People need to be aware that this is a long fight. This is not a crisis. This is not some small incident somewhere that can be managed. This is all out war. Anonymous NATO official, 2023.[1]
A general stiffening of morale in free Europe is needed, and it can only come from action of this country... Willingness to fight for liberty is closely related to the strength of help available. Jack Hickerson in a memo to Secretary of State George Marshall, March 8, 1948.
In early May, the New York Times was able to describe how the support voted through in the US Senate would take months to have an effect on the battlefield.[2] Meanwhile, an expected Russian offensive would risk putting significant pressure on Ukrainian defenses. Even if the U.S. military did not believe the Ukrainian military would collapse, Russia would continue to wear down Ukrainian defenses and achieve marginal gains. Analysts interviewed by the New York Times described how Ukraine would at best stabilize the front by the summer. At worst, it could take until the end of the year.[3]
In the first week of August, Ukraine instead attacked Kursk Oblast, just north of Sumy. For the first time in two and a half years, Russia is forced to fight on its own territory.
The attack on Kursk was described by CNN as “bold and counterintuitive”; an analyst CNN spoke to said it was Ukraine “doing the least likely thing.”[4]
By exploiting operational surprise, Ukraine was able to exploit Russia's lack of preparedness on its borders. Apparently, Ukraine found a weak point to attack. Kursk Oblast. This is, embarrassingly for the Russian army, neighboring Belgorod Oblast, where Ukrainian troops had previously made several raids.
While Putin has promised to “throw the enemy out” of Kursk, Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed on August 1000 that the Ukrainian army now controlled XNUMX square kilometers inside Kursk Oblast.[5]
Jörgen Elfving, a retired lieutenant colonel, gives three possible continuations in Dagens Nyheter – that Ukraine continues to advance inside Russia; that Ukraine digs in and defends captured terrain; and finally that Russia manages to push Ukraine back. He sees the first option as the least likely, the other two being dependent on whether Russia manages to coordinate its resources, and which units are deployed.[6]
Because even though the long-term outcome of Ukraine's attack into Kursk Oblast is currently unclear, Anna-Lena Laurén was able to describe the attack in Dagens Nyheter on August 12th as a "real stroke of luck from a PR perspective."[7] While Russia is sending troops to try to take back its territory, Ukraine, according to Laurén, has already achieved its goal – “to prove to Russian citizens that the war concerns them. No matter how much they try to convince themselves otherwise.”[8]
Two days later, on August 14, Philips O'Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews, noted that Ukraine had managed to take as much ground in a week as Russia had done around Avdiivka since the beginning of the year.[9]
On the same day, CNN reported that Ukraine had carried out its largest attack on Russian air bases since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.[11] According to the Russian Defense Ministry, dozens of Ukrainian drones were shot down in Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, Volgograd, Bryansk, Orel, Rostov and Nizhny Novgorod.[12] At the Savasleika air base in Nizhny Novgorod, aircraft armed with Kinzhal, a Russian type of hypersonic ballistic missile, are based.[13]
A day later, on August 15, Oscar Jonsson described the Ukrainian operation as “historic.” Over a hundred thousand residents around Kursk have been evacuated, and the neighboring Belgorod region has declared a state of emergency. According to Jonsson, the Kremlin appears “increasingly out of control of the situation.” Like Elfving, Jonsson believes that Ukraine has three main options before it – occupying as much Russian territory as it can, which could risk exposing Ukrainian troops to counterattacks; an orderly withdrawal; or some kind of middle ground where it withdraws but forces Russia to fight to take back its territory. Regardless, Jonsson writes, Ukraine has “humiliated the Russian leadership and presented it with a difficult dilemma – and strengthened its own morale.”[14]
On the same day that Jonsson's article was published, and ten days after Ukrainian troops crossed the border, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukrainian troops had taken control of the town of Sudzha. The town, located almost a mile into Russian territory and with a population of just over five thousand people, may at first glance seem relatively uninteresting.
But two separate factors make Sudzha a high-value and interesting target. Sudzha is home to a gas terminal that serves as a key point for gas supplies to Europe, particularly to Hungary and Slovakia. On Russian state television, Andrei Fedorov, a former deputy foreign minister in Russia, described how “smart people in Kyiv have calculated that they will take over this hub, with the aim that the Russian army will have to destroy it in order to take it back. This means that gas supplies to Europe are being stopped because of Russian actions, not Ukrainian ones. This will hit Hungary and Slovakia very hard.”[15]
The second reason that could explain Ukraine's entry into Sudzha is Russian logistics. By gaining access to the train station at Sudzha, Ukraine can gain direct access to the Russian railway system's computer systems, train traffic, schedules, and internal communications. Since much of the information is fully automated and transmitted between stations, it simply cannot be simply turned off.[16] It is a veritable goldmine of intelligence that Ukraine may have come across – especially since Russia is completely dependent on the railways for its logistics. An indication of Russia’s lack of logistics in the area of Kursk Oblast is the lack of artillery, and films published on August 15 show Russia using short-range ballistic missiles against individual Ukrainian tanks.[17]
In addition to this, Ukraine has managed to isolate parts of Kursk Oblast by blowing up at least two of three bridges crossing the Sejm River.[18] The Russian troops remaining in the area now risk being isolated from the rest of the Russian forces.
At the moment, it seems that Ukraine is holding on to Kursk Oblast. An advisor to President Zelensky, Mykhail Podolyak, wrote on Telegram that Ukraine has no interest in occupying Kursk but that it was necessary to force Russia into “fair” negotiations – “We need to inflict significant tactical losses on Russia. In Kursk Oblast, we can clearly see how military means are being used to convince the Russian Federation to participate in a fair negotiation process.”[20]
On August 16, President Zelensky expressed the same sentiment, describing Kursk as an “exchange fund,” and insinuating that occupied Russian territories could be exchanged for Ukrainian territories.[21]
It has now gone so far that Brian Whitmore describes the Ukrainian occupation of Kursk as Putin's third "major military humiliation" since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The other two, according to Whitmore, were the Battle of Kyiv and Ukraine's counteroffensive that culminated in the liberation of Kherson and parts of Kharkiv (February - September 2022), as well as Prigozhin's mutiny in June 2023. Regardless of what happens militarily in the future, writes Whitmore, Putin has been damaged politically.[22]
While fighting continues in Kursk Oblast, Russia continues to make incremental advances in eastern Ukraine.[23] Fierce fighting continues in Donbas, and Russia has been gaining a little over a kilometer and a half of territory per week since the beginning of July. Pokrovsk, a little over fifteen kilometers from the front, is an important transport hub for Ukraine, and a presumed target for the Russian advance.[24]
Aside from the Russian failures in Kursk Oblast, and the tactical successes in Donbas, Russia has larger structural and strategic problems.
It is easy to forget that Russia is losing large amounts of equipment and soldiers every day as the war continues. Today, just over 900 days after the invasion, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense states that Russia has lost nearly 600 men – so far.[25] According to the British Ministry of Defense, Russian losses since May 2024 have amounted to over a thousand men per day, In total, the Soviet Union lost over half a million dead and wounded, and the invasion has likely cost the Russian state upwards of $211 billion so far.[26]
At the same time, it seems that Russia is having trouble recruiting enough soldiers for the front. The average age of dead Russian soldiers has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the invasion. In early 2022, the average age was 30.2 years (the age could be explained by the fact that Russia initially used contract soldiers), in July 2024 the average age was 37.8 years.[27] This could be an indication that the Russian military is now sucking labor from the civilian sector in Russia, which partly explains the labor shortage in Russian industry. At the same time, the Russian Defense Ministry's open figures indicate that fewer contract soldiers were recruited in 2024 than in 2023 – and that the number recruited is being overestimated.
If the figures are correct, the number of recruits has fallen from an average of 29 a month in 000 to 2023 in 24. It is therefore not surprising that Putin has doubled the lump sum paid to new volunteers. The sum of 500 rubles is equivalent to over $2024, and the minimum wage for a Russian contract soldier is now three times higher than the average wage. Volunteers from the Moscow region are paid five times more.[29] The high bonuses may be a sign of the drastic measures the Russian leadership is prepared to take to avoid carrying out a major mobilization, something that would most likely be unpopular.
At the same time, inflation and labor shortages are “dark clouds” over the Russian economy.[30] The labor shortage in Russia has become even worse as between half a million and one million people have chosen to emigrate from Russia since 2022 – many of whom are “younger, better educated, and work in key industries, such as the IT sector.”[31] Overall, if you add together mobilized, volunteer, the effects of the coronavirus, and war-related losses in the period 2020 – 2023, the available labor force in Russia has decreased by between 1.9 – 2.8 million people.
Pensioners today make up nearly 30 percent of the population, half of all industrial companies report that they lack personnel, and official interest rates are currently at 18 percent.[32]
At the same time, Russian mortgage rates for August have hit a record high, at over 20.8 percent, but thanks to the interest rate hikes, mortgage rates at many banks are expected to increase to 22 – 23 percent.[33]
Meanwhile, Russian suppliers of bread, dairy products, chocolate and beer have notified stores of upcoming price increases of up to 40 percent – costs attributed to a combination of inflation, high wage costs, and increased prices for, among other things, freight, personnel and raw materials. This compares with July, when prices were almost ten percent higher than July 2023.[34]
As early as March, Russia expert and professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University, Timothy Frye, was able to state that “the problem with managing Russia is not managing its rise. It is managing Russia’s fall. The lack of technological innovation, the uncertainty around property rights, the high levels of production, the opacity of the economy – all of these are factors that hardly bode well for long-term economic growth. It’s a pretty bleak picture.”[35]
Harley Balzer at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center describes in his report "A Russia without Russians? Putin's disastrous demographics", an impending Russian catastrophe, and parts of the report are worth quoting at length.
Thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin has “virtually guaranteed that future generations in Russia will be not only smaller, but also older, more fragile, and less well-educated. It [Russia] will most likely be less ethnically Russian and more religiously diverse… Putin’s timing of military aggression in Ukraine may have demonstrated an understanding that Russia’s demographic (and economic) situation would not improve for the next two decades. But the invasion is turning a growing crisis into a catastrophe… invading Ukraine while facing a catastrophic demographic challenge appears to have been a colossal folly. Hubris, based on a colossal intelligence failure, may explain the miscalculation. Another possible explanation is that Putin understood that Russia’s economic and demographic challenges meant that the country would not be in a better position for decades to come.”[36]
Putin and Russia, notes Nataliya Bugayova in an article for the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), are vulnerable. The incremental support for Ukraine from Western partners has helped the Kremlin mask these weaknesses.[37]
According to Bugayova, a serious American strategy (and this can be said to apply to the EU as a whole) would, among other things, remove restrictions on targeting Russian territory. This is precisely what the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner, has advocated, saying that “if they [Ukraine] can use long-range weapons systems to hold Russia’s military targets that attack Ukraine accountable, then we can change the dynamics on the battlefield.”[38]
What Western partners need to do, according to Bugayova, is to create multiple simultaneous and painful dilemmas for the Kremlin. So far, the Kremlin has succeeded in a form of controlled risk management. Relaxing the targeting restrictions would be a measure that confronts Russia with dilemmas. An effective campaign would “degrade, disrupt, and destroy the Kremlin’s capacity, and the source of that capacity, to wage war in Ukraine…”[39]
The argument that Russia would be provoked by Western “escalation” is no longer serious. The same words were heard before Finland and Sweden entered NATO.
As Michael C. DiCanna points out in the National Interest, Russia has a long history of bowing to Western resolve.[40] Threats and insinuations in the early days of February and March 2022 claimed that tank fire would be an unacceptable Western escalation. We have been here before.
If Sweden and the EU cannot donate more weapons and weapons platforms to Ukraine, there may be other more indirect solutions. At the end of July, Lars Calmfors, professor emeritus of international economics, pointed out that Sweden's military commitments to Ukraine of 25 billion kronor per year for three years represent 0,35 percent of GDP.[41] Meanwhile, the combined GDP of the US, EU and UK is nine times greater than Russia's. The EU and UK are five times greater. If the EU and UK were serious and matched Russian military spending in donations to Ukraine, they would spend less than 0,5 percent of GDP. If they gave another thirty percent, it would still only represent 0,84 percent of the countries' combined GDP.
Andreas Umland sums this up well when he writes that the “Russian-Ukrainian war is a grand war about the future of Europe and about the inviolability of borders. It is a war about Ukraine's right to exist as a normal member of the UN. The conflict has genuinely global consequences.”[42]
In that perspective, Lars Calmfor's proposal that Sweden should donate one percent of its GDP to Ukraine appears humble. We can, and must, do more.