Meanwhile, in Kursk

Russia inches forward in Ukraine, Ukraine storms into Russia, the whole war heads into a strange new phase

In late July, Russian channels started to pick on something weird: Ukrainian drones were attacking gas stations near the Russian town of Sudzha.

It was curious, because Sudzha is nowhere near most of the fighting in the region — that was mostly happening along a totally different stretch of the border, north of Kharkiv, some 150km to the south-east.

Then the attacks expanded. Ukraine was hitting farm equipment, greenhouses, oil depots. While Sudzha is a major transit point for natural gas shipments, the harassment campaign didn’t make much strategic sense. The volume of drone attacks, however, suggested Ukraine was very interested in Sudzha: Russia reported downing 42 drones in a single night. And then it was another 41 drones, plus artillery shelling, the next night. What, exactly, was Ukraine playing at?

The Russian milbloggers thought they figured it out last Wednesday, when local authorities report that “a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group of about 100” tried to break across the border in Sudzha. “Our troops repelled the enemy,” a milblogger wrote. The conclusion seemed to be that Ukraine was trying to replicate its successful cross-border raids from earlier this year. If that was the plan, the Russian milbloggers boasted, it had been thwarted.

That sigh of relief was cut short just hours later, when dozens of Russian border guards emerged from their fortifications, waving the white flag. Far from just a few dozen fighters, Ukraine had sent at least 1,000 soldiers to cross into Russia.

Things went from bad to worse for Russia. Ukrainian forces drove more than 20km into Russia, capturing the town of Sudzha itself and spanning out across the Kursk region. With the help of reinforcements and Western-made kit, Ukraine has made a mockery of Russian border defenses and it's defensive forces. Kyiv now claims it controls some 1,000km of Russian land.

Most damaging, perhaps, to the Russians is that it remains unclear what, exactly, the Ukrainians want. So anxiety reigns.

It’s a stunning development to cap off a remarkably consequential month — marked by marginal territorial gains, concerns about the viability of Ukraine’s defensive line, the arrival of Ukraine’s F-16 jets, an unprecedented prisoner swap, and the ups-and-downs of Vladimir Putin’s most ardent Western friends.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, everything you need to know about the state of the war in Ukraine — and, now, Russia — and how it will determine the fate of the war going forward.

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The Freeze, Thaw, Freeze Battlespace

Starting in the spring, you probably saw ample coverage of Russia’s battlefield advances. Moscow, it seemed, had regained the initiative.

On May 10, Russia suddenly seized a swath of land immediately to the north of Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-largest city. As the Institute for the Study of War wrote at the time, the incursion had “limited operational objectives but is meant to achieve the strategic effect of drawing Ukrainian manpower and material from other critical sectors of the front in eastern Ukraine.”

The opening of a second front for Kharkiv lent to high anxiety that the city itself could come under direct assault. Speaking to Ukrainians when I was in Kyiv in the spring, there was ample speculation that Russia would take aim at one of Ukraine’s major eastern cities — vying to either capture or destroy Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, or Kherson.

Despite the surprise advance, Russian forces haven’t moved much beyond their initial cross-border incursion, and Ukrainian defensive forces have largely pinned them down. The ISW has observed some marginal gains from Russia in recent weeks, but they’re a long way off from reaching Kharkiv. Even if they made it to the city limits, Russian forces have proved largely incapable of capturing and holding most Ukrainian urban centers.

Kharkiv, however, continues to be hammered with Russian missiles and drones. It’s at the point where the Ukrainians no longer flinch. See this video of a local coffee shop, from July. (Note the barista serving hotdogs, which are a staple of the Ukrainian coffee stand.)

This is a fairly representative experience along most of the front: Russia gains a little, gets stuck, struggles to advance further, lobs missiles and glide bombs in hopes of wearing down the Ukrainians. This is a story that's repeated all across the frontlines, not just near Kharkiv.

In late July, a massive column of Russian tanks tried to break through the Ukrainian line near Bakhmut. ISW counted “11 tanks, 45 armored combat vehicles, a rare ‘Terminator’ armored fighting vehicle (of which Russia has reportedly manufactured only 23 as of December 2023), 12 motorcycles, and roughly 200 personnel from several tactical directions.” Ukraine, however, had seen the assault coming. When the dust settled, six of the Russian tanks, seven armored combat vehicles, and all the motorcycles were wrecked. (It seems the “indestructible” Terminator survived.) Russian forces retreated. These kinds of assaults continue, and they occasionally crawl forward into Ukraine.

If you've followed this war at all, you've likely read dozens of pieces of analysis (including on this newsletter) claiming that Russia simply cannot sustain continuous losses like this, either in terms of equipment, manpower, or morale. All we can say now is: Apparently, they can. While there must be a point at which the losses become too much to bear, we simply have no idea where that line is.

We can more accurately observe the effects of loss on the Ukrainian side. The Kyiv Independent recently visited the frontlines in Donetsk Oblast, where some limited Russian gains have really stretched the Ukrainian defenses. The reporting exudes the exhaustion and pain. Ukraine continues to face a deficit of soldiers and kit, but retains the advantage in professionalism, strategy, and grit. Even as Ukraine ran out of ammunition and kit, it largely held its lines.

Now, more of that equipment is flowing — including the long-awaited F-16s. Russia has so worried about these F-16s that it has been expending expensive ballistic missiles to hit Ukrainian air bases. It's probably all been for naught: While Russia claims it has destroyed critical Ukrainian fighter jets, Ukraine says it’s been hitting dummy targets. (Students of history will recall how the French employed similar tactics to defend against German airships in the First World War, going so far as to construct a fake Paris.)

When I first began working on this dispatch, I wrote that there was no obvious opportunity on the near horizon for either side to change the tempo, suggesting that a true stalemate remained the most likely outcome. This week has, at least to some degree, changed that. More on that soon.

Russian Sabotage, Ukrainian Strikes

The past year has seen the evolution of Ukraine’s long-range strike program, an attempt to project power deep behind the frontlines.

As I wrote in WIRED in May, Ukraine’s long-range drone program has gone from nonexistent to a tail-to-snout operation — building the drones, training pilots, dispatching them hundreds of kilometers into Russia — in a manner of months. This has allowed Ukraine to hit Russian air bases, take out missile launch sites, and destroy electronic warfare capabilities. Plans to develop a domestic long-range missile system promises to further upgrade this capacity. Its naval drone program, meanwhile, has chased Russia's entire Black Sea fleet out of Crimea. They even sank a sub.

All told, it has forced Russia to pull back its most useful military hardware deeper and deeper into its own territory, reducing its ability to operate effectively on the frontlines and especially inside Ukrainian-held territory. (In retrospect, that was a pretty good hint that the Ukrainian Armed Forces were preparing for something big.) With more time, if other things go well, this could substantially change the balance of power in this war.

On the other side of things, we can observe a marked and intriguing upswing in Russian clandestine efforts well behind the frontlines — so far behind the frontlines that it’s not in Ukraine at all. In recent months, European security agencies have arrested Russian agents, accusing them of planning to attack American military assets, assassinate defense industry executives, and set fire to British shopping malls. Another Russian veteran accidentally blew himself up in a Paris hotel room before carrying out such an attack. Poland sees Moscow’s fingerprints on a fire that destroyed a major shopping mall in Warsaw, and an arson that damaged a German factory, There was also a fire at a weapons factory Wales and a massive coordinated effort to disrupt France’s rail network just before the beginning of the Olympics. (Although worth noting that the French government is hinting that far-left groups are responsible for the rail sabotage.)

Russia’s rival effort is a bit more of a quixotic than Ukraine’s long-range strikes. Because they are clandestine efforts, the propaganda value is questionable. Setting fire to arms factories is somewhat helpful, as it could disrupt aid shipments to Ukraine, but it also risks hardening European solidarity and boosting weapon donations to Kyiv. Torching malls, however, is strategically inexplicable. It may be chaos for chaos’ sake.

Two Peace Deals and a Prisoner Swap

A casual watcher of this miserable two-year war may have noticed a faint ray of sunshine peeking through the cracks in recent months.

Unfortunately, that ray of sunlight was more likely coming from the spotlight on Vladimir Putin as he bloviated onstage in June. The Russian president demanded that Ukraine sacrifice the four regions claimed by Moscow — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. That list includes areas that are controlled, at least partially, by Kyiv. He further demanded that Ukraine must swear off its bid to join NATO and intoned that such a deal could only be struck once President Volodymyr Zelensky has been removed from power.

This was never a serious proposal. Indeed, it’s the exact terms he’s been demanding since the very beginning of the war. His decision to state his demands so plainly, however, was a attempt to feed Ukraine’s Western critics — chiefly, JD Vance and Donald Trump.

Still, for the kind-hearted who detest war, the inclination may be to say: Giving up territory is worth it for peace. The trouble with such a position, however, is that capitulation would not just sacrifice soil but blood: Millions of Ukrainians still live in those regions, and surrendering them to Russia would mean feeding them to the beast. We have seen the brutality that Russia has inflicted on Ukrainian civilians it has kidnapped over the course of this war, from Bucha to Mariupol to Kherson, and everywhere in-between. Even if such a deal would stop the immediate fighting, we know that Putin does not respect such deals: A bad deal today increases the chance of a worse war tomorrow. For peace to work, both sides have to actually want it.

Certainly, Ukraine wants peace. That’s why it organized a peace summit in Switzerland in June. Russia, however, boycotted. Its allies, meanwhile, refused to sign the final communique.

The surprise breakthrough in negotiations actually came between Washington and Moscow, with the announcement that a massive prisoner swap would liberate American journalist Evan Gershkovich, maybe-spy Canadian-American Paul Whelan, as well as Russian liberals Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, traded for a list of FSB goons, spies, and assassins. As I wrote in May, Putin has led an obsessive effort to crush the last of his country’s liberal reformers — his decision to release its last living leaders is an intriguing move. This, particularly since his stalking horse Donald Trump had been counting on securing Gershkovich’s release himself on day one of a prospective second term. It’s quite odd.

All told, there is little evidence that Moscow has any interest in striking a deal anytime soon.

The Kursk Incursion

We arrive back at the big news: Ukraine invaded Russia.

I will spare you the minutiae of exactly where Ukrainian forces are operating, what they’ve captured, and where they might go next — by the time you’re reading this, that information may well be totally out of date. If you’re keen on the granularity of Ukrainian operations, you can’t go wrong in reading the Institute for the Study of War. (Their maps are also be a useful visual guide.)

Instead, I want to quickly break down three questions that you’ve almost certainly been asking yourself as this brazen invasion has unfolded.

How has Russia not bombed the Ukrainians to dust? Russia, as we’re often reminded, has air superiority over Ukraine — and, certainly over their own territory as well.

Kyiv’s months of targeting of Russia’s anti-air systems, air bases, and electronic warfare stations in the region was, we now know, a ‘softening’ operation — an effort to reduce both Russia’s defensive capacity in the region and its ability to retake the territory. Ukraine also planned for Russia’s aerial bombardment, and brought with them ample anti-air systems. Kyiv may have even dispatched some of its dwindling supply of fighter jets to ward off Russian bombers.¹ The arrival of those F-16s immediately prior to the mission is probably a good indication, too, that Ukraine conceived of a complex effort to deny Russia of air cover over the region.

But that, alone, doesn’t answer the question. While we will need to wait for the dust to settle before we can truly appreciate how Ukrainian innovation made this incursion possible, Russian channels have that Ukraine managed a blitz of disruptive tactics meant to scramble Russian jets, drones, and missiles; disrupt radio communication; and thwart radar.

Ukraine has also been experimenting with using drones for air-to-air intercepts of Russian attack helicopters, using fixed-link drones to overcome Russian electronic warfare, and mastering the ability to dispatch drone swarms to destroy critical targets.

To make a long story short: It looks like technological innovation, combined with serious planning and smart logistics, helped shield Ukraine from the expected Russian aerial onslaught. Can this last? Hard to say.

How are the Russians taking this? Not well. I’ve been tracking the response from the milbloggers since the Ukrainians first broke through the border, and their response has gone through all the stages of grief. Tellingly, however, they have struggled to stick to any sort of line, occasionally drifting into angry fatalism. Take this one assessment from a popular milblogger, who lamented that Ukraine struck “successfully” and that Russia lacked the capacity to dislodge them, at least for the time being:

Svyatoslav Golikov: From our side, reserves continue to arrive. At the same time, the forces involved are still not enough even for sustainable stabilization of the situation, not to mention the defeat of the enemy. They are lacking not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. On the enemy's side, they have fairly well-staffed units and formations. So far we have a patchwork of fire brigades, and they are scarce in numbers.

The use of “fire brigades,” here, is a euphemism. As another milblogger explained elsewhere, such a brigade is “a large number of border guards and national guardsmen to stabilize the situation, who almost immediately die on the first line of defense.” Elsewhere, the analysts suggested that it’s actually Russian special forces who are serving this ‘fire brigade’ role. “All this results in another attempt to plug the fucked up holes with the special forces,” they observed.

This milblogger also took direct aim at Chief of Defense Staff Valery Gerasimov. This is just one example of these military/political analysts openly pointing to the rot at the top of the military leadership and the absurdity at the core of this ‘special military operation’ — careful, of course, to never criticize Putin, just his cronies.

This should harken back to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ‘March of Justice.’ (Dispatch #60), when things were so dire in the war that the Wagner Group boss took his mercenary group and attempted to stage a slow-motion coup. (Prigozhin’s main target, defense minister Sergei Shoigu, was subsequently sacked and may be in even more trouble today.)

An interesting aside: Scattered reports claim that the remnants of Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, which had been largely exiled to West Africa and the Sahel, were redeployed back to Kursk and may form part of that ‘fire brigade.’

The milbloggers have kvetched and complained often, but the degree of their disgruntlement is always a useful barometer for the state of the war. This is particularly true, as Putin has continued tuning the screws on the limits of acceptable dissent — a spate of suspicious deaths and arbitrary detentions, coupled with a new law that lets the state seize assets of those who “discredit” the military all portend the Kremlin’s loss of patience with the armchair generals. The fact that they are complaining this loudly, despite the risks, is notable.

While it’s a good indicator, this bitching doesn’t really matter. The television propagandists continue to breath fire on TV, Putin continues to insist that things are going fine, and regular Russians seem to be either complacent or fatalistic. Moscow, however, may be facing a point in the not-too-distant future where a second, substantial, mobilization will be required to keep its war going. If that comes to pass, these criticisms of this brutal and bungled war may become incredibly salient.

And we arrive at the million dollar question: What is Ukraine hoping to achieve?