Ukraine Goes into Kursk: A Dose of the "Russia Contingency" with Michael Kofman
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. This is a special preview of one of our members-only shows that you may have heard of called The Russia Contingency with Michael Kaufman. In this episode, Mike talks with Dara Massakot about Ukraine's offensive operation into the Russian oblast of Kursk. This is part one of that conversation. Part two can be available to you if you become a member at warontherocks.com slash membership. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to another episode of the Russia Continuously. Today with me I have a good colleague and friend, Dara Masica. She is also a senior fellow at Carney Endowment, works in the same program as I do. And although we talk quite a bit, actually since it's August, I think we've both been away and

And I have not had Dara on the podcast recently, so I thought it'd be great to have her back. And today we are going to talk about the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk or Kursk offensive operation.

We're going to try to figure out what we know so far, discuss what it means, what to look for, and give our takes, maybe exchange views on how it's unfolded so far and what the implications might be. Dara, it's great to have you back on the podcast, and it's been too long. Well, thanks for having me back. Yeah, so let's dig into it. We're recording this on Friday morning.

Right now it's August 9th. So this operation started August 6th. We're looking at it basically on day four. Big caveat, most visual evidence shows up at least a day, two days late.

from an operation like this, these things tend to be very dynamic at the beginning. And so pretty much everything you're seeing has a fairly significant lag effect and you've got a lot of fragmented data. Is that fair to say, Dara, that we have to be honest and upfront that whatever we know publicly, it's probably dated by

at least today. Right. I think the big takeaways we can deduce from what we see, but there's a lot of important pieces that are not visible to us. And I agree, things can get distorted pretty quickly. Right, right. So let me give a quick summary of where I think we are, what we know, and see if you agree. So Ukrainian regular forces have pushed in from Sumy

Russia's curse cobalt. They seem to have seized the town of Suja. They pushed Northwest towards the town of Snagos. They seem to be some distance outside, uh,

further northwest and they've advanced um north it's unclear how far maybe several settlements down the road towards gov and kursk itself and made a bit of a salient with sort of branching uh advances down several roads from it i think what i've seen in in reporting in papers and uh

discussions and open sources that Ukraine has captured something like 350 square kilometers, probably more now at this point. The big caveat I would make is that I don't think Ukraine actually controls this territory as of yet, or at least it's a bit early to make that determination. It's unclear what they actually control.

and what they genuinely intend to hold. There is definitely a salient that they have made. They overran Russian border guards and they overran the initial conscript units that were there, taking quite a few POWs prisoner. We don't know how many, but most likely it's in maybe the hundreds. And Ukrainian forces advanced fairly quickly.

driving down roads, but we have to keep in mind that driving down roads with advanced elements is not quite the same as controlling terrain. Although I know folks tend to shade these things fairly quickly. So there's a lot of speculative maps out there right now that are swirling trying to characterize the situation. Is this a fair kind of depiction so far from your point of view, Dara? Yes, I would agree. And I

I agree on, you know, it's not clear to me what they control. Do they control the municipal buildings in any of these cities? Where are the local police? Are they still in force? What's going on? Are they just moving up the roads?

How are they holding behind them is another question to me. I also am thinking a little bit about who exactly are the POWs that they have. I think that imposes different kinds of dilemmas on the Kremlin if there are any Russian conscripts among them. This is a particularly sensitive point for President Putin, and it has been for 20 years that conscripts not be involved.

I'm also watching who the Russians are trying to blame right now. And it seems to be shifting a bit to Chechen Akhmat group that was supposed to defend, but they ran away or they couldn't engage and couldn't close. But yeah, in general, there's a lot of movement right now. And whenever I see this type of maneuver pushing forward, I have to ask myself, well, what is the logistical plan?

For this, how are they going to resupply them? How are they going to refuel them? And that's the kind of information that's not really visible to us right now from the publicly available feeds. I mean, we see all the images of things blowing up and all that, but the important things that you and I follow are where are the reinforcements? What's the logistics plan? Until I have a better sense of that, that's the key part to watch for right now because we're already several days into it.

Right. Well, let's get into this a bit and talk about what we know about the operational structure. My view is, I came up very early on saying this is very clearly not like the previous raids organized by HUR. This is an operation clearly planned by the Ukrainian general staff. It's an operation comprised of regular forces with supporting probably elements of National Guard, maybe territorial defense, the Ukrainian Border Service.

from what people have been able to publicly identify there are elements of at least five different brigades. I want to be clear, elements. People, when they see different brigade numbers, they assume all those brigades are there. But that's not the case. This operation, as best I can tell,

is probably closer to a divisional-sized element, maybe, rough guess, 10,000 to 15,000 men. It doesn't look that large, to be perfectly honest. And I doubt that what we're seeing is just the tip of a spear for a couple of reasons. First, a number of these brigades were moved off of the line in Donetsk and other areas. A couple of them are brigades that had been recently created and were going to serve as a reserve.

based on what I know and time I've spent sort of traveling in Ukraine, doing field work there, there isn't a large number of excess manpower or additional brigades available for this kind of operation. So it's quite unlikely that Ukraine has a lot more forces to throw into this without having to pull them directly off the line. And a number of these units were pulled off the line too. If you look at some of the brigades involved, you got...

of 80th Airborne Assault Brigade, 82nd. You have 22nd Separate Mechanized Brigade. You probably have some elements maybe of 95th

and maybe 5th separate assault brigades as well, along with all sorts of supporting elements, maybe one of the newer 150 series brigades, like 150th. So bottom line, in terms of operational size, it's probably closest to the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv in 2022. It looks like it's following a similar template,

That's not surprising given that Sersky's in charge, right? It shouldn't come as a shocker. I think initially they were quite successful and have had a significant breakout. I do – from my first reaction to this, this looks deeply embarrassing for Russia. And I don't know what you have to do to get fired if you're Gerasimov, your favorite general. I'm not sure what it takes, but –

Yeah, well, I'll say this. I'll say this. If General Sir Vigin was still in charge of this, he would have built, you know, defenses and minefields on the other side of the border on the Russian side. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Yeah, I'd agree with you. It's that...

With this type of brigade involvement, of course, the general staff is involved in planning this. It's not clear to me right now, and I suspect that there probably is Ukrainian intelligence involvement in some of the units that are subordinate either to HUR or SBU that are involved in possibly scouting things out in an advance party at the start of this thing last week.

So I think there's probably mixed in with that number you gave, there's probably a good amount of...

that are subordinate to those intel units. Yeah, I share your concerns about the reinforcements. That picture is not clear to me either. And we know that there are persistent challenges with manpower in many of these brigades, especially acute in Donetsk. So if they've pulled units away from that main effort for the Russians to do this, then that makes things a bit harder down there in that region.

In terms of logistics, again, this is one of those things that's not quite clear to me yet. Who is responsible for going in and supporting these units? I would say that access is probably okay from Ukraine to move forward. I just don't know what happens to that logistics tail after it crosses the border to try to catch up with the guys who are already all the way forward.

And yeah, you know, your final point, this is embarrassing at this stage for Russia. Now, we are at the beginning of this and we don't know how it's going to end. But for the first week, this reveals a lot of problems that frankly shouldn't be going on on the Russian side at this point two years into this. Right?

Right when the war started, Russia declared a state of emergency or like a modified martial law in all of the regions that border on Ukraine. And this was one of them. And so what that does is it gives local law enforcement and the military enhanced powers to enforce curfews, to set up roadblocks, to put in minefields, to do all of these territorial defense activities.

specifically to make it easier to defend when you're at war with your neighbor. And the fact that we're two and a half years into this and they were fighting

either Russian intelligence did not pick this up, which is a failing, or they did pick it up and it got routed up the chain and then it went sideways at the, you know, general Lappin level who's in command of this area, or it went above him up to Gerasimov who, you know, Gerasimov, if you are a long time listener of this podcast, that means to fail in very intricate ways. Um,

It's not clear to me yet who will bear ultimate responsibility. I think it falls obviously on General Lappin. He's in charge of border defense in this region. And there seems to be some effort at blaming, again, the Akhmat group, which is the fighters loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov from Chechnya. But again, you start to see these appeals from Russian citizens everywhere.

And as those circulate, those will become very damaging to the Kremlin. And if you all haven't seen them, there are citizens, Russian citizens in these towns saying, you know, we've supported the war for two and a half years. We're a border town. You know, our men are off fighting and you all haven't evacuated us. You're not providing for us. There's no help. You know, this is dangerous and unfair. And that's a very dangerous message for the Kremlin to let

bounce around in the information space. We need to look at how this began, too. So it's clear that Ukraine managed to achieve operational surprise. But to be clear, folks like me didn't know this offensive was coming. I don't think anybody did. I don't think that they told the United States or others. And I have my own clear-cut theory as to why. My view is that tactically, we're

Russians actually had ISR coverage. In fact, there are videos posted from Russian drone feeds of them watching Ukrainian units before they crossed the border from Sumy into Kursk and as they were crossing the border. But as these types of operations continue to show, right, war is a human endeavor and technology may make the battlefield a lot more transparent, certainly at the tactical level,

but people make mistakes, they don't prepare for things like this, they don't react on time. And it's in some ways not dissimilar to what happened during the Kharkiv offensive, which people tried to portray as a surprise. Actually, Russians were talking about it for two weeks during the buildup before Ukraine conducted it, and the Russian general staff just didn't appropriately respond, prepare or whatnot.

The thing that I think has remained consistent, I'm glad you mentioned it, yeah, we see Russian forces continue to make certain types of mistakes. And there's reasons for that. First, Russia seems to do quite poorly when it has to respond dynamically in a situation like this. And so to some extent, you see Ukrainian units having a run of the place in these initial four days. Russian forces do far better when they're operating with prepared defense, fixed lines, more in position of warfare.

It's much harder for them, as best I can tell, to coordinate action between different types of units. That still remains fairly weak, and it's interesting to observe. The other big issue is that, who do you have to respond with? So, well, Russia clearly has reserves of second echelon units. It can pull units off from, let's say, Kharkiv axis if it needs to.

The issue you get typically is that newly generated units are inexperienced. They're also often led by people that aren't that experienced either. And they will typically perform poorly against experienced units. This has been the case on both sides. Ukraine has had the same experience whenever it's thrown a battalion from a brand new brigade to try to hold a part of the line, too. It's been...

It's been fairly consistent to this war. So what happens when you have to send reinforcement and all of your experienced units are along the line of control, they're sort of stuck on this 1,200-kilometer front, your reinforcements are probably going to be either newly contracted personnel or, even worse, somebody who's newly conscripted, a battalion that's primarily conscript staffed.

And they're going to be very unprepared. And you're going to see things like we saw yesterday, which is an entire Russian column

of trucks filled with infantry parked somewhere on the road, essentially getting wiped out by a HIMARS strike. They probably lost a company's worth of men. That's the kind of mistake the Russian forces along the line of control typically don't make, but it's definitely the kind of mistake that new units will make and will consistently be making when they're sent to reinforce and try to respond to this type of situation because they likely have very little experience and whoever leading them probably doesn't have great experience either. Yeah.

Yeah, I would agree with you. And if we think about that region, who might that be? Russia has several regeneration and training sites that are north of that area. They've probably pulled whoever was closest and who was reasonably available to do this, which is why you see that clumping that you're talking about with everybody jammed into trucks.

So I agree with you. When I saw the drone feed of the POWs surrendering, that is really inconsistent with a lot of the behavior that we've seen inside occupied Ukraine from units that have been fighting for years. They typically, they don't surrender. Ukrainians will say this. We've seen it on drone feed. They will shoot themselves in the chest with a rifle or their head. I mean, it's

you know, it's, they, they don't really surrender like that in an organized way. So when I saw that, my first thought was, are these conscripts? But then I think, no, they were too big. I'm like two. I mean, that sounds crazy, but they are, they were too physically like men with muscles, 18 year old Russian conscripts just have a very different bearing and different size. I can't tell, you know, for certain who that is.

But to me, it didn't seem like these were 18 year old boys from a base. So yeah, I share, I share your view. This, they were probably pulled from whatever training range was available, not experienced guys. And, and that's why, that's why you got that. The, again, if these were hardened guys rotating out of the zone, it would have looked, I feel like it, what we have, what we would have seen would have looked very different.

Yeah, so it's that messy period, but again, this is week... This is day five or six of this. The Russians are already...

again, it's not perfectly visible to us how they're planning on responding, but they will. So I would just caution everyone that week two of this is going to look very different from where we're sitting and looking at today. Yeah, it could go in a number of directions. And the Russian-Federal Harbour, for example, looked quite good in the first couple of days, but actually culminated by around day five, six. And this is a very different operation, different situation, but I'm just saying that

These things tend to be quite dynamic early on and then the offensive action can actually fairly quickly reach a culminating point depending on what you have to exploit it with. What do you have? Have you thought the logistics? Do you have additional reserves to throw in to sustain momentum?

etc., etc. Ukraine has air defense there, for example, but clearly this is a fairly narrow incursion. I've already seen them lose some of their air defense systems, franken-sams, what have you. We've seen Russian Lancet strikes and attack helicopter missions. So it's clear that Russian forces are suffering losses.

and getting personnel captured. My best guess is who you saw were likely territorial troops of some kind, reservists, because conscripts tend to be young, I think you're very right. But we don't know who that was. It might have been border guards. It might have been the formations they created, and they created a whole bunch of them.

to help guard the border against raids, but these are, I'm not even sure it would be fair to describe them second echelon troops in terms of who they likely staff that with. And clearly we're unprepared to deal with an actual mechanized assault and a planned operation by regular forces. Let's talk about objectives, and here we are sadly in the realm of speculation, but...

But we should try to make at least some educated guesses. So my first impression, let's see if you agree with this, is that Ukraine likely would wish to trade any territory that they end up holding for Russian withdrawal from Kharkiv if they could.

Alternatively, I think the minimum objective here is to create a Krinky type situation. For those who recall, Krinky was the lodgement that Ukrainian Marines held for a very long time on the left side of the Dnieper Riverbank and Russian forces, particularly the Russian airborne, spent a long time trying to attack it and cost them quite a bit in terms of losses. Ultimately, Ukrainian forces withdrew from it and abandoned that position.

And the purpose of a cranky type salient is that, of course, Russia would then have to throw a lot of forces at it since this is on Russian territory, right? And that could then pull in quite a few units. The challenge is that for us to evaluate or for that to be successful, invariably Russia will be throwing in reserves. And that's not even a guess. We already see that they're moving reserves into the area to counter.

The issue is that Ukraine pulled units off the line to do this and deployed units that were also what Ukraine had available in its reserve. And so the question now is, will Russia deploy a substantially larger force to counter this? Will it be worth it? What the balance of attrition will be? And most importantly, is it going to force Russia to...

to pull forces from active operations that will materially affect its current advances in Donetsk. This is the Pokrovsk-Terevsk-Shaseviyar axis, or the current positions that they are holding in that narrow buffer north of Kharkiv. Because so far, the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk has not stalled. If anything, it's actually accelerated in the last couple of days, right? And I don't know if that's going to hold. I'm just saying that

That, I think, is one of the litmus tests in terms of what the operation can achieve. If it does, it'll be very successful.

I've heard, well, at least I've read in papers, folks advancing the notion that, well, maybe this will be leveraged for some future negotiations. I'm pretty skeptical of that. I think people are advancing various types of speculative or notional objectives for the operation, whereas the reality is that the operation probably has concrete sort of day one, two, three objectives, and maybe there's a clear objective that they're trying to get to there.

I don't think it can be especially grand just looking at the forces arrayed there and how difficult it's probably going to be to hold that terrain. I do think that any operation has minimal and maximum objectives, and then they can change ultimately depending on how it unfolds. And that's why you can both be right and wrong in trying to guess as to what they are because something might have been the objective, let's say the planning objective for the operation,

but the operation ended up being much more successful than anybody anticipated, like Kharkiv did in 2022. And then you become much more ambitious and try to advance much further than you initially intended. Or alternatively, the operation is less successful and you pare down your objectives and political leaders will invariably say that the original objective was whatever the thing looked to have achieved.

Thank you for listening to this fascinating conversation about this fast-developing event. If you want to listen to part two, become a member at warntherocks.com slash membership. Stay safe and stay healthy.