Nigel Gould-Davies
Russian territory is under occupation for the first time since 1944. Since launching a major incursion into Kursk on 6 August, Ukraine has taken about the same amount of Russian territory (approximately 1,000 square kilometres) as Russian forces have, at huge cost, taken from Ukraine since October 2023.
This is a major development. How it evolves will depend on Ukraine’s objectives for the operation and Russia’s decisions on how it musters forces to resist it. But it is already significant for what it tells us about the war and about Russia, and for its impact on the wider diplomacy of the conflict.
Significance for the war Ukraine’s incursion demonstrates the continuing unpredictability of the war. A dominant narrative – in this case, that Ukraine was struggling to prevent a steady Russian advance in the Donbas and has little prospect of making further gains of its own – has once again been broken. While Ukrainian positions in the Donbas remain under threat, its forces have seized the initiative with an audacious and well-executed combined-arms operation into Russia. Through a combination of concealment, deception and Russian complacency, Ukraine achieved complete strategic and operational surprise – confounding the view that uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) have made the battlefield too transparent to achieve this.
Ukraine’s capacity for ingenious and unexpected moves – mirroring on land what it regularly demonstrates in the Black Sea – remains undiminished. This also confounds speculation that Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s armed-forces commander since February, would prove more conservative and ‘Soviet’ than his predecessor, Valerii Zaluzhny. Ukraine has consistently out-thought Russia in the war. By contrast, where Russia has made gains, this is due to superior mass, not skill. The contest of intelligence, in both senses, favours Ukraine. This reverses the dictum, attributed to Vladimir Lenin, that quantity has a quality all of its own.
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