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(Original title: "Ukrainian troops seize another 40 square kilometers of territory in Kursk")

Ukrainian President Zelensky said on the 13th that the Ukrainian army's offensive in Russia's Kursk Oblast is still continuing.

Zelensky said that despite the difficult and fierce fighting, the Ukrainian army continued to advance in the Kursk region, and Ukraine's "bargaining chips" were increasing (data map)

Zelensky had a video call with Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Sersky on the same day. Zelensky later posted on social media that despite the difficult and fierce fighting, the Ukrainian army continued to advance in the Kursk region and Ukraine's "bargaining chips" were increasing.

Zelensky said Ukraine has taken control of 74 settlements in the Kursk region and carried out inspection and stabilization measures in these settlements. Work on developing a humanitarian solution for the Ukrainian-controlled areas is still ongoing. Preparations for Ukraine's next move are also underway.

Serski informed Zelensky that Ukrainian troops had taken control of 40 square kilometers of territory in the Kursk region in the past 24 hours.As of the 12th, the Ukrainian army has controlled approximately 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory.

The Ukrainian army raided Russia's Kursk region on the 6th, and then the two sides broke out in fierce conflict in the region. Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting on the situation on Russia's southern border on the 12th and said that Russia will resolutely respond to a series of provocations from Ukraine in the border area.

Further reading

Zelensky, why dare to march into Russia?

It has penetrated more than 12 kilometers into Russian territory, controlled 28 settlements and more than 2,000 residents... On August 12, local time, Smirnov, acting governor of Russia's Kursk Oblast, publicly discussed for the first time the specific scale of the "difficult situation" in the region during a video call with President Vladimir Putin.

On August 6, the Ukrainian army crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border and attacked the small town of Suja in Kursk Oblast and surrounding settlements. Both Russia and Ukraine confirmed that this was an offensive of brigade size or above. This also means that this operation was not a small-scale harassment of the border by Ukrainian special forces and paramilitary groups before, but the first large-scale ground offensive launched by the Ukrainian army against the Russian mainland since the Russian army launched the "special military operation" on February 24, 2022.

After a week of fighting, Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Silsky said on the evening of August 12 that the Ukrainian army had controlled about 1,000 square kilometers of land in Kursk Oblast. The Ukrainian army did not quickly attack the main cities or nuclear power plants in Kursk Oblast as some analysts initially expected, but instead tried to seize the initiative on the battlefield within a controllable range. On the other hand, Russian Chief of General Staff Gerasimov vowed on August 7 to "completely defeat the enemy and return to the border." However, after about a week of counterattack, it has not been able to restore effective control over the border area.

The Mist of Suja

A week later, no one can tell exactly how many Ukrainian regular troops crossed the border between Ukraine's Sumy Oblast and Russia's Kursk Oblast on August 6. Russian Chief of General Staff Gerasimov said the next day that there were "thousands". The Kyiv Independent verified multiple sources and believed that the Ukrainian troops that attacked in the first battle may have hundreds of soldiers and dozens of armored vehicles.

What is certain is that the beginning of the Battle of Kursk in 2024 is very different from the Russian army's "special military operation" two years ago and the Battle of Kursk that determined the direction of the Eastern Front of World War II 80 years ago. This is a raid that started quietly. A video confirmed by international media showed that the Ukrainian army captured about 40 seemingly unsuspecting Russian border guards at the Suja port. Subsequently, the ground forces advanced in two directions, with the main target being the small town of Suja, about 10 kilometers from the border.

Sudja is located 85 kilometers south of Kursk, the capital of Kursk Oblast, and had a population of about 6,000 before the war. It is not only the port of entry from Kursk to Sumy Oblast, Ukraine, but also a transit point for Russian natural gas to Europe. Less than 24 hours after the operation began, a Ukrainian army squad unfurled the Ukrainian flag in front of the Gazprom office 2 kilometers west of the center of Sudja. On August 12, a video of Ukrainian armored vehicles driving through the center of Sudja was released.

This is also the biggest achievement of the Ukrainian army in this operation that all parties can confirm. As of August 13, except for Suja, the other villages and towns controlled by the Ukrainian army in the past week's operations are small settlements with a population ranging from dozens to hundreds, and are basically concentrated in the Suja area.

Russia releases destroyed Ukrainian armored vehicles (video screenshot)

On the second day of the operation, the vanguard of the Ukrainian army approached the town of Korenevo, which is adjacent to Sudja. The town has a population of about 5,000. But after five days of fierce fighting, Russia and Ukraine are still fighting in the settlements around the town. In addition, on August 12, the Russian local authorities announced the evacuation of residents from the Belovsky District, which means that the third regional unit of Kursk Oblast has become a war zone. However, the Ukrainian army has not yet approached the central town of Belaya in the area. Ukrainian media estimated that the Ukrainian army actually controlled or approached 40 to 50 settlements.

It is worth noting that the Kiev High Command maintained a subtle silence in the first few days of the operation, and Ukrainian President Zelensky only explicitly acknowledged the launch of the operation on August 10. During this period, the Ukrainian army tacitly allowed the participating units to release videos, including many images of small-scale harassment. The US think tank "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW) believes that some Russian frontline officials also tried to cover up the fact that the frontline was ineffective in prevention by exaggerating the Ukrainian army's achievements in the initial stage.

Due to multiple factors, the Kursk offensive had a greater impact on public opinion and psychological warfare than the actual battlefield situation. Kursk Mayor Korpenkov once claimed that the Ukrainian army had approached the outskirts of Kurchatov. It is nearly 100 kilometers away from the Russian-Ukrainian border, and the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant is located in the city. This led some analysts to believe that attacking the nuclear power plant was the Ukrainian army's goal.

On August 10, there was news that the Ukrainian army opened a "second front" in the Belgorod region of Russia to cross the border with Russia. In fact, it was five soldiers from the 252nd Battalion of Ukraine who went deep into the village of Poroz, 3 kilometers from the border, to shoot a video. No main force followed. The village where the small force entered had only about 10 people living in it.

Ukraine's "Kiev Independent" comprehensively analyzed the Ukrainian army's investment and believed that the effective breakthrough distance of this operation was about 15 kilometers into Russia. Considering that the city of Kursk is 80 kilometers away from Sujashan and the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant is 60 kilometers away from the border, the newspaper believes that these targets are "out of reach" and were not originally included in the combat plan of Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Silsky.

Since the end of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the autumn of 2022, the battle lines of Russia and Ukraine have often changed in hundreds and tens of meters. Therefore, advancing about 10 kilometers in 24 hours and controlling at least 28 and as many as 50 settlements after a week of fighting can be regarded as the greatest success of Ukraine on the battlefield since the autumn of 2022.

Some Russian military bloggers pointed out that the Ukrainian army's current plan is to bypass settlements and fortifications with small forces, penetrate a long distance to find opportunities, fight with the Russian army and then withdraw. The main force will stay in the area near the border of Sumy and Kursk regions to build fortifications and try to maintain long-term control over at least hundreds of square kilometers of Russian territory.

The Butcher's Flying Knife

Until the operation began on August 6, Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Silsky had a bad reputation at home and abroad. In February this year, when the battle in Avdeyevka, Donetsk Oblast, was coming to an end, Silsky replaced the prestigious Zaluzhny as the supreme commander of the Ukrainian Army.

Later, due to hasty planning and late orders, the retreat from Avdeyevka became a disaster for the Ukrainian army on the second anniversary of the war. The then Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the Ukrainian army lost more than 1,500 people on the day of the retreat. British officers who provided advisory services to the Ukrainian army also admitted that the 110th Motorized Infantry Brigade that held on to Avdeyevka was "actually annihilated" in the end.

Silsky became the target of public criticism. The American magazine Politico wrote that Zaluzhny possessed "battlefield rationality" and was a key leader in maintaining the cohesion of the Ukrainian army, while Silsky "was willing to put soldiers in danger to achieve his goals" and was nicknamed "the butcher" among the soldiers.

What is even more disadvantageous to Silsky is that the Moscow High Command knew at least in May this year that the Ukrainian army was preparing to "open another front." On August 2, senior Ukrainian general Andrei Natov pointed out in an interview with the local media that the Russian army launched a new round of offensive in the northern part of Kharkiv Oblast in May because it realized that the Ukrainian army might launch a new offensive if the front line was stable. Therefore, the Russian army wanted to "complicate" the Ukrainian army's front-line mobilization and prevent it from freeing up troops to regain the initiative.

In addition, TASS quoted Bloomberg's "close to the Kremlin" source as saying that Russian intelligence knew clearly two weeks before August 6 that the Ukrainian armed forces were about to launch a cross-border attack, and that it would be "the largest since the start of the war." However, the same report pointed out that Russian Chief of General Staff Gerasimov ignored the warning and did not report it to Putin.

Russian Chief of General Staff Gerasimov was accused of ignoring warnings from intelligence agencies (file photo)

The reason for Gerasimov's mistake is unknown, but what neither Russian nor Western analysts accurately predicted was the scale of the forces Silsky was preparing to mobilize. Although the numbers of six or seven brigade-level units appeared in the Kursk Offensive, multiple sources revealed that the main Ukrainian troops involved in the operation were three brigade-level battle groups with the 82nd Air Assault Brigade as the core. In addition to the ace 82nd Brigade, the 61st Mechanized Brigade that participated in the first day of the offensive was not a traditional main force, and some troops belonged to the newly formed reserve brigades. In the past week, the Ukrainian army has deployed barely more than 10,000 troops to Kursk.

This may be because Zelensky and the US government have limited the scale of cross-border operations, but in the context of Russia's difficulty in obtaining internal intelligence in Ukraine, small-scale mobilization that does not involve the main front-line combat troops may have caught Moscow off guard. Sumy Oblast is close to the northern part of Kharkiv Oblast, where the two sides are fighting fiercely, which also concealed the Ukrainian army's troop mobilization and preparation.

In addition to the "lightweight" deployment of troops, from before the war to the start of the battle, the "butchers" who used to be keen on large-scale combat threw small flying knives at their opponents this time. In early August, the Ukrainian army dispatched drones to carry out multiple rounds of raids on military airports and logistics facilities in the three Russian border states of Kursk, Belgorod and Rostov. Information from all sides showed that the Ukrainian army dispatched about 100 drones to the border in a single day. Russian airports, refineries, and oil depots near the border were all affected, and the air force ammunition depot was also attacked and exploded.

In addition, since this spring, small Ukrainian troops under different banners have repeatedly crossed the border to attack Russian villages and towns, often penetrating hundreds of meters to several kilometers and returning immediately. In retrospect, these actions not only have the significance of reconnaissance, but also make the Russian troops on the border "accustomed to it", and relax their vigilance after evacuating the villagers in the front-line settlements. After the large-scale ground operation was launched, small units continued to cooperate in the operation, which not only expanded the scope of the Ukrainian army's penetration into Russian territory in the public opinion field, but also affected the judgment of all parties on the Ukrainian army's number, scale, and whereabouts.

The Institute of War Studies believes that due to the limited scale of the Ukrainian army's cross-border operations, the Russian army may be reluctant to transfer troops from other fronts in Ukraine to Kursk, because this may disrupt the original battle line and offensive deployment, and even mean that the Ukrainian army really regained the initiative on the battlefield through a "flying knife".

To some extent, this can explain why the Russian army's counterattack was slightly delayed. At present, the Russian troops present in the Kursk battlefield are complex in number - from border guards, reserve forces to Chechen special forces, but there are almost no main forces fighting in Ukraine. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, as of August 13, the Russian army had killed 1,600 Ukrainian troops in the Kursk battlefield.

Can Silsky's "flying knife" raid be replicated in the future? Analysts believe that a lightweight counterattack is impossible on the front line in Ukraine. Kortunov, former director-general of the Russian International Affairs Council, pointed out to China News Weekly that the reason why the Russian army has basically controlled the initiative on the battlefield in the past year is that after the Ukrainian army's major counterattack in the fall of 2022, it strengthened the second line of defense of the entire front.

In 2023, the Ukrainian army launched several large-scale counterattacks, but all failed. Even the Kiev High Command pointed out that it should learn from the Russian army's experience in building a double defense line. Earlier this year, Michael Kaufman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointed out after visiting the front line that in order to maximize the chance of final victory, the Ukrainian army should focus on the destructive power of the front line, "paying attention to firepower rather than mobility, and reducing the enemy's combat capability by causing greater losses in personnel and materials than its own side."

Obviously, the Kursk Offensive was the opposite of what Kaufman suggested. It was a choice that prioritized mobility over firepower. The small Ukrainian troops were able to penetrate and bypass the Russian defenses because they were targeting the Russian mainland, which was not as well-defended as the Kharkov, Donbass, and Kherson fronts. In other words, the "flying knife" option has always been there. The real question is: why did Ukraine dare to launch a large-scale attack on the Russian mainland this time?

Zelensky's "bargaining chips"

On August 10, Ukrainian President Zelensky publicly discussed the reasons and goals of the attack on the Russian mainland. He said that Ukraine is under attack from the Russian army in Kursk Oblast every day, so "the action is entirely for the security of Ukraine and to liberate the border from the Russian army."

At the same time, Zelensky also talked about the political significance of the offensive. He associated it with the catastrophic accident of the Russian Navy's "Kursk" nuclear submarine 24 years ago, calling it the "beginning" of Putin's rule, and the current attack on Kursk Oblast as a symbolic "ending."

Houses attacked in Kursk Oblast, Russia

The Kiev High Command decided to attack the Russian mainland for many reasons, including regaining the initiative on the battlefield, allowing the Russian people to feel the impact of the war more personally and boosting the morale of Ukrainian society, and making the international community focus on the Ukrainian issue again through a battle.

More than 120,000 civilians have been evacuated from Kursk Oblast, and a video of a Russian elderly man crying and complaining about "poor defense" has been widely circulated on social media. However, a statistic that has not received widespread attention is that as the Russian military has increased its air strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure again, the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine has continued to increase since March this year.

For Zelensky, the more serious challenge is the international community's "Ukraine fatigue." "It is impossible for all parties to focus on the same crisis for a long time," Kortunov told China News Weekly. "The expectation that Ukraine will defeat Russia in some way and that the war will not last too long is one of the motivations for providing practical support to Ukraine. If the war becomes a long-term conflict and a war of attrition, more and more countries will say that we support Ukraine, but we have other things to deal with."

The window to resolve "Ukraine fatigue" is before November this year, which is also the time when Zelensky plans to hold a new round of peace summits. Ukraine and its supporters do not want to risk Trump winning the US presidential election. The fighting in Kursk did not affect the Republican presidential candidate on August 12, when he once again blamed Biden for the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and said, "I get along well with Putin and he respects me."

"Trump does not want Ukraine to lose, that would be a 'humiliation' for him, but he wants to make a deal on his own, so he will really put pressure on Ukraine." Nibright, a former foreign policy adviser to the British House of Commons, told China Newsweek that for this reason, the choice for European countries and Ukraine in the coming months is to "support Biden (Harris) while preparing for Trump's possible coming to power."

Niblet explained that this means that Europe will undertake as much military aid to Ukraine as possible, "which is both a support for the Biden administration and a way to tell Trump that the United States does not need to pay more to support Ukraine." Similarly, for the Zelensky government, this strategy means telling Republicans through a proactive offensive that Ukraine still has the ability to break the deadlock and even "take a bite" of Russia.

The Kiev High Command has prepared a number of operations for this purpose. In early August, the head of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Service, Budanov, revealed that Ukrainian agents were developing a "complex solution" to more thoroughly destroy the Kerch Bridge across the Crimean Strait in the coming months. In terms of time, Ukrainian agents and naval drones severely damaged the bridge twice in October 2022 and July 2023, both of which attracted great international attention.

However, a short offensive cannot change the overall stalemate and the general trend of a war of attrition. The New York Times quoted Ukrainian military sources as saying that even in the short term, the raid on Kursk failed to alleviate the continued pressure from the Russian army on the eastern and southern fronts, which also means that it is difficult for the Ukrainian army to achieve the goal of regaining the initiative. So, what will the Ukrainian army do next?

The Kyiv Independent quoted military sources as saying that Silsky's real goal is likely to hold on to a small piece of Russian territory for a long time. This is also part of Zelensky's "preparation for Trump." Ukrainian Ambassador to Turkey Bodnar recently pointed out that if the two sides really negotiate a ceasefire at the current actual control line, then about 25% of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian control, and the Russian army will have room to continue to attack the interior of Ukraine at any time.

According to US media reports, Trump privately suggested that the war in Ukraine be ended by "ceding" Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia. How to make Russia "willingly" withdraw from Kherson, Zaporizhia and other regions? A small piece of Kursk Oblast may not be equal in size, but it may have great political significance for Putin, who emphasizes maintaining territorial integrity.

What is certain is that no matter how the battle in Kursk develops, the bottom line of the Russian army is to drive the Ukrainian army out of the border; and to maintain the occupation of at least a small piece of Russian territory is the bottom line of the Ukrainian army. The Kiev Independent pointed out that within Ukraine, small-scale raids on the Russian mainland have been criticized because they will consume valuable veterans and advanced equipment. Silsky needs to prove that his new tactical attempt can bring enough political value to Kiev.

Reporter: Cao Ran