CIt was the surprise of the summer. In a grim and deadly war threatened with a quagmire, Ukrainian forces launched, on August 6, an operation that no one, and certainly not the Russian aggressor, expected: to invade the invader.
Surprised by the audacity of the maneuver, the Kremlin watched as hundreds of its conscripts—at least those who were still alive—who were supposed to guard the border surrendered, evacuated 200,000 civilians, and watched the Ukrainian army advance. Nearly a month later, kyiv’s troops are still there, in the Kursk region, where they control some 1,200 square kilometers of Russian territory.
Did this coup change the course of the war? Militarily, no. Because, at the same time, Russian forces continued to advance in eastern Ukraine. The strategic city of Pokrovsk was about to fall, its population in the process of being evacuated. The front was collapsing again, even more quickly than at Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
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Rather than launching a large-scale counter-offensive to repel the Ukrainian incursion, President Vladimir Putin preferred to take revenge by raining missiles on several Ukrainian cities, the last of which, on Tuesday 3 September in Poltava, was particularly bloody, and by continuing the methodical destruction of energy infrastructure.
Politically, however, the operation is not without benefits. After the failure of its 2023 counter-offensive, so widely announced that the Russians had had plenty of time to prepare for it, this surprise incursion has boosted Ukrainian morale and denied the idea of a total impasse among their Western allies: Kiev’s army has regained the initiative. It has revealed – once again – the vulnerabilities of Russian intelligence. It has also countered the legend of inexhaustible Russian forces: where were these forces to chase away the Ukrainian “invader”? And if kyiv has no use for the Russian territory taken by its troops since August 6, since, unlike Russia, Ukraine is not in a strategy of conquest, this conquest can weigh in a negotiation.
Fear of escalation of conflict
President Volodymyr Zelensky has also provided a diplomatic justification for the incursion. The aim, he said on August 27, was to “force Russia to end the war”This is not the first time that the Ukrainian president has raised the issue of ending the conflict; he has made frequent reference to it in recent months, as pressure to negotiate has mounted in discussions among Western experts and diplomats.
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