How invading Russia fits into Zelensky’s “victory plan”

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has said his bold incursion into Russia will form part of a “victory plan” that he’ll present to the US at a peace summit in November.

So what? A victory plan would be a fine thing, from the point of view of

• goals – establishing victory rather than merely avoiding defeat as the object of Ukraine’s war effort;
• aid – presenting the US Congress with something resembling an overarching strategy to justify continued military support; and
• morale – showing the Ukrainian public that hopes raised by the initial success of the incursion could be part of something bigger.

But Zelensky may get a sceptical hearing even so. By sending an invasion force into Russia for the first time since World War Two he’s alarmed Washington as well as Moscow. The gambit has paid off for now but at the cost by one estimate of 10,000 casualties, and without forcing a significant redeployment of Russian troops away from the Donetsk front.

And Putin could still escalate.

The view from the Kremlin. There are two interpretations of Putin’s failure so far to respond to the Kursk incursion with overwhelming force:

• He’s rattled.
• He’s biding his time.

Both of these could be true, but only one – the second – definitely is.

Reality check. The Kursk operation has not changed the military landscape in Ukraine:

• Russian troops have not withdrawn from the city of Pokrovsk in Donbas – a Ukrainian transport hub of more strategic value than Bakhmut whose fall is now seen as inevitable.
• Russia’s main military goal remains, in Putin’s words, “to completely liberate the territories of the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics, the territory of Novorossiya”.
• Blind to his own actions, Putin has ruled out negotiations with people who “indiscriminately strike at civilians, at civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities”.
• Ukraine has gained a territorial bargaining chip, but the territory Russia controls in Ukraine is 2,400 times larger in relative terms.

Ukraine’s real victory with the Kursk incursion has been to break out of a stalemate imposed on it partly by its own allies, without asking permission and without the sky falling in. In the process it has shown that

• Russia’s military intelligence, border guards and regular army were not capable of doing their jobs; and
• Putin’s instinct when surprised was to dismiss the incursion as a “counter-terrorism situation” and turn to the FSB rather than the army to deal with it.

Russia’s new normal. Russians know this is happening. 57 per cent of them say the incursion is their biggest worry, according to a recent poll. While 80 per cent approve of Putin’s actions, almost half say they are anxious nonetheless. In response the Kremlin has launched a multi-faceted (mis)information campaign designed to persuade Russian society to accept a “new reality” in which

• “the enemy” has broken through into Russian territory;
• inevitable defeat awaits him;
• but that will take time.

Ukraine’s new hope is that acting without asking could evolve from a tactic into a strategy. Nato’s red lines limiting Ukraine’s use of long-range western weapons on Russian targets have been exposed by the Kursk operation as “naive [and] illusory”, Zelensky said at his most recent press conference. Yet the price of ignoring them could be that the supply of those weapons dries up.

What’s more… The most potent of them all, the F-16 fighter, reportedly saw action over Ukraine on Monday, helping to shoot down incoming drones and missiles. But only ten have been delivered. Zelensky cannot afford for those to be the last.