Ukraine's Kursk gambit upends some old assumptions about Russia and the war

The Russian military's plodding reaction to Ukraine's surprise attack — and Ukraine's plan to create a buffer zone in the Kursk region — should compel Western political and military leaders to question many of the assumptions they've been making about this long-running war.

A former top U.S. commander and a senior defence analyst with deep ties to Ukraine both say no one should be quick to draw hasty conclusions from the events of the past two weeks.

Still, a number of suppositions about the direction of the conflict have been upended since Kyiv launched this bold action — the first ground invasion of Russia since the end of the Second World War.

There are questions the West should be asking itself as this operation plays out. What are Russia's real capabilities? And what kind of capacity does it have to sustain military operations?

Implicit in NATO's multi-year resurgence and rearmament has been the belief that Russia won't stop at invading Ukraine and wants to carry on to places like the Baltic States. In Latvia, one of those states, Canada leads a multinational brigade.

Expert observers, mostly from European defence and intelligence agencies, have been warning darkly that the West has only a few years to prepare for a possible confrontation with Moscow, and perhaps with other authoritarian powers. 

Yet Ukraine — which has been on the defensive in the eastern part of its own territory — was able to launch a surprise offensive on Russia. Until this past weekend, the goals of that offensive were cloaked in strategic ambiguity.  

In his nightly address on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country's daring military incursion aims to create a buffer zone to prevent further attacks by Moscow across the border.

It was the first time Zelenskyy had clearly and publicly articulated the aim of the operation, which was launched on Aug. 6.

The first assumption demolished by this operation was that Ukraine wouldn't be able to regain the initiative until next year.

Phillip Karber, who teaches at the Washington-based National Defence University, said it had been passively assumed in the West that Moscow had the advantage, that it would keep pushing forward in the eastern Donbass region and that there were no other strategic alternatives.

"I would tell anybody who would listen to go attack where the Russians aren't," said Karber, who has close contacts in Ukraine's military establishment. "Try and force them to play catch-up. I think seizing the initiative and forcing them on the defence is good."

Some observers have speculated that Ukraine was trying to draw Russian troops away from the Donbass to relieve pressure on its forces there.

If that was the case, Karber said, the gamble "really hasn't paid off" and he fears the Ukrainians will soon face a determined counterattack on one or both of the shoulders of the salient. The Russians' aim would be to trap the Ukrainian forces in a pocket, a tactic the Soviet Red Army was very good at during the Second World War.