Three weeks after Ukraine launched a bold attack on Russia’s Kursk region, experts are still trying to determine the long-term impact of the war that has lasted more than two and a half years.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the offensive had created a “buffer zone” to limit Russian attacks on the cities of Kharkiv and Sumy while depleting Russian reserves. But those goals did not stop Russia from launching a massive missile and drone attack across Ukraine on Monday, killing at least five people and cutting power and water to millions across the war-torn country.
“Like most previous Russian strikes, this one was equally vicious, targeting vital civilian infrastructure,” Zelensky said.
Even before Monday’s attack, Ukrainians were evacuating areas of the Donetsk region as the Russian army continued its advance eastward. However, Ukrainian forces, which have overrun Kursk and captured hundreds of Russian soldiers, have maintained their hold on about 500 square miles, a small part of the territory that is home to more than a million Russians.
Penetration into Ukraine:What is the reason behind the slow Russian response to the Ukrainian raid?
Russia tastes its own medicine
The attack has a “taste-your-own-drug logic,” Ziv Vaintosh, head of research and intelligence at the international security firm Global Guardian, told USA Today. Vaintosh questions the tactical benefits but says the attack boosted Ukrainian morale and lowered Russian morale.
The attack also signals to Western backers that with further support it could do serious damage to Russia’s military and economic infrastructure, Vaintosh says. Such a move would fuel internal opposition in Moscow while providing an opportunity for a territorial swap as part of a diplomatic settlement.
In an assessment of the war in Ukraine, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be demanding that his military retake captured territory without sacrificing the stability of his regime or slowing Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine. “The expulsion of his incompetent but loyal aides is out of the question,” the assessment added.
The evaluation added that the results of this strategy are too early to predict.
Putin holds US, West responsible for Kursk storming
The incursion, while far from decisive, has forced Russia to make tough choices, says Joe Chaffetz, an intelligence analyst at Global Guardian. It also exposes the possibility that Putin may not be able to end the war on his own terms, Chaffetz added.
“Kiev’s invasion of Kursk proved that Ukrainian forces are capable of achieving a complex mechanical advance,” he said, adding that if Ukraine could repeat the success, Russia’s strategy of incremental, irreversible advances would fail.
Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow in the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, was an adviser to Putin nemesis Alexei Navalny before his mysterious death in a Russian prison six months ago. Luzin says he’s not sure what the reports that Ukraine controls more than 90 villages in Kursk really mean. If a few Ukrainian soldiers walk into a town and no one stops them, do they control it?
“Villages and cities… are now within the Ukrainian military sphere of influence because the city administrations, to a large extent, have fled,” he said at a forum last week, adding: “We do not know whether we are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of this military operation (which) will only be understood over time.”
Putin criticizes ‘provocation’Ukrainian forces cross into Kursk
Russian citizens may not have any interest in Ukraine.
Luzin also says that Russian society’s apparent indifference to the attack on Ukraine may be an indication of indifference to Putin’s goals of seizing Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and retaining Crimea, territory Russia seized a decade ago that Ukraine is struggling to reclaim.
This raises the question of how much sacrifice Russian citizens might be willing to make in Ukraine.
“What does this mean for us? What does this mean for Ukraine? It means that if the Russians do not care about Kursk, they will never care about Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk and other occupied territories of Ukraine.”
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