In the second week of their offensive, reinforcements sent by Moscow failed to stop a surprise Ukrainian offensive in Russia’s Kursk region. This leaves the Kremlin with a dilemma: either it could further expand the Russian invasion forces in Ukraine by withdrawing more battalions to defend Russia, or it could send new conscripts to war.
Moscow has so far recruited regular soldiers for its armed forces at home and sent only temporary soldiers to the bloody battlefields of Ukraine. But the Kursk offensive has changed this delicate political balance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was already aware in the first days of the invasion of the possible political backlash that sending conscripts to Ukraine would provoke.
“I stress that conscripts do not take part in hostilities,” Putin said in a televised address in March 2022 in response to concerns raised by conscripts’ mothers. “There will be no additional call-up of reservists.”
He deployed conscripts in border regions by allowing the Federal Security Service (FSB) to recruit them – a move that will likely remain legally controversial.
On August 10, four days after the Ukrainian invasion, Russian mothers began complaining that their sons were in active combat.
“Oksana Deeva, the mother of a conscript who was in the Kursk region, published a petition for the return of conscripts from combat zones. Almost three thousand people signed it in three days,” wrote Okno, an independent Russian news publication.
On Monday, Akhmat, the commander of a volunteer battalion of the Chechen special forces, hit back violently, speaking of “sobs and outbursts.”
“No one will die who is not destined to die, but if you die defending (Russia) and your faith in God, you will go to heaven,” Apty Alaudinov said in a televised address.
Putin has remained silent on this issue.
Organizations of soldiers’ mothers have political power in Russia, said the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
“Mothers’ organizations have managed to steer large Russian social movements in the past. For example, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers (later renamed the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers), which advocated for the interests of Soviet conscripts in the late 1980s and early 1990s and successfully demanded greater transparency in the Soviet military.”
In the first days of the invasion, Putin assured conscripts’ families that professional soldiers would bear the brunt of the fighting. But heavy losses among special forces and other experienced units increasingly forced Putin to offer pardons to serious criminals, legal residency to immigrants, and large signing bonuses to non-Russians in return for their service in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s bold step
Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Ukraine had advanced 35 kilometers (22 miles) into Russia in some places and had taken control of 1,293 square kilometers (500 square miles) on Tuesday, compared to 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) a week earlier, and captured 93 settlements (compared to 74 the week before).
The ISW estimated on Saturday that the contested area near Kursk was 28 km (17 miles) deep and 56 km (35 miles) wide.
The ISW also estimated that Russian forces had occupied 1,175 square kilometers (454 square miles) of Ukrainian territory since the beginning of the year.
If this is true, it means that Ukraine has conquered more Russian land in two weeks than Russia conquered in Ukraine in eight months.
The capture of 19 Russian settlements in the past week is a pace that cannot be matched by Russian forces, which are still on the offensive in eastern Ukraine and have made several minor advances.
The biggest Russian success of the past week came west of Avdiivka, a town Russia captured in February. Since then, the town has developed into a salient 30km west of the city. Russian forces are believed to be seeking to capture Pokrovsk, 16km to the west. In the past week, they captured Zavitne and Novozhelanne and claimed half a dozen other settlements whose capture remained unconfirmed.
However, Ukraine’s success is still far greater, not only in territorial terms, but also because it has regained the initiative on the battlefield in one sector of the front. On its own territory, Ukraine remains reactive and defensive.
“These operations by the Ukrainians have surprised everyone, all of us included. Not just the fact that they took place and where they took place, but how successful they were,” Lieutenant General Ben Hodges told Times Radio.
He attributed this success to “good analysis” by the Ukrainians, but also to Ukraine’s ability to “weaken or neutralize Russian drones by apparently creating a kind of counter-drone bubble.”
Russia uses Iranian-designed Shahed drones to attack frontlines and cities in Ukraine, and has recently copied Ukraine’s tactic of using smaller drones with first-person view (FPV) capabilities to spy on enemy formations.
Hodges, who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and was commander of U.S. forces in Europe, described the Russian response as “slow” and “chaotic.”
“There is a mix of border guards, National Guard, FSB, regular army and local authorities, and it is not clear who is responsible,” Hodges said. “And of course, the response, not surprisingly, has been quite chaotic.”
“We underestimated Ukraine from the beginning,” he added.
The Royal United Services Institute said Kursk was a Ukrainian attempt to “counteract Russia’s unstoppable economic and numerical superiority through surprise, maneuver and Ukrainian tactical cunning.”
Four RUSI experts who recently visited Kyiv also believed that Ukraine was preparing the ground for possible negotiations with Moscow.
“Experience teaches us that Russia negotiates in good faith only when it is under pressure and negotiations are the only option,” they quoted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba as saying.
The experts called on Ukraine’s Western allies to maintain the pace of military aid and lift restrictions on its use. In particular, the United States and Germany have set geographical limits on the targets of their missiles in Russia.
“Now is not the time to meticulously manage the risks of Ukrainian actions, to hold back supplies or to strictly limit the use of equipment – especially against military targets on Russian territory – for fear that Putin might escalate the situation, possibly with the option of a nuclear bomb.
Ukraine claimed it was using American equipment to advance its Kursk forces. This apparently included cluster bombs to destroy pontoon bridges and rockets which, according to Ukrainian sources, had destroyed all three bridges over the Seym River in the Kursk region by Wednesday, cutting off a key Russian logistics base in Glushkovo from front-line troops.
