Ukraine is in control of 74 settlements in Russia’s Kursk region after only a week of fighting — nearly on par with what the Kremlin has spent the last eight months taking — from leading an incursion that experts say has revealed Moscow’s “weakness.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky touted that his troops had seized the scores of settlements in Kursk as of Tuesday, more than double what it had the day before, with Kyiv’s forces continuing their advance as they occupy about 400 square miles of Russian territory.
The surprise incursion gives Kyiv nearly as much territory in Russia as the 450 square miles the Kremlin has managed to take from Ukraine since the start of 2024, according to calculations by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank that tracks battlefield movements and developments.
“We continue to advance further in the Kursk region,” Zelensky said Wednesday, “from one to two kilometers in various areas since the start of the day.”
“We have captured more than 100 Russian servicemen during this period,” he added.
George Barros, the ISW’s Russia team and geospatial intelligence team lead, told The Post the Ukrainian incursion is forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to reassess the future of the war.
“Russia now has to decide whether or not to allocate a substantial amount of troops and resources to protect the 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) border,” Barros said.
“For a majority of the war, Russia has had the luxury of keeping the border largely unmanned, and Ukraine’s operation proved its weakness,” he added.
Should Russia conclude that the border is no longer dormant, Barros said, Putin and the Kremlin will be faced with dilemma after dilemma and new costs for its invasion plans.
While the war in Ukraine has been largely seen by the public as a stalemate in recent months, Moscow has been making slow but steady advances in the Donbas and Donetsk regions.
The operations, however, have cost Russia significantly, with Ukraine claiming that about 300,000 Russian soldiers have been killed over the last eight months.
While that number could not be independently verified, wartime experts agree that Moscow has lost a lot of manpower compared to the amount of land it’s seized.
“Despite making marginal gains, Russia has not been able to achieve victory there, and they’ve suffered staggering casualties,” retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former US Army vice chief of staff and chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, told The Post.
Regardless of the losses, Russia mounted a successful invasion in May, opening a new front in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, which saw intense fighting and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.
The invasion, however, only netted Moscow about 96 square miles of territory, its largest single gain in the second half of the ongoing war, according to a Telegram analysis.
In response to the Kursk incursion, Putin and his advisers have ordered troops fighting on other fronts to help repel the occupying Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian army spokesman Dmytro Lykhoviy said Tuesday.
While Ukraine has kept mum on its goals in suddenly mounting a large incursion into Russia, analysts speculate that the attack aims to force Russia to pull back from the front lines and allow Kyiv’s forces some respite before mounting a counterattack.
The operation could also be a way for Kyiv to garner a much-needed morale boost by taking the war to Russian soil.
“The optics are already bad for Putin and great for the Ukraine,” Barros said. “Ukraine doesn’t even need to hold the territories it’s taken so far to force Russia to change its calculations.
Some have also predicted that the seized land could serve as a bargaining chip in possible future cease-fire negotiations.
“Hopefully, if everything goes well, the presence of the Ukrainian troops in Russia will serve as a force to change the dynamics of the war, and it will increase our negotiating power, for example, in the context of the possible peace initiatives,” a Ukrainian government official told CNBC.
Zelensky said the offensive’s main goal was to put “pressure on the aggressor” and finally take the war to Moscow after two years of Kremlin propaganda assuring its citizens that the war would not affect everyday life in Russia.
An estimated 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate Kursk as the Ukrainian army advanced.
“Russia brought war to others, and now it is coming home,” Zelensky said.
“Russia must be forced into peace if Putin wants to continue waging war so badly,” he added.
Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi has said Kyiv has no plans to annex the seized territory the same way Moscow did with Crimea.
With Post wires
