Ukraine on the Offensive

Launched on August 6, Ukraine’s surprise cross-border offensive into the Kursk region of Russia has startled the world. Not only is the operation far and away the largest Ukrainian attack into Russian territory since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; it has also come at a time when Ukrainian forces were struggling to preserve their already stretched resources along the existing 600-mile front. Yet as of mid-August, Ukrainian forces had penetrated dozens of miles into Russia and gained control of 74 villages and towns in the Kursk region, according to Ukraine’s top military commander. Ukraine has also taken more than 100 Russian prisoners.

At this stage, it is too early to assess the success of the operation. So far Kyiv has said its primary aim is halting Russian artillery attacks from the Kursk region into Ukrainian territory. According to the Ukrainian government, more than 255 glide bombs and hundreds of missiles have been launched at Ukrainian towns from the region since the beginning of the summer. Kyiv also hopes to use the Russian POWs in a prisoner exchange to release Ukrainian soldiers from Russian captivity. Even more important, the operation could force the Kremlin to redeploy some of its troops from southern and eastern Ukraine. Previously, it was Ukraine that had to draw from its existing deployments to counter Russian attacks.

Politically, the Kursk offensive serves another purpose. It allows Kyiv to address its partners from a position of strength and puts the growing debate about potential cease-fire negotiations in a different light. Few Western observers expected any significant Ukrainian offensive this summer, let alone one that could penetrate well into Russia. If nothing else, Kyiv has demonstrated that it is very much still in the fight, easing recent concerns about its staying power. Moreover, Ukrainian troops have shown that they are capable of planning and unleashing a surprise large-scale offensive in total secrecy despite the presence of drones and satellites on the battlefield that can see almost everything.

This is a striking contrast to the first six months of the year, when the frontlines remained largely static despite intense fighting. By early 2024, citing a sense of impasse, many Western analysts were pushing for some kind of settlement with Moscow. Although there was no official support for this from Kyiv, some experts had also begun proposing ceding Ukrainian territory to bring an end to the fighting. Yet as recent events have shown, the war is not exactly at a stalemate: both sides have launched major actions since the late spring, and thanks to the arrival of new weapons and new defenses, the balance of power has shifted. Although much has been made of polls showing mounting war fatigue among Ukrainians, few are prepared to give up significant parts of their country to reach a settlement. Ukrainians are also wary of any plan that would freeze the frontlines where they are now, which would leave Russian forces on their doorstep and poised to launch a new invasion at any time.

Amid these concerns, the Kursk operation has also shown just what is at stake for Kyiv and why it is continuing the fight. Whether in the daily grind of the eastern front or in bold new offensives, Ukrainian forces are seeking to keep Russia off balance and to make the war far more costly—and above all, to prevent Moscow from strengthening its own war machine further.

KHARKIV’S DEFIANCE

To understand what the Kursk incursion means for Ukrainians, it is crucial to follow recent events in and around Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city and a crucial bastion of its northeast region. On May 10, the Russian army began a long-anticipated assault on the city, which lies near the Russian border and is home to 1.3 million civilians. Since the fall of 2022, when the Ukrainian army liberated this area, it had remained relatively calm by comparison with the east and the south, and many Ukrainians displaced from the Donbas had sought refuge there. A Russian occupation of even part of Kharkiv would have been a dramatic setback for Ukraine.

Yet that didn’t happen. During the early days of the May offensive, Russian forces moved five miles into Ukrainian territory, with heavy fighting in the border area around Kharkiv. But Ukrainian forces succeeded in halting the advance, and by by the end of the month, it was clear that the city would not be taken. Today, Russian forces continue to press the fight near Kharkiv, but the stalling of the offensive marks something of a turning point in the war this year: barring a cataclysmic change in the balance of forces, it is now highly unlikely that Russia will be able to capture Kharkiv or any other large Ukrainian city.

This outcome was not foreseen by Western observers. When Russia’s spring assault began, international headlines initially portrayed it as an existential threat to Ukraine. Up to 50,000 Russian troops were approaching Kharkiv while aircraft sent huge glide bombs from Russia’s side of the border with largely no impediment.

By March, Ukraine’s air defenses had almost run out of ammunition, in part because of the months-long delay in a $61 billion aid package that remained stuck in the U.S. Congress. The Kremlin had taken advantage of this shortfall to destroy Kharkiv’s power grid. From that point on, scheduled power cuts became a feature of daily life in the city. Moreover, Kharkiv lacked any missile defense system equivalent to the U.S.-supplied Patriot force, which had been prioritized to protect Kyiv itself. As a result, during the first weeks of the invasion, the city was exposed to lethal bombardment. On a single day in May, seven people were killed and 16 wounded during an attack on a publishing house; two days later, 19 were killed in an attack on a hypermarket.

Kyiv has demonstrated that it is very much still in the fight, easing recent concerns about its staying power.

By early June, however, additional ammunition for air defenses had been delivered. Ukrainians were now capable of hitting the Russian aircraft that were carrying the missiles and even of reaching targets in the neighboring Belgorod region of Russia from where many glide bombs were launched, thus limiting the threat to Kharkiv. Ukraine was also able to stabilize the situation with the arrival of a few support brigades, although this left some Ukrainian positions in the Donbas more vulnerable. Since then, Russia has launched frequent missile strikes at Kharkiv almost daily, but glide bombs have become rarer.

Although intense fighting continues around Kharkiv, a strong defense has shifted the mood in this city, an important center for Ukrainian industry, logistics, and scientific research. Since the opening weeks of the Russian attack, Kharkiv has been functioning and full of life: hospitals, state institutions, cinemas, shopping malls, and many small businesses are fully operating. Despite a strong military presence, the city has the look and feel of an urban center in full swing. In a survey published in early August, around 70 percent of Kharkiv residents agreed that “invincibility” was one of the city’s main characteristics—that “life goes on,” and “people do their jobs despite fears.” The city has also rallied around the armed forces and municipal employees who have continued to work—even during air raid warnings that may last for nine to 12 hours per day—as well as firefighters and energy workers who rush to fix infrastructure after Russian attacks.

With the fighting all around it, Kharkiv has strived to reinvent itself and acquire a new purpose. Although its large foreign student population departed at the start of the war, it has welcomed some 200,000 Ukrainians displaced from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, for example. For many, it is easier to find regular work in this large city than in more agricultural regions to the west. Residents who have so much to lose—freedom, their way of life, their homes—prefer to talk about their city in terms of how much Ukraine has to defend there.

MOSCOW’S BOMB POWER

A larger reality underscored by the successful defense of Kharkiv, one that has until now been too little appreciated in the West, is that Russia is unlikely to take a major Ukrainian city in the future. Although the threat to the city grabbed international headlines, there was never a moment during Moscow’s May offensive that Kharkiv could have fallen. On the contrary, the past few months have shown Ukrainians that at this stage, Kharkiv and other crucial cities close to the frontlines—Dnipro, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia—remain out of reach for Russia’s ground forces.

By contrast, Russia’s attacks on smaller towns and villages on the frontlines have been utterly devastating, including for some that are very close to Kharkiv. Take Lyptsi, a village less than a mile from the Russian border. Until early May, life was relatively normal there. But Lyptsi was one of two major settlements that stood in the way of Russia’s advance on Kharkiv and has served as a Ukrainian military outpost. Thus, starting that month, the village was hammered with glide bombs. According to Ukrainian soldiers based there, they have sometimes been targeted by up to ten glide bombs per hour. The local school, kindergarten, and hospital were destroyed. Hardly a single building in Lyptsi is still standing. All civilians have fled.

Of course, ravages to frontline towns, especially in the Donbas, began long before this summer. But Lyptsi’s fate shows how much Russian strategy has evolved since the war began: Russian forces now make little pretense that they are trying to capture Ukrainian towns and bring them under Russian domination. Instead, they simply seek to obliterate them. This is a shift from two years ago, when Ukrainians in the east faced a different Russian threat.

Consider the experience of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian town of 17,000 near the Russian border in the Kharkiv region. Within hours of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces occupied the town, which became fully isolated from Ukrainian territory; the only way for residents to escape the war was to cross the border to Russia. When Ukrainian troops liberated the area six months later, they found a population that had gone through a horrific occupation.

As soon as the Russians had taken over the town, a local factory was turned into a detention and interrogation facility. At its peak of operations, up to 300 Ukrainians were held there. One Ukrainian who was interrogated there described the way he and other detainees were treated. “They attach clothespins to your ears,’’ he said. “Your hands are tied behind the chair.” He was able to escape; others were not so lucky. Many described beatings, and women were threatened with rape. One local resident, Kostia Tytarenko, who was 21 at the time, was abducted by the Russian military on a highway near Vovchansk in the summer of 2022 and taken to Russia.

Now Vovchansk has suffered a different fate. Until this spring’s assault, some 3,500 people had remained there, but as Russians troops moved into it, nearly all of them left—this time mainly to Kharkiv. In two weeks, not more than 50 people remained. Today, it is not abusive Russian occupiers that Ukrainians in the east fear most, but Russian bombs and Russian drones. They know that the Kremlin’s forces no longer have the capability to capture their cities and try to make them Russian. But along the frontlines, they can destroy what they can’t dominate, forcing Ukrainians to abandon their homes.

THE DEAL PUTIN WANTS

Amid their grinding efforts to defend largely ruined towns along the frontlines, Ukrainians fear that Kyiv’s Western partners could someday force them to accept a more permanent Russian occupation of their land in the interest of ending the war. This tension dates to early 2024, when many Western commentators began to talk more insistently about the possibility of a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. There was even talk that Putin might be ready to make a deal. At the time, I tried to verify these rumors with my Russian colleagues—independent journalists and analysts who still have contacts inside Russia.

As I learned, Putin was trying to capitalize on a sense of Western war fatigue, encouraging voices in the West who were questioning continued support for Kyiv at a time when Ukraine was already short on military resources. In fact, Russia had no interest in a deal: at the start of the year, Russian generals were already bragging about a possible assault in Kharkiv in May, a plan that was ultimately carried out. It seems likely that the Kremlin was exploiting Western talk of negotiations to try to undermine Ukrainian morale.

In the long run, Ukrainians want to make Russians themselves tire of the conflict.

Ukrainians are not interested in playing this game. It is not hard for them to see what a deal on Russia’s terms could mean. At the outset of the war, Putin officially titled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the “special operation in Donbas”—a campaign aimed at “liberating” the part of that eastern Ukrainian region, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk, that it had not captured in 2014. (Even if Luhansk is now in Russian control, Russia has been unable to occupy two major towns in the region, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.) Gaining or declaring full control over the Donbas would give the Kremlin an easy exit strategy: it could effectively freeze the frontlines where they are now while boasting that it had achieved its declared war aims.

Obviously, this is not an outcome that Ukrainians are prepared to contemplate: the presence of Russian troops along hundreds of miles in the east, even with a frozen conflict, would be a permanent threat. Moreover, the region is important to millions of displaced Ukrainians who hope to return and can remember a past in which the Donbas was a fulcrum of the country’s industry.

From a practical standpoint, there is little for Ukraine to hold on to in heavily bombed border towns like Vovchansk. While even small retreats are psychologically painful for those in the military who have spent years defending these few dozen acres of land, the loss of villages in the Donbas today does not have much effect on Ukrainians’ overall attitudes about the war. Industrial towns such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka are already in ruins; heavy industry, once the region’s pride and glory, has been destroyed beyond recognition. Under Soviet rule, especially under Stalin, the region became a center for metallurgy and mining through an enormous level of harsh Soviet planning. Heavily mined, polluted, and now filled with spent ammunition, the region cannot return to that past. Regardless of how ambitious Kyiv’s postwar reconstruction plans are, it will be impossible to reindustrialize eastern Ukraine to the extent it once was. Donbas as the heart of the Ukrainian industry is gone forever.

But if Ukrainians have few illusions about how much has been lost, they also understand that now is not the time to negotiate. Although recent polling indicates that more Ukrainians are open to territorial concessions to end the war, these findings are less clear than they may appear. For one thing, even with growing numbers voicing such flexibility, they are still a minority of Ukrainians, and a large majority of the population maintains a high level of confidence in victory. For another, although more Ukrainians may agree today that fighting over a few miles of scorched earth is not that important, that doesn’t mean that more of them are prepared to give up important cities in the east, including those currently under Russian control.

MAKING RUSSIA PAY

Should the West push Kyiv to negotiate, Ukrainians can easily imagine the likely outcome: military support from their allies would diminish, since some Western governments would find it illogical to provide further military aid while peace talks were getting under way. Meanwhile, the Kremlin would continue to produce weapons. Moscow has already made clear that it seeks to further militarize its economy, presumably to prolong the war. Thus, during its assault on Kharkiv this spring, Putin reshuffled his cabinet and, in a surprise move, replaced his longtime defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, with Andrei Belousov, an economist. Not just known for his loyalty to Putin, Belousov is an economic planner who believes the entire economy can be rebuilt around the war. In his new position, his job is to transfer all available government revenue, including income from taxes and natural resources, to achieve military goals—in other words, to make the state capable of waging permanent war. Russia’s defense budget already constitutes seven percent of GDP, one of the largest ratios in the world, and analysts expect it could rise to as high as ten percent under Belousov.

Moscow’s new war economy poses a major challenge to Kyiv. The Ukrainian government has had no choice but to follow suit and adjust its economy to secure the permanent availability of weapons and resources for defense. As a democratic state, Ukraine cannot force its private economy to go on a total war footing, but it can provide incentives for businesses to participate in the war effort and ensure greater tax enforcement, since its entire defense budget comes from tax revenue. Somehow, the military war of attrition that both sides have been waging has become an economic one as well. And this may also be one of the reasons why Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is so important.

Through much of the past two and a half years of fighting, a popular view of Russian strategy has been that Putin is seeking to outlast his adversary by simply exhausting Ukraine and its Western partners. But Russia itself is not immune to exhaustion. For Kyiv, forcing Russia to burn through as many of its military resources as possible has become a way to hinder Putin’s goal of adapting the Russian economy to a state of perpetual war. In the long run, Ukrainians want to make Russians themselves tire of the conflict.

For now, the arrival of new supplies of military equipment has allowed Ukrainian forces to defend the population better. Consider the long-awaited delivery of F-16s. For example, as of mid-August, after the first planes arrived from the Netherlands, Ukrainian military officers in the Kharkiv region were noting a reduction of Russian glide-bomb attacks. Even though it was not clear that any F16s were present in the area, the mere fact that Ukraine now had the capability to hit Russian aircraft carrying the bombs had become a form of deterrence.

One of the growing realities of this war is how different it looks close up. Months before the Kursk invasion, when many Western observers perceived the war to be stalled, the view from Kyiv was different. In the spring of 2024, it was already clear to many of Ukraine’s military leaders that Russia was expending enormous amounts of manpower and firepower each day and that this would help Ukraine in the long run. As this summer’s campaigns have unfolded, Ukraine’s task has been not only to defend its own strategic assets and show resilience against relentless Russian attacks but also to destroy as many Russian resources as it can to make Putin and Belousov’s war economy impossible. This may not offer an immediate path to victory, but it can prevent Russia from exploiting its current position and do much to diminish Russia’s potential for future gains. At least in part, this strategy seems to be working.