• Russia
• Ukraine
• Jack Detsch
• Amy Mackinnon

Ukraine’s daring incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, which began on Aug. 6, stunned officials in the West and the Kremlin.

The cross-border assault—which saw Ukrainian troops face little resistance as they pushed into Russian territory, seizing 28 settlements, according to the regional governor—has buoyed morale in Ukraine. Russia’s armed forces have made creeping territorial gains in recent months, but the Kursk operation has left the Kremlin scrambling to respond. The Biden administration was not notified by Ukraine ahead of the operation.

Yet one week into the surprise attack, Kyiv has remained tight-lipped about the goals of the incursion. It was even reticent about the fact that it was taking place, with President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming only on Sunday that Ukrainian troops were fighting in Russia.

Zelensky said on Monday that the Ukrainian government was preparing a humanitarian plan to accompany the operation—and was continuing to urge the West to allow Ukraine to fire donated long-range weapons deeper into Russia—but said little about what Ukraine was trying to achieve. He also made comments about the operation being a matter of Ukrainian security, as Russia has used the Kursk region to launch strikes against Ukraine.

With Ukrainian officials remaining taciturn, analysts have gleaned what they can about the operation using open-source images on social media and scrutinizing claims made by Russian military bloggers.

One leading theory—and one that Russian President Vladimir Putin has also posited—is that the incursion was intended to thwart Russian advancement in key battlegrounds in Ukraine. “Ukraine likely holds that, at a bare minimum, this operation will force the Russian military to deploy a much larger force to counter their offensive, thereby sapping their operations in Donetsk,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ukrainian forces faced little resistance when they blazed across the border last Tuesday, catching border guards from Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, off guard as they pushed into the largely undefended region.

“They knew what they were doing in terms of finding a weak spot,” said Dara Massicot, also a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that different elements of the Russian security services operated in the area, which may have hampered coordination between them and slowed Moscow’s response to the attack. “It’s not clear to me yet whether the Russians failed to detect them point-blank, or they did detect them but the machinery didn’t activate for whatever reason,” she said.

But the lack of clarity regarding Kyiv’s operational goals in Kursk, one of the most sophisticated military movements that Ukraine has made in the war to date, has current and former U.S. officials and experts concerned that Ukraine could be leaving itself vulnerable to a Russian counterpunch.

“The offensive is bold but risky,” Kofman said.

Ukraine appears to have committed some of its most effective units, such as the 80th and 95th Air Assault Brigades, to the weeklong push into Kursk. Russia has so far only responded with small deployments of first-person vision drone teams, military analysts said. But Ukrainian troops pushing into Russia are much less effectively protected there than they are back on their home turf.

Ukraine was already struggling to call up reserves with the Kremlin’s three-month offensive into Kharkiv already stretching Kyiv’s well of available manpower, and Russia, with a larger population, is reportedly considering a renewed mobilization of troops to send to the front line. Unless it is able to replace the fallen, Ukraine could be burning through troops that might be used for another counteroffensive push that Western officials have been hopeful could occur by 2025.

Even as Ukraine has pushed into Kursk region, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based military think tank, said that Russia was advancing along several axes of the front line in eastern Ukraine, such as Vovchansk, in the Kharkiv suburbs; and in areas of Donetsk, including Chasiv Yar and Toretsk.

But the move has allowed Ukraine to seize the initiative in one part of the conflict, bringing important psychological but also operational benefits for its forces, said former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk. “It’s not only an unpleasant thing for them [Russian forces], it’s also that you are following someone else’s playbook,” said Zagorodnyuk, who still serves as an informal advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense but stressed that he had no inside knowledge of the planning or ongoing operations in Kursk.

Beyond the tactical level, the sustained fighting on Russian soil has threatened to upend the Biden administration’s effort to contain the conflict. And former U.S. officials said that it left the administration in the awkward position of having to publicly stand by the Ukrainians’ actions despite internal reservations about the endgame.

“The Russians assume that we were right in the middle of this planning,” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. Defense Department official. And indeed, in a televised meeting with his senior defense officials on Monday, Putin accused the West of using Ukraine as a proxy to attack Russia.

As such, Townsend said that the U.S. administration “[doesn’t] have to be having a big garden party and shooting off fireworks” in response to the incursion, but they do “have to be supportive of this and see where it goes.”

At the same time, Ukraine appeared to be making the case to U.S. officials to speed up the delivery of weapons—and fast.

Though the Ukrainians were getting outshot by Russian artillery at a rate of 20 to 1 before the $60 billion U.S. supplemental aid package to Kyiv passed Congress in April, they are still getting outfired by a ratio of 8 to 1, said Yehor Cherniev, a Ukrainian lawmaker, as officials wait for more U.S. assistance to arrive. “It’s not a party still,” he said.

Analysts see a number of future scenarios for Ukraine’s operation in Kursk. “Ukraine may pocket its success in the informational space, because the operation has already significantly boosted the military’s morale, and withdraw and seek to press Russian forces elsewhere,” Kofman said. They could also seek to entrench with a view to trading the territory in negotiations further down the line or to bog down Russian forces, he added.

Ukraine’s top brass may have also gamed out a number of different scenarios for the operation depending on the Russian response, Zagorodnyuk said.

The incursion marks the second time in a little more than a year that Moscow’s hold over parts of its territory has been challenged. In June of last year, forces loyal to the mercenary Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin led a short-lived uprising in southern Russia, seizing the military headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don. Although it was quickly quashed, the mutiny was an embarrassment for the Kremlin, and Prigozhin died in mysterious circumstances in a plane crash two months later.

“When the Kremlin is faced with this kind of embarrassment, their response is always to overcorrect and then to crack down really hard,” said Massicot, the Carnegie Endowment fellow. “That’s kind of what I’m bracing for at this point, is what they’re going to do in this region,” she said, in reference to Kursk.