The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has announced that it has no intention of permanently retaining the small portion of Russian territory it seized over the past week.
But the country faces a difficult choice: keep its forces there to exert maximum pressure on Moscow or withdraw now.
Hit daily by Russian drones, missiles and bombs, and with its exhausted frontline troops slowly retreating in the Donbas, Ukraine was in dire need of some good news this summer.
With this extraordinarily bold and well-executed raid into the Kursk Oblast region of Russia, he succeeded.
“The most striking thing about this raid,” said a senior British military source who asked not to be named, “is how well the Ukrainians mastered combined arms warfare, deploying everything from air defence to electronic warfare, as well as armour and infantry. Impressive.”
The Ukrainians also appear to have used Some of the modern weapons supplied by the West – such as the German Marder and other armoured vehicles – far more effectively than in last summer’s failed offensive to drive the Russian army out of Ukraine’s southeastern provinces.
So, Where does Ukraine’s incursion into Russia go from here?
There will be those at the more cautious end of the spectrum who will argue that Ukraine has already made its point, that Putin’s chosen war must now bring some pain to the Russians, and that, despite recent setbacks on the battlefield in the Donbas, Kyiv has proven capable of mounting a sophisticated combined arms assault using all the elements of modern warfare.
In other words, retreat now with honour, after giving the Kremlin a bloody nose, before Russia brings in sufficient forces to kill or capture the Ukrainian invaders.
The dilemma
But withdrawal would defeat two of the apparent goals of the Ukraine incursion: put enough pressure on Russia to force it to divert some of its own troops in the Donbas and retain enough Russian territory to use as a bargaining chip in any future peace negotiations.
“If Kyiv retains Russian territory,” says David Blagden of the University of Exeter, “it can negotiate the return of their own territory from a position of greater strength. Kyiv will also have sought to change the impression among Russians that the Putin regime is all-powerful and encourage the Kremlin to seek a deal that would not jeopardize its grip on power.”
One thing is clear. The presence of foreign forces from Ukraine on Russian soil – a country that President Putin does not even believe should exist as an independent nation – is intolerable.
It will put everything it can into this problem, while at the same time maintaining pressure on Ukraine in the Donbas and punishing the Ukrainians with even more drone and missile attacks.
His irritation was evident in the television images. Russian journalists are seen chairing an emergency meeting in Moscow this week.
So, Has Ukraine’s gamble paid off?
It’s still too early to tell.
If its forces remain within Russia’s borders, Ukraine can expect suffer increasing ferocity from Russian attacks as Moscow’s reaction accelerates.
Blagden warns that “the demands on personnel, equipment and logistics to try to sustain the incursion and then control the captured territory will be significant, especially as supply lines lengthen.”
This has certainly been Ukraine’s boldest move this yearIt has also been the riskiest.
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