What follows is my English translation of an article originally in Italian, first published on Nilo Vlas - Blog Telegram channel on 23rd August 2024 (click here for the original) and then on ComeDonChisciotte.org today, 27th August 2024.
I do not fully agree with the author on everything and in one occasion I actually had to adapt the translation, though I also provide the literal translation as well. (All formatting original).
1) The attack
One must first begin to understand what is happening on the ground, in the territories of the Kursk region bordering Ukraine.
On Tuesday 6th August the first reports appeared about an indefinite number of Ukrainian military personnel crossing the border. Initially, war reporters and Russian military blogs derided the episode as yet another media incursion by the Ukrainians (similar to last year's in the Belgorod region), allegedly aimed at photographing themselves on Russian territory and then fleeing faster than the wind. Indeed, Ukraine has a long history of purely propagandistic and militarily useless operations.
After only a few hours, however, it becomes clear that the incursion is in fact a full-scale invasion, and Russian news portals fall into total panic.
Within two days Ukrainian units are spotted dozens of kilometres deep inside Russian territory, distances unheard of for at least a year and a half since the war became positional. The Ukrainians seem to be everywhere, appearing in dozens of villages at once and entering the town of Sudzha (population 5,000). On the border, several garrisons are surrounded and annihilated, or taken prisoner. The fate of many Russian units is unknown. In two days, the Ukrainians seem to have conquered an area covering one thousand square kilometres, more than Russia conquered in the whole of 2023.
But things are not really like that. So what really happened on the Russian-Ukrainian border?
In some ways, Ukraine's military operation resembles the Hamas attack of 7th October 2023. Border positions were eliminated with lightning speed, often in their sleep and, before the opposing command had managed to realise what was going on, units of saboteurs had already penetrated deep behind the enemy rear lines. However, these were rather small units, often less than twenty soldiers, whose task is to move quickly in manoeuvrable vehicles (in fact, no tanks were seen at first) and swoop down on enemy garrisons by surprise without giving them time to react. The purpose of this first phase of the invasion was not to occupy territory but to sow chaos between enemy lines. The saboteur units moved quickly and continuously, giving the impression of being “everywhere” at the same time and thus being a much larger invasion force than they actually were. In some cases, Ukrainians attacked enemy positions disguised in Russian uniforms, contributing to the chaos and the Russian command's loss of control over the situation on the ground. All this even led to the belief that the safety of the Kursk Atomic Power Plant was at risk, which in reality has never been in danger really [so far! Literal translation should be: will never really be in danger, but I do not agree on that].
The map of the Kursk front as of 22nd August [2024], according to Rybar.
In reality, the Ukrainians do not permanently control a thousand square kilometres, they simply move around the area, striking Russian positions by surprise, but without securely occupying these territories. The fact remains that it takes a few days before the Russians even understand what is going on in the region. And this huge mess, which has also caused over 100,000 refugees, has been caused with a rather modest deployment of forces by Ukraine.
In October 2023, more or less the same thing happened around Gaza. Hamas soldiers (soldiers indeed, because calling fighters with that level of training “guerrillas” is difficult) had suddenly eliminated the Israeli garrisons on the border of the strip and then, divided into small groups, had rapidly spread over a very large territory, terrorising the civilian population and liquidating the sporadic outbreaks of disorganised resistance. All this was done by constantly moving around without consolidating control over the territory, which, by the way, had never been the goal of Hamas. Even there, it was a few days before the Israeli command managed to regain control of the situation. For a short time, Hamas seemed to control a huge territory.
The difference between the Hamas attack and the Ukrainian one, however, is in the likely final intentions. If behind the Palestinian raiders there was no one to consolidate the success of the breakthrough, behind the Ukrainian ones other more substantial units with heavy weaponry entered Russian territory, with the clear intention of staying and barricading themselves in the newly conquered territories.
While it is understandable that Israel found itself unprepared after years of relative calm around the Gaza Strip, such negligence is astonishing for a Russia in its third year of war, and is symptomatic of a permanent deficiency both in the quality of the army cadres and in the organisation and coordination of the fighting units (but in Russia, the betrayal thesis is growing in popularity). Being well aware of the enemy's weaknesses, the Ukrainians made extensive use of electronic warfare systems in the first hours of the attack, which “switched off” the Russians' radio communications and thus compromised their effective coordination and reaction to the attack. Numerous Russian units found themselves isolated without the possibility of communicating with their superiors and allied units, ending up easy prey for the Ukrainian raiders. Such a situation could not have happened if the Russian units were equipped en masse with military radio equipment, resistant to the perturbations of electronic warfare, equipment that is still very rare in the Russian armed forces (but not in the Ukrainian armed forces), which is compensated for with civil radio systems.
Only a week after the start of the attack we began to glimpse a certain stabilisation of the front and containment of the Ukrainian advance, which, however, now controls some thirty population centres, including the entire capital of Sudzha.
Given the obvious fiasco in foreseeing and effectively dealing with the sudden Ukrainian offensive, there are many in Russia demanding the head of Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, who is certainly not at his first blatant failure.
Moreover, as with the Hamas raid on 7 October, there is also the conspiracy theory that the attack was planned and permitted. The motivation for such a “conspiracy” varies depending on who puts forward the hypothesis. It would either be a trap (which, however, does not seem to have been realised on the ground) or an excuse to use the atomic weapon (of which no preparations can be seen) or other more or less improbable reasons. Judging by the disorganisation with which Russia has reacted to this attack, I do not think these theories deserve attention.
2) Terror against the civilian population
Another similarity with the Hamas operation is the indiscriminate violence against the civilian population. Far from being senseless barbarism, the terror against the civilian population serves a very specific purpose, namely to force the enemy into a hasty and ill-judged response. In fact, the Russian reinforcements cannot be said to have entered the battle in an orderly and effective manner...
Without delving too deeply into the list of atrocities, including ambulances riddled with bullets, cyclists killed in the streets and girls shot in the kneecaps, suffice it to say that the Ukrainian Nazis are behaving exactly as everyone expected. And this undoubtedly has its practical-military purpose for Kiev: to force the Russians to throw large forces into a strategically secondary scenario to defend its citizens. Forces that would be more useful elsewhere, for example to support the Russian advance in the Donbass. At the moment more than two thousand civilians are under Ukrainian occupation and their fate is unknown. As happened in Gaza, many of them will probably become hostages when the Ukrainians withdraw.
A Russian civilian killed by Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region.
Obviously, in all this there is not only calculation, but also banal sadism (another element that abounds on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), reinforced by the sclerotic sense of superiority typical of Ukrainian nationalism, all the more senseless when directed towards the Russians, virtually indistinguishable from the Ukrainians themselves. It is worth mentioning that among the very few cultural achievements of Ukrainian nationalism in the first half of the 20th century are also peculiar racial theories (Dimitrij Donzov and Jurij Lipa, to name but a few), most of which overlap with German ones. The only difference is that the Ukrainians think they are the Aryans.
3) Zelensky's targets
Many are now wondering what Ukraine's real target would be with this surprise attack. Even in the Western mainstream media there are questions about what benefit this stunt could possibly have for Ukraine, while the negative consequences seem obvious. To defend its border, Russia could in fact decide to create a new buffer zone in the Ukrainian region of Sumy, which would turn the fleeting Ukrainian victory into a resounding own goal with further territorial losses. Or in retaliation, Russia could decide to deal the death blow to the Ukrainian power grid, which is already being held up by spit and was not finished by the Russians just for humanitarian reasons.
Certain risks for uncertain gain, then. Everything becomes immediately clearer if one does not think about what is advantageous for Ukraine, understood as a nation that wants to have a future, but what is advantageous for Zelensky and his establishment, politician-mercenaries who for three years have reduced Ukraine to a giant private military company in the pay of NATO.
As I have already explained on other occasions, one should not look for what is advantageous for Ukraine as a nation: following this reasoning, Ukraine would have been better off joining the Russian Federation many years ago.
So what is advantageous to Zelensky? Zelensky is in favour of all-out war, no matter if at the end of the story Ukraine comes out with broken bones or worse ceases to exist. This is because, as soon as the war ends, with no more excuses to postpone elections, Zelensky would lose power and with it immunity from all his crimes. Many will ask him to account for many of his decisions, for example why he rejected the highly advantageous Istanbul Agreement with Russia of March 2022. Without assuming an unlikely Russian Nuremberg, Volodymyr Zelensky would be torn apart by his competing power groups or even used as a scapegoat by his own establishment. Dragging out the war is the only way for the current president to stay in power, and it matters little if continued fighting makes a Ukrainian defeat more likely. His presidential term expires in May 2024 and he is already effectively usurping power. With the state of emergency and the police terror he has imposed on society under the guise of war, his head would also fall.
While the operation in the Kursk may seem counterproductive for Ukraine, it is certainly not in Zelensky's personal interests..
Hence, the events in Kursk immediately become clearer. After months in which the international arena was only talking about Ukraine to wish for peace talks, Kiev makes a gesture that postpones any dialogue with Russia to an indefinite future.
Although the Zelensky government claims that the purpose of the offensive is precisely to gain diplomatic leverage in view of the talks, it is hard to believe that coming to an agreement with Russia is really in its intentions.
Of course, the success of the offensive is a bitter snub for the Kremlin, but it is already clear, given the gradual stabilisation of the Kursk front, that this will not be the leverage to force the Russians to surrender, neither militarily nor diplomatically.
Alongside Zelensky's general aim of sabotaging any peace initiative, there may also be other secondary objectives. Certainly the aforementioned diversion of Russian forces from other scenarios, where the Russians are advancing instead.
But perhaps the most curious element is the occupation of the Sudzha gas metering station, the nerve centre of the last pipeline that still pumps methane to the EU (yes, it may sound absurd, but Russia in two and a half years of war has continued to pump gas to the EU through Ukraine, which used it for its energy needs and received lucrative royalties from the transit). If this station was to be destroyed, the last energy supply channel between Russia and Europe would be permanently closed. In short, this would be the conclusion of the work begun with the sabotage of the North Stream, and thus the crowning achievement of the American dream of violently separating the European economy from Russian energy resources, making it dependent on American ones.
Even this, however, does not mean anything good for Ukraine, a veritable kamikaze nation in the pay of others.
Many claim that Ukraine's goal was to occupy the Kursk Atomic Power Plant. However, it is highly unlikely that the Ukrainian command seriously hoped to conquer the nuclear site, which was quite far from the border and seriously defended. More likely, it had considered it sufficient to create a potential threat.
4) Special Military Operation
As recently as two years ago I wrote why the plan for a Special Military Operation failed at the start. I quote myself:
This is the result of the Kremlin's approach to war in its relationship to society. It is evident from the very name “Special Military Operation”, whose “speciality” underlines its “private” and “professional”, not popular, dimension. An attempt was made to pass the war off as a ‘state’ affair, in which the citizen was not to meddle, free to carry on quietly with his life as usual. The professionals would do their work in Ukraine and return victorious. The Ministry of Defence continued to reinforce this concept throughout the summer [of 2022, Author's Note], stating that the Special Military Operation was “proceeding according to plan”. Then, at the beginning of September, the Ukrainian breakthrough in Balakleya showed everyone that every plan had gone to hell. The professionals did not make it, and now it is up to ordinary people, as part of the partial mobilisation, to make up for the generals' strategic mistakes.
And again, from another article:
In the last article we saw how the very name “Special Military Operation” originally indicated the “private” and “professional” dimension of the conflict and how this induced a dangerous apathy towards it in Russian society. On a purely warlike level, the name also suggests something else: it was an operation conceived with the use of military force, but envisaging fighting of limited intensity, in anticipation of the rapid achievement of the set objectives. In short, although it envisaged the use of armed force, such an operation is the opposite of a conventional war. To give examples, the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Red Army could be defined as a special military operation. In the same way we could define the intervention of the Russian Federation and the CSTO in Kazakhstan in January of this year [January 2022, Author's Note] (admit it, you forgot.) The Second Chechen War in Russia is officially called a counter-terrorist operation. In short, similar formulations are used to refer to asymmetric and unconventional conflicts, such as regime change and counter-guerrilla operations. The problem with the current Ukrainian conflict is that it is instead a very conventional war, where two regular armies, with, if not identical, at least comparable capabilities, face each other in a “classical” confrontation, i.e. with a clear front line separating the two sides. The Kremlin's strategic mistake, at the root of all the problems that later arose in the course of the war, was to believe that it was possible to defeat Ukraine as part of a special military operation, avoiding conventional conflict.
These were my analyses back in the autumn of 2022, which have lost none of their relevance. Until today, however, there still remained one factor of asymmetry in this conflict, namely the fact that the entirety of the fighting (and thus the destruction) took place on Ukrainian territory. While Russian society had already been taking a blood toll for two years, it is also true that daily life for the majority of the population continued as usual, often displaying indifference to the ongoing war.
Now the war has come to Russian territory, and it has come aboard NATO vehicles waving Nazi insignia, and no one can pretend any longer, not even in the most remote corner of Siberia (although it should be said that Siberians have always been more involved than the snobbish and liberal middle class of European Russia).
With the latest asymmetry the last “specialty” of this military operation falls as well. The war from special now has to become popular, especially since Russian propaganda itself has always forced the comparison with the Great Patriotic War.
Vladimir Putin, however, does not seem to give these momentous events the importance they deserve. More than two weeks have passed since the attack, but the president has still not addressed the nation, nor personally the inhabitants of the Kursk region, who are quite disappointed that their misfortunes are being treated as a routine episode in this war. The Russian public is certainly astonished by the lack of a strong reaction from the president. In the past two weeks, Putin has made time to visit Azerbaijan, Chechnya and a number of other Russian regions, but not Kursk... Instead, the president's spokesman, the otherwise ubiquitous Dimitrij Peskov, has been on holiday since the start of the Ukrainian offensive. So what is Putin's plan? Is he secretly preparing a frightening response, or will he decide not to attach too much importance to what is just another battle in a long war?
Groznyj, Chechnya: Vladimir Putin watches Ramzan Kadyrov's son Adam practising at the shooting booth. Many wonder if the president does not have more important matters to attend to while the nation is under attack.
We shall see. But in the absence of an adequate reaction, and should the ouster of Ukrainian forces take months, the situation risks becoming a dangerous precedent. If a foreign army was able to occupy a piece of Russian territory without receiving an atomic confection in return, why shouldn't someone else, say Finland or Poland, try it again?
5) Conclusions
Summing up, the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region appears to be a big military gamble. Politically, however, it creates undoubted difficulties for the Russian Federation. If on the one hand the Ukrainians are wasting precious military resources in a strategic dead end, on the other hand Russia's weak and disorganised reaction to the invasion of its territory is creating discontent and mistrust in its leadership internally, while externally it is weakening deterrence towards NATO (Kaliningrad is warned).
It is now clear that Russia has given up on a rapid liquidation of the Ukrainian forces in Kursk, limiting itself to their containment, in favour of continuing the advance in the Donbass. Militarily the calculation seems correct, however much will depend on the results of the Russian offensive in the Donbass. If the Russian summer campaign were to achieve its objectives, in particular the conquest of the city of Pokrovsk, an important road junction in the Donbass that also opens the way to the Dnepropetrovsk region, then the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk would indeed prove to be a bad bet. Otherwise, however, the Russians would be faced with the political consequences of this attack without having any major military victories to counter, ending the third year of the war with a hand full of flies.
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As I wrote at the beginning, please mind that the original article was posted 4 days ago, on Friday 23rd August 2024. In the meantime, things have changed, with the Russian getting closer and closer to Pokrovsk - see latest SitRep by Simplicius the Thinker in the link below:
Also, as I wrote again in the beginning, I do not totally agree with everything Nilo Vlas wrote in the original article. Like BigSerge in his latest article (see link below), Nilo Vlas thinks that the Ukrainian “Kursk operation” (or “Operation Krepost”, as BigSerge calls it) was a Zelensky’s idea.
In my humble opinion, Zelensky is just a puppet and could not have launched this operation (however you want to call it) by his own volition and without support from his master and puppeteers in Washington DC and London. This operation was masterminded, organized and is still managed by NATO and, in particular, by the Outlaw US Empire and the United Kingdom (see for instance this article by The Times or recent admissions by Zelensky’s security advisor Mikhailo Podolyak, who said that Ukraine discussed the attack on the Russian oblast of Kursk with Western partners, despite their initial denials, as reported here).
Gilbert Doctorow’s For Russia, recovering Kursk is no walk in the rose garden (short read). In it Gilbert Doctorow reports that Frants Klintsevich, Russian senator and retired colonel, has recently claimed that “the two U.S. aircraft carriers and their escorts now in the Eastern Mediterranean may be there not to contain Iran but for an all-out attack on Russia using their jets to deliver nuclear strikes”! That may explain why today Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has warned the Outlaw US Empire that the Third World War would not be confined to Europe, as reported by The Guardian. [UPDATE: For more context on Lavrov’s statement and his exact wording, please refer to his presser/Q&A here]
Alex Krainer's The coming collapse of Britain, which ties all together: Kursk, Russo-Ukrainian war, Ukrainian economic crisis and the subsequent demise of the British economy, as well as the riots in UK. It is another long read, but it is really worth your time!
things can and do change more quickly then not.. he raises some good points, but i think it is premature to cast blame in putins direction... war is complicated and nato is very intent on saving its ass however it can here... we'll see how it all unfolds..
thanks ismaele...
things can and do change more quickly then not.. he raises some good points, but i think it is premature to cast blame in putins direction... war is complicated and nato is very intent on saving its ass however it can here... we'll see how it all unfolds..