Two weeks after Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia, the Kremlin’s forces have slowed the enemy advance, with the hardening front line in the Kursk region of Russia setting up the next phase of a battle with great political stakes for both sides.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has pledged a decisive response to the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II. But so far, the response has been focused on containing the incursion rather than reversing it, raising the question of what Russia’s depleted military is willing to risk to expel the invaders — or if it is capable of doing so.

The unforeseen invasion of Kursk has exposed the ongoing intelligence failures of the Russian military as well as Russia’s shortage of battle-ready reserves in a war fought along a 750-mile front. Ukraine’s rapid gains have also upended the global perception of Russia’s slow but unstoppable march toward victory in a war of attrition.

But from the Russian perspective, Kyiv’s gambit has also created an opportunity for the Kremlin to speed up the depletion of Ukraine’s own limited forces, make gains in other areas of the front and turn a short-term political victory for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into a strategic defeat, at least in the view of Russian military analysts.

After being initially heralded as a brilliant military stroke, the Kursk operation could end up becoming a trap for the Ukrainian Army, these analysts said.

“The invasion of Kursk has merely expanded and prolonged a war of attrition, in which Russia enjoys a resource advantage,” said Vasily Kashin, a political scientist at Moscow’s state-run Higher School of Economics, who studies the political impact of Russia’s war.