• Geopolitics
• Military
• Russia
• Ukraine

It’s a symbolic “fuck you” to Russia, a cathartic response to the “Z” and “V” symbols on the Russian vehicles that invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The white triangles have become an iconic image of an operation that may just be the key to how Kyiv can win this war.

Watching the triangle being taped to our window was a little more uncomfortable for me. While they were there to ensure that we didn’t become the targets of friendly fire, they also clearly demarcated us under international humanitarian law as combatants in an active conflict zone as Russian drones constantly surveilled the skies above us.

Foreign Policy was granted unusual access to Ukrainian-occupied Sudzha, a town in southwestern Kursk, at a time when very few journalists are being allowed into a highly active combat zone. I was embedded with a group of volunteers called 1Team1Fight, bringing crowdfunded technological upgrades—including off-road vehicles; drones, both off the shelf and custom built; and drone signal-jammers and generators—to the brigades fighting on the fronts. One of these innovations was fitted onto our vehicle: a domestically produced drone detector, which scanned the frequencies around us to identify drones. As we drove, it beeped and flashed constantly.

Ukrainian soldiers are seen near a military vehicle in the village of Khotin, Ukraine, on Sept. 13. Khotin is a town near the Russian border that has become a military hub following Ukraine’s advance into Russia’s Kursk region. Andre Alves/Anadolu via Getty Images

The day before our arrival in Kursk in mid-September had seen the start of an ultimately unsuccessful Russian counteroffensive operation intended to take back the oblast from the Ukrainians, with heavy fighting audible in the distance throughout our time there.

Our excursion had to be brief, vigilant, and fast-moving. There were no weapons in our vehicle, and none of the volunteers are armed. But the importance of the equipment that they were delivering was clear on the faces of the weary but grateful commanders we met.

Drone detectors and jammers, often put together by Ukrainian engineers using 3D-printed parts, have become critically sought-after pieces of equipment for Ukrainian troops. Even if they only buy a few extra seconds of warning, that time can save lives.

There was no sign of Ukrainian withdrawal, or preparation for a withdrawal, as we traveled. Most of the traffic marked with white triangles was heading in one direction, right across that border into Russian territory. Kyiv hopes that its military gambit in the region will help it turn the tide in the war, which has been marked more by drone-haunted trench warfare than blitzkriegs.

Ukraine’s embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky stated in August that the Kursk incursion, which came without warning to Ukraine’s allies and startled Western capitals with its initial rapid successes, was part of his plan for victory, one designed to prevent the Russia-Ukraine war from becoming a frozen conflict that works to Moscow’s long-term advantage.

A Ukrainian soldier walks past a damaged store on an empty street in Sudzha on Aug. 16. Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

As we passed what was once the border post, we stopped briefly outside the Pyaterochka grocery store, a well-known Russian chain, at the entrance into the town of Sudzha, now infamous after Ukrainian soldiers stopped there to take photos of themselves to prove they were really in the enemy’s country. Now there’s a wall of graffiti outside, including the standard message that Russian President Vladimir “Putin is a dickhead” as well as the names of Ukrainian cities attacked by Russia over the past two-and-a-half years: Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia.

There were signs of fresh shelling throughout Sudzha and the occupied areas, and while most of the residential properties have been spared significant damage, the signs of fighting with small arms—such as the bullet holes—pockmarked some of the buildings in the center of town. But it does not compare to the total devastation left behind in towns that Russia eventually seized in Ukraine’s east, such as Avdiivvka or Bakhmut. Sudzha seems to have fallen with barely a fight.

While there were a handful of civilians still moving around houses on the outskirts of Sudzha, the center was a ghost town. In the town square, Russian flags have been replaced with a Ukrainian flag and a flag of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a movement of Chechen separatists who fought and lost several attempted independence wars with Russia.

Where a statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin once stood, only a plinth with half of a mangled bust still remained, now with photographs of the destruction of Ukrainian cities plastered onto the sides.

Around the ragged plinth was a message, painted in white across the pavement before it.

A destroyed monument to Vladimir Lenin is seen plastered with posters in the central square in Sudzha on Aug. 23. Fabien Nachi/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

“Russians—learn to fight. Your conscripts are rotting in the fields by their thousands.”

A wrecked Ukrainian self-propelled howitzer on the side of the road, alongside several burned pieces of Russian armor, made it clear that both sides paid a price.

The Ukrainian soldiers accompanying our group said that the Russians had started shelling the town. We passed a burnt building, showing signs of a shell attack, the fire flickering in its dying embers. Two Russian men were standing outside it, casually talking while it burned, with one smoking a cigarette with one hand while he gripped the handlebars of an old bicycle with the other. We couldn’t tell where that particular shell had come from, but the evidence overall suggested that the town was being hit from the Russian lines to the north and east.

The town is only a handful of kilometers away from the front line, where Ukrainian troops have dug in as part of a plan that Kyiv claims is meant to establish a “buffer zone” to protect its territory from Russian attacks.

The ultimate purpose of this impromptu excursion into Ukrainian-occupied Russia, however, was to get a glimpse the state-owned Gazprom gas metering facility just outside of Sudzha, the final operating point of the last functioning gas pipeline that runs directly from Russia to Europe.

Gazprom maintains that it continues to send gas through the facility onward into Europe, but it was clear from our visit that at least the administrative parts of the facility were currently completely abandoned. If the facility was still functioning, there didn’t seem to be anybody left to do maintenance if anything went wrong.

Read More

The Murky Meaning of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive

A short-term success doesn’t necessarily have any long-term effects.

Argument

|

Stephen M. Walt

We wanted to spend more time assessing the visible damage—which seemed to have scarred the facility buildings, but not the pipelines—but at that point, the drone detector in the lead car was beeping furiously, and we retreated back across the border.

Kyiv has secured a substantial political victory in Kursk whether it stays or decides to withdraw from this territory in the coming months. It has called Putin’s bluff and made a mockery of his stated “red lines” and nuclear bluster.

But some of the other strategic goals have been less successful. Zelensky was hoping that this operation would also expedite the decision to allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory using Western-supplied cruise missiles. While the White House has refused to change its position on this, Ukraine’s growing domestic long-range capabilities have been causing increasing damage to Russia’s back line in recent weeks, further embarrassing the Kremlin.

The operation was also intended to divert Russian resources away from the Kremlin’s campaign to capture the rest of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Oblast from Kyiv.

Yet despite sustaining staggering losses, Russia has continued to slowly advance in Ukraine’s east for months. Russian forces have just captured the Ukrainian city of Vuhledar, or rather, the smoldering remains of the city. Ukrainians have been fighting to defend Vuhledar since October 2022, finally falling after nearly two years of continuous warfare. But their defenses in the east are gradually buckling under the weight of seemingly infinite meat-grinder assaults by Russian troops on exhausted Ukrainian defensive positions.

Yet the Kursk incursion may have helped a wider strategic goal. By occupying Russian territory—and if Ukraine successfully continues to defend that territory—then should this conflict be frozen on current lines of control, Moscow cannot claim any kind of victory in this war when Ukrainian troops maintain a presence on its de jure territory.

A missile is seen near the village of Khotin, Ukraine, on Sept. 13, near the border with Russia’s Kursk region.Andre Alves/Anadolu via Getty Images

Much of the considered foreign-policy wisdom in the West is that Ukraine and Russia will eventually have to sit down at a table and make concessions to end the war. Yet no real effort from Ukraine’s allies, nor Russia’s, to actually state the terms of what kind of peace deal would be agreeable to both parties has been successful to date.

In the Kursk Oblast, however, a Ukrainian theory of victory has emerged, if only still in its conceptual infancy. Like the many successful prisoner-of-war swaps carried out between Kyiv and Moscow since the start of the war, the Ukrainians imagine being able to trade Russian land in Kursk, and potentially farther afield, for their occupied territories, at least in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, if not also Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. The offensive has, at the very least, significantly strengthened their hand in any future negotiations.

Despite its lack of recent elections, Ukraine remains a democracy, and the number of Ukrainians that would consider territorial concessions to Russia to end the war is growing. However, those voices are still in the minority, and the details of what those concessions could even be vary wildly. After two-and-a-half years of war, the Ukrainian people have no interest in surrender.

So if surrender is out of the question and a total military victory for Ukraine is unlikely on this timeline, then a negotiation based on mutual land swaps at least establishes a credible third route out of this war. Ukraine’s Kursk operation remains fraught with danger, and the war has not been trending in its favor in 2024. But with an occupation of Russian soil, at least theoretically, Kyiv has set a precedent that could—despite the many setbacks it has suffered—still end the war in its favor.