Students of international relations, military history or armoured warfare will be familiar with the name of Kursk. Capital of its own oblast (province), and one of the principal railway hubs of European Russia in the 1930s, the city once had a population of two million. Much fought over during the Russian civil war then captured by the Third Reich in 1941, it was retaken by the Soviets in 1943. By then its residents numbered less than a million, either drafted by Stalin or executed by the Nazis. The front lines, which had moved back and forth, eventually hardened into a vast ring of steel around the city, projecting westwards into the German lines. The Nazis rashly and unwisely tried to snuff out this huge salient, between 5 July and 29 August 1943. 

Vladimir Putin will particularly feel the disgrace of these first boots intruding onto the Motherland’s terrain since 1944

It was a turning point of the Second World War and we are left in awe of the staggering numbers involved. In the Wehrmacht’s attack and Red Army’s subsequent counter thrust, vast numbers of men took part. German casualties alone were estimated at 150,000, but those of the Soviets at 950,000. However, history particularly remembers the losses of tanks and armoured fighting vehicles on each side – the Germans at around 3,000 and the Soviets 4,000. A German officer related to me how the defeat at Kursk meant he knew the Reich had lost the war: “all those reserves of men and tanks, thrown away in a few weeks. We were never as powerful again.” There has not been a battle of comparable size fought since, not even D-Day, in the Ardennes or Middle East, and the attrition of armour remains unequalled. 

More recently, in the early months of Vladimir Putin’s long presidency, Russian submarine K-141, named the Kursk, sank during a naval exercise on 12 August 2000 in the Barents Sea. Nearby ships did not initiate a search for over six hours, but when they eventually found the sub 350 feet down, over the next four days, the Russian Navy repeatedly failed to attach diving bells and submersibles to its escape hatch. Only then did Vladimir Putin authorise acceptance of outside help. The world’s media watched as a week after the sinking, British and Norwegian divers finally opened a hatch, but found no survivors. All 118 on board had perished.

Now the Russian people are associating the Kursk oblast with another bloody setback. At the beginning of August – historically a bad month for Kurskians – the armed forces of Ukraine launched an attack into the region, which is Russian territory. Hitherto the Eastern war which, following the ousting of a pro-Moscow president, began with the Russian invasion of Crimea and the 20,000-square miles of the Donbas region (the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk) in February-March 2014, had been fought exclusively on Ukrainian territory. Through strict control of the money and weapons they have given him, the international community has gone to great lengths to ensure that the fighting does not “leak” into neighbouring states. This fear of escalation has been and remains behind any tensions between NATO and Kyiv.

Escalation-avoidance is why Western missiles, tanks and F-16 fighters have been slow to arrive. For example, in May 2023 Britain and France announced it would supply Storm Shadow missiles, the fire-and-forget, pre-programmed Anglo-French smart munition with a range of 300 miles, that carries a 1,000-lb warhead, but stipulated they cannot be used on Russian soil. Once weapons and their platforms are committed to combat, you stand to lose them. In June and July last year, Storm Shadows were downed by Russian air defences, who recovered some of the technology, while last week Ukraine lost its first F-16 fighter. Such are the fortunes of war. 

Now the war in the East has entered a new phase with Kyiv’s current incursion into the Kursk oblast of Russia. Maybe twenty miles deep, and now controlling an alleged 100 settlements, it is nothing like the scale of 1943, but still represents a major humiliation for Moscow. Foreign invaders have now set foot on the soil of Mother Russia, just as they did in 1812, 1914-17 and 1941-44. Vladimir Putin will particularly feel the disgrace of these first boots intruding onto the Motherland’s terrain since 1944, exactly eighty years, having so closely tied his fortunes to those of Stalin against Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Several factors are behind Ukraine’s bold move of a few weeks ago – so bold that the attack came as an operational surprise not just to Russia but equally to NATO. Kyiv has learned how to guard its secrets. Indeed, Moscow cannot believe that Ukraine is capable of such a master stroke without Western guidance, although it appears true. One reason is the arrival of a new Ukrainian Chief of Defence Staff, the 59-year-old General Oleksandr Syrskyi, appointed on 8 February. Tensions had arisen between his predecessor, Valerii Zaluzhnyi who had led the defence of Ukraine since 24 February 2022 and oversaw last summer’s failed counter attack, and President Zelensky. More to the point, General Zaluzhnyi must have been emotionally and physically tired, punch-drunk after overseeing the successful defence of his country against all odds for two years, so the time was probably ripe for a change at the top. 

Another factor is Zelensky’s own vulnerability. He emerged the clear winner after a second round of presidential elections held on 21 April 2019, with a five-year mandate. His term expired this April, but he remains in office because Ukrainian law does not allow presidential elections to be held when martial law, declared in February 2022, is in effect. Thus, he needs to pull off a spectacular win to quell any unease at home over his direction of the war. Populations are by nature impatient for good news, as are international allies, and we forget that even Winston Churchill had to face down not one, but two, votes of no confidence over his direction of the war in January and July 1942. 

Apart from this, the coming American presidential election of 5 November looms large over the fortunes of Kyiv. Zelensky’s incursions into Russia not only rob the military initiative (if it was ever in the ascendancy) from Moscow, but amount to a hedge against a Trump victory. Ukraine is also worried about growing tensions between China and American-backed Taiwan. As Washington D.C. perceives it has a growing capability gap with Beijing, any hint of a worsening situation in that region will draw US military attention, strength and resources, whether under a Trump or Harris administration, away from Europe and Ukraine. Thus, we may have reached the peak of US military support to Kyiv, which could now diminish, leaving Europe to take up the slack. That is not to say military aid will cease, for America’s arms industry has significantly ramped up production and invested in new plants, and will not allow any president, even a sceptical Donald Trump, to destroy its best new customer.

Another problem is that Kyiv is also aware of growing Western war fatigue, which is higher the further from Russia you live. Those closer to the Russian Federation, particularly the Baltics, Poland, Czechia and Romania, are all ramping up military spending (Poland has just announced a rise in defence expenditure from 4.2 percent to 4.7 percent of GDP), but NATO countries have now realised the shortcomings of their “just in time” defence logistics, adopted in the 1990s. Logical at the time of glasnost, this was a strategic policy to emulate commercial enterprises and reduce vast military stocks of weapons and equipment, ordering replacement items only when the old items had been consumed or were reaching the end of their shelf-life. 

Kyiv also needs to position its forces before the season of Rasputitsa

The vast flow of kit to Ukraine and increased need for Western exercises to test alertness and readiness has put huge strain on the West’s defence supply chains, as NATO realises that military capability cannot be bought off the shelf, as though from an Amazon warehouse, and delivered next week. It is a fact much of the world is beginning to understand, though Western politicians, His Majesty’s Government included, remain reluctant to accept such uncomfortable reasoning, and still find a lot of other uses for money other than the creation of an improved defence manufacturing capability. Although acknowledging UK defence spending needs to rise from the current 2.2 per cent to 2.5 per cent, HMG will not yet commit itself to a date. The UK, France, Germany and Italy have become very adept in the use of rhetoric to support President Zelensky, but poorer in the timely supply of vital military equipment and shoring up their own defence infrastructure.

Defence technology has leapt forward at a pace of its own, at least since the Russian invasions of 2014, and manifestly so since 2022. For example, in terms of remotely-piloted warfare, which has seen the use of drones with all-round FPV (First Person View) cameras, others armed with machine-guns or grenades, naval suicide boats, aerial battles between drones, the use of personal drone detectors and jammers, and the establishment of Drone Attack Teams, we are with unmanned warfare now where we expected to be sometime after 2030. War has an uncontrollable urgency – and an expense – of its own. Although the Russo-Ukraine conflict became an infantry war after 2022, much of the human destruction has been done by drones, with an estimated 100 per day on all sides killed or wounded by unmanned, remotely-piloted machinery. It is a field I first wrote about in The Critic 20 months ago, and one where Ukraine has since demonstrated far greater combat flexibility and quicker innovation than Russia.

There is a wider logic to these advances towards Kursk, too. Ukraine is running out of manpower. It has conscripted most of the men it can aged between 22 and 60, and is actively looking for thousands of deserters, while the number of foreign volunteers is drying up. Its women fighters are all volunteers. The Kursk assault is thus a great morale boost for Ukraine’s bloodied, but unbeaten army and its wider population. Yet, Russia is losing people at a greater rate – an average of above 1,000 a day are being killed, wounded, captured or deserting, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. 

Thus, the new offensive also aims to distract better-trained Russian forces away from the highly-attritional battles on Ukrainian soil to the south-east, and rather like the battle of Verdun in 1916, relieve pressure on General Syrkyi’s bleeding army. Kyiv also needs to position its forces before the season of Rasputitsa – or Bezdorizhzhia to the Ukrainians – (literally the “season of bad roads,” where everything other than hard-standing is turned into thick, treacly black mud, followed by freezing temperatures and snow), closes down all fighting before the coming winter. 

In the wider world, Russia is still meddling, not only in Ukraine, but Georgia, Moldova, Syria and parts of Africa. Rome is worried about Russian presence in Libya, and its potential ability to turn on or off the flow of illegal migrants to southern Italy and Sicily. Paris is worried about the total interdiction of supplies of uranium by Russian-friendly Niger. There is evidence that Mr Putin’s regime has been interacting with Tehran and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, controlling shipping in and around the Red Sea. Furthermore, there is growing evidence of Russian Spetsnaz (Special Forces) reconnaissance of, and occasional attacks on, subsea internet cables and pipelines in international waters. Mr Zelensky must confirm that his country is worth backing in the wider struggle against Russia, and the Kursk attack goes some way to proving this to Ukraine’s allies.

Kursk is again causing ripples of unease in the Kremlin, and may come to be seen as a turning point in another war

Russian political and military thought, today known as the Gerasimov doctrine, has a direct linkage to the revolutionary ardour of Lenin, Stalin and the old USSR. Valery Gerasimov, current Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defence, advocates that global Russian influence should be spread by all means, military, informational, cyber and diplomatic, creating political instability amongst her adversaries and rivals. This is what it has been happening in Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. The West’s security agencies are worried that Russian “sleeper” agents, buried deep into civic society, are well-placed to initiate a massive hit against the West’s cyber infrastructure. Some consider this alarmist nonsense, taken from the pages of John le Carré, but most Western politicians have now woken up to the fact that we are in a Second Cold War with Russia, and have been since at least 2014.

The West pressurised Ukraine to counter attack Russia forces last summer, which it duly did, but with only limited success against several belts of thick Russian defences. These included anti-tank trenches, concrete obstacles, stout bunkers, minefields and artillery-targeted areas. Roads behind the lines had been constructed also, allowing Russian forces to rush from one threatened break-in area to another. They were the identical defensive tactics used by the Soviets with great success at Kursk in 1943, but this year’s invasion of the Kursk oblast encountered nothing of the kind. This was because all the fighting had occurred further east, on Ukrainian soil, and Gerasimov and his cronies dismissed the possibility that General Syrskyi would bring the fight to them. The Kursk frontier region was defended by poorly-trained conscripts, who have been surrendering in their thousands. This all amounts to a logic that if forced to a peace conference, Ukraine had little to trade apart from a few prisoners. 

Now Kyiv has Russian soil to offer up in return for concessions from Moscow. I don’t assess this as likely, as President Zelenzsky and his brave compatriots have invested too much of their national self-belief and blood in the defence of Ukraine. In the same way, President Putin has staked his own reputation on victory in Ukraine. They cannot both win; meanwhile the war has gained a momentum of its own and will grind on. All of this presents us with the possibility that the name Kursk is again causing ripples of unease in the Kremlin, and may come to be seen as a turning point in another war.