Mick Ryan
The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians. There are many reasons for this, including Russia not assembling all the available pieces of intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian attack, the Ukrainian deception plan, and a failure of humility on the part of Putin’s regime and military.
The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.
Ukraine has shown that, fortunately, strategic audacity is not entirely dead in democratic nations.
In early August, reports emerged of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast. For the first 24 hours, most observers – and the Russian high command – assumed that this was just another small-scale, unconventional Ukrainian operations of the kind it has mounted twice into Belgorod.
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