are paying attention to the US election. If Trump manages to beat the margin of fraud and get elected then Russia will probably feel emboldened and Ukraine depressed as Trump has been considerably more skeptical about providing Ukraine with aid. Hence one reason for Ukraine to invade Kursk is to strengthen its bargaining position in Trump sponsored peace talks some six months from now. Ukraine may also feel that it needs to get some decisive victories to ensure Russia is unable to take advantage of Ukraine not having as much external support next year. To that extent it is possible that Ukraine will take more risks in the next 100 days or so than it might otherwise.

However it seems to me that while Trump is likely to reduce supplies, he is on the other hand likely to allow Ukraine to use the weapons it has more freely. Unlike the current Biden maladmistration approach of limiting the use of US weapons to Ukraine and nearby regions of Russia, Trump is likely to say that Ukraine can use its weaponry anywhere it likes. Hence another reason for the Kursk incursion is that it provides a gateway for Ukraine’s F-16s to conduct missions over Russia. While the F-16 is certainly not invulnerable, it is likely to present a lot more of a challenge to Russian air defenses in their current degraded state than any other Ukrainian airforce asset. F-16s flying raids on Russian infrastructure could leave it in tatters in the middle of winter and that might well be the final straw for Russians putting up with Putin.