Ukraine’s Kursk operation has ended.
With Russia retaking control of its sovereign territory in the region that borders north-eastern Ukraine and Ukraine holding just a tiny chunk of territory while withdrawing troops, assessments have poured in regarding whether the operation, launched in August 2024, was necessary and effective.
To be sure, Kursk has always been a point of contention. Some commentators, like the professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn. Andrew Latham, dubbed it a strategic error already back in 2024, noting that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s military incursion into Russia “marks a departure from the realm of diplomacy and into the territory of strategic blunder.”
Other commentators like the nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center Vladislav Davidzon wrote after the incursion that “whatever its strategic significance turns out to be,” it “shows Kyiv’s frustration with the allies who appear, according to Zelenskyy, of being “afraid of Russia losing the war.” Accordingly, Ukraine, which had suffered substantial losses during the failed 2023 counteroffensive and had been facing increasing pressure from the Biden administration to launch a negotiation with Russia, needed a bit of “peremoha,” i.e., victory.
Fast forward to March 2025, and the assessments remain split, with soldiers describing the Kursk withdrawal “as a nightmare.“
The Telegraph recently published an opinion piece that dubbed Kursk Ukraine’s most costly mistake—in stark contrast to its earlier claim this year that “Ukraine is humiliating Putin at the worst possible moment” by “making important advances in Kursk Oblast.”
Most commentators, including social media personas like Jay in Kyiv, who briefly spoke to EP, emphasized that the Kursk operation has rendered a blow to Putin’s ego and successfully crossed one of the many red lines that Russia issued to Ukraine and its partners.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lauded the operation, saying that he is content with how it played out as it helped “withdraw a significant portion of Russian troops from Pokrovsk and Kharkiv directions.”
To understand the situation better, EP spoke to three military experts-practitioners from Ukraine’s Western allies who were asked whether they believed the Kursk operation to be a success or failure. This includes Ukraine’s International Legion squad leader, Craig Dana Jones, who fought Russians on the frontline in eastern Ukraine, losing his left hand and most of his left forearm.
Two others were granted anonymity to speak due to a lack of authority to talk to the press on the subject.
Success must be measured against the objective
Answering the question of whether it was a success or failure, a military practitioner from Ukraine’s Western European ally noted that it “depends mostly on the level of the objectives you consider.”
“If the objective was to relieve the pressure in Donbas, this was a partial success in that it clearly forced the Russians to shift a significant portion of their forces to Kursk Oblast (including North Koreans). It is only a partial success in that regard as it did not prevent the Russian force from advancing, especially in the Pokrovsk direction. Still, maybe, it worked well enough as the Russians were unable to take the city so far and have not been able to provoke a collapse of the Ukrainian front,” he noted.
At the same time, he added that Ukraine deployed “some of the best units to defend the occupied territories in Kursk against the Russian counterattacks,” and “these units were needed elsewhere and got attrited significantly.”
“So, in terms of pure military balance of force, I would say the result of the operation is a draw,” he said.
Then there’s the political objective.
“If it was to humiliate the Russians by surprising them again and calling out their nuclear blackmail by occupying a small region of their national territory, the operation succeeded 100%,” he concluded, adding that “if the objective was to convince the partners of Ukraine that the Ukrainian military is still capable of designing and executing bold large scale operation and thus convince the West that the Ukrainian can keep on fighting it was also a success.”
Lastly, if the objective was to occupy a chunk of Russian territory to have leverage for future negotiation, it was also a winning move at the time.
“It now seems to have already been exchanged for the 30-day cease-fire option. On this, I am quite pessimistic as the Ukrainian troops have already evacuated the salient (most likely under pressure from the Trump administration but also because it was becoming militarily untenable), but nothing of worth has been obtained from Putin, who already got something in return for a vague, no committal statement,” he said.
In his view, Putin will now ask for more in every step of the negotiations.
“It will only entice him to ask more at every step of negotiations in which he feels in a position of strength, and he has consistently demonstrated that he would abuse every opportunity he has to maximize his gains. But once again, the military situation made the deployment the only sensible option anyway,” he said.
In war, you must have victories
The senior command never made it clear what the objective was, says Craig Dana Jones, adding that there have been a couple of different theories pertaining to it.
Did they take it because they were looking for some bargaining chip? Was it actually meant to open up a whole new front? Did they mean to go to Kursk City or capture the nuclear power plant in Kursk Oblast?
“From my perspective, they wanted all of the above, and they needed to try to open up a new front to the battlefield. This 1200-kilometer front, which everybody identifies as kind of a World War One experience, is exactly that. It’s not like one big long trench, but it’s a zero line where two armies are just clashing along a 1200 km front,” says Jones.
He adds that he’s been to the significant parts of the front and depending on the time of the year and Russia’s desire to put pressure, the intensity along that 1200-kilometer front changes depending upon where the Russians want to put pressure.
“I lost my arm in October in Toretsk, and that was when the Russians were pushing like crazy in Toretsk. So I think that from that perspective opening up a new front to try to get around the Russians or open up a new area of the battlefield made a lot of sense,” he said, quoting the old American axiom “hit’ em where they ain’t,” adding that the Kursk operation followed that principle.
“You go where the Russians aren’t, and the Ukrainian military found a section of the battlefield that was lightly defended, and they were able to jump in and grab a huge piece of territory,” he said, adding: “Initially, it caught Putin’s thugs totally off guard and had some success. They took Sudzha immediately, which is a pretty good-sized border city inside Russia, and they were moving. But then they got stopped.”
Why did they get stopped? Due to air power.
“The Russians then put so much were dropping so many bombs, so it slowly stopped growing, and once it stopped growing, they were never able to build any sort of trenches or fortification systems, and it just started crumbling,” he explained, adding that Russians grabbed little by little and received North Koreans. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Armed Forces did not have enough men, material and, most importantly, couldn’t get control of the air.
“I’m 10 minutes from the main military hospital in Kyiv. The number of wounded that are coming in from that areas since early or mid-November from Kursk Oblast has been extraordinary,” says Jones.
Still, because the military had that initial success and because it was able to capture the imagination, it showed the Ukrainian people and the world that you could win on the battlefield, and in war, you have to have success.
Russians are unready to defend their land
“There is an old saying in the Army. When in doubt, attack,” says a military practitioner from Ukraine’s transatlantic partner.
According to this expert, while the Kursk operation had limited operational consequences, it must be evaluated within the context of resource constraints. “The front is very wide while the resources are limited. To make gains, you have to pick a point to concentrate those limited resources,” he notes.
“What objective in Ukraine would you have retaken instead? Since the Russian tactics are to level everything basically, anything you would have gained would be of questionable importance and may have killed as many Ukrainian civilians as it liberated. More consequential areas were likely more heavily defended and deeper in occupied territory,” he says.
Unlike his European counterpart and Jones, this analyst believes that another strategically important factor should be taken into account: Russians’ apparent unwillingness to defend their own country.
“The average Russian isn’t going to take up arms and fight Ukrainians. The fight to retake Kursk seemed like it was highly reliant on foreign troops. It was no Stalingrad,” adding that from a historical perspective, Russians hadn’t done well outside of their own country except against the Nazis in WW2, “who were exhausted by the time the Soviets pushed back.”
“Whether Napoleon or the Germans, the Russian successes came after their enemies overextended deep into their territories. The whole Russian strategic approach since the time of Muscovy is just to create so much depth that their core interests, like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, are protected. So I’ve been telling people, don’t look at the tactical significance in Kursk. Look at the reaction to the people who live there as they did not cause a mass uprising against the Ukrainian presence,” he emphasized.
The operation’s pitfall is that its effectiveness was restricted by the limited reach of influence toward the Russian people and the general indifference from those in power to these regions.
“They either don’t know about Kursk, or it is too far away to have fully changed their tacit support for the Putin regime. It may have made people like Lukashenko moderate their support because they might have had their own doubts about their people fighting back in similar situations,” he said.
There’s also the factor of not being able to predict how the allies would react.
“It could have been the first of a number of similar actions if international support were different. It also helped clarify Russian red lines. It’s now been shown that Russia won’t automatically use nuclear weapons or other means if there is fighting on their territory,” he said, adding that overall, it was a game-changer, though “maybe not in hindsight.”
Finally, the operation positively affected the Ukrainian military and the population’s morale.
“Again, I’m too far removed to know. But it did show audacity, which rarely has a negative effect on those things,” he concluded.
Kursk operation in a nutshell
In the summer of 2024, following the failed 2023 counteroffensive and the US’s delay in approving Ukraine aid, the Ukrainian armed forces lacked the necessary means to stop the Russian advances in eastern Ukraine while lacking both men and weapons. Meanwhile, it became evident that the Biden administration is nudging Ukraine toward a negotiated settlement with Russia by delaying the supply of weapons supply and ruling out Ukraine’s NATO membership.
Fighting in Russia’s Kursk Oblast began on the morning of 6 August 2024, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border near the city of Sudzha. Ukrainian troops advanced deeper into Russian territory and, within a few days, controlled several hundred square kilometers. This was the first Ukrainian combined-arms operation on Russia’s border territory since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On 12 August, the Ukrainian authorities acknowledged that the Armed Forces of Ukraine were behind the offensive. On 14 August, they stated that Ukrainian troops had established a “buffer sanitary zone” for self-defense purposes. By the end of August, Ukrainian forces controlled approximately 1,100 square kilometers of Kursk Oblast.
While Russia initially attempted to reclaim territory, it still prioritized the conquest of Ukrainian sovereign land while recruiting North Korean troops to deploy to Kursk Oblast in October 2024 to support Russian military operations against Ukrainian forces. Reports indicate that approximately 12,000 North Korean soldiers were sent, and NATO confirmed their presence on 28 October 2024.
Ukrainian soldiers are now retreating. It remains unknown whether the short suspension of military aid and intel sharing introduced by Donald Trump’s administration in mid-March in an attempt to subdue Ukraine into a peace negotiation really had an impact on the Kursk operation or whether Ukraine used Kursk Oblast as an argument in the US-Ukraine negotiations in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Read more:
- Ukraine and the West pay security cost of America’s Cold War bias
- After 218 days in Russia, Ukraine is ending its Kursk campaign
- “Plan B was needed yesterday.” Is Ukraine on the brink of withdrawing from Kursk?
