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You fight wars with the army you have, not the army you want. In this case there are two distinct Ukrainian armies: the trench army fighting grinding attritional static line battles dominated by artillery, and a much smaller maneuver army trained on donated western equipment. The latter army cannot function in a battlefield dominated by minefields and artillery + loitering munitions. The meta to hard counter minefields is combat engineering, and to counter artillery + loitering is air supremacy. Air supremacy means unrestricted air operations, which is incredibly difficult and which has a distorted public profile because the US doctrine has made it seem way too easy to achieve.
As such, the Ukrainian assault into Kursk is an economy of force effort, using an available resource in its optimized capability. Russia only has opportunistic air dominance, with the default assumption for any air operation being contested. As such the only overmatch Russia has available to deploy against the Ukrainian rapid advance forces is occasional longer range strikes, which while effective are insufficient compared to the current Ukraine-air-war meta of loitering munition, KA-52 attack helo and SU25 reactive strikes on advancing assets (pitch-up Mi8 rocket pods are only more useful against fixed emplacements). Russia has minimal drone assets in Kursk, and quick response close air support seems countered by air defense assets brought up by the Ukrainians, with the unknown threat scale posed by Ukrainian assets serving as an effective anti-air umbrella - the Russians do not definitively know that the Ukrainains do not have the capability to take out integrated fix-track-target platforms (basically see aim shoot, which must be a very fast decision cycle that does not work if the attacks are popup). With no minefields in place to funnel advances into specific directions and wide open traversable plains, the Russian defense is difficult and anemic.
As it stands, the Ukrainians seem to be running roughshod over local resistance, with an air defense umbrella of unknown size limiting the intensity of Russian best response. Furthermore, Russian ISR has been dominated by its drone assets, which are extensively deployed in Ukraine and not locally. I know for a fact that the Russians have extremely few COTS drones in any domestic defense units, with pretty much every fundraised COTS drone going to units on the frontlines. I would venture that a similar situation exists with organic ISR assets, with Orlans deployed where they are presumed to actually be useful (at the front) and not at home. Russian manned fixed wing aerial recon assets are anemic, and the anti air artillery brought up to Kursk seems to be impeding surveillance missions (though the Russian doctrine has to my observation never prioritized full spectrum battlespace awareness, likely due to incapability). It must be noted that ISR is actually somewhat difficult, and territory is really large. Even an incursion only 20km deep is really hard to find unconcentrated forces, and EW + AA prevent most detailed ISR assets. The most striking incident of this Ukrainian attack was the destruction of 1-2 companies worth of Russian reinforcements, with burnt out trucks visibly full of dead Russians after a Ukrainian artillery strike on the vehicles. The Ukrainians only found such a juicy target because the Russians uploaded videos of themselves travelling to Kursk to raise morale.... onto Telegram.
As to the strategic objective, who the hell knows. The optimal outcome is a rushed collapse of Russian lines within Ukraine as a disorganized command structure pulls units out haphazardly. That is unlikely to occur, and the 2022 Kharkiv offensive shows what happened when a rapid advance succeeded against Russian (held) territory: the local front collapses, and inertia prevents other forces from mobilizing in time, with the Ukrainian advance halting due to logistical limits as opposed to hardened resistance - building up minefields and fortifications is fast, but not 2-day fast. The limits of Ukrainian logistics to push through stiffening resistance will be tested fairly soon in my estimation.
The concrete strategic outcomes are, as commentators noted below, likely outsize PR outcomes. Ukraine is now seeking forgiveness rather than begging for permission to use its western assets, and videos of Ukrainians frolicking in Kursks is highly embarrassing for Russia. The messaging within domestic information environment in Russia is, to my read, the larger PR win. Russia has two contradictory narratives at play: the Russian army is the inevitable beast that is the envy of the whole world which keeps NATO afraid of taking Russia, and NATO is an incompetent meatgrinder which is throwing thousands of mercenaries and special forces to their death in Ukraine against qualitatively superior Russian tactics and equipment because the West is decadent and wasteful. The tension in the two narratives is: if NATO is so incompetent, why do we Russians need such a large army to protect ourselves from such stupid weaklings.
In this information environment, the worst case scenario is 'my large scary army is getting destroyed in the exact scenario they are supposed to be trained for'. NATO (Ukraine is basically just a NATO puppet after all) has invaded us, and we cannot defend against them. Russia can claim thousands of dead NATO soldiers and fire up DCS to show fields of burning tanks, but it can't stop its own citizens fleeing their villages and complaining extremely loudly as they run. Crimeans are not true Russians, but Kursk slavs are real Russians - blonde blue eyed white skinned orthodox Christians, true Russian blood speaking proper Russian, not Dagestani or Buryat subhumans, or dirt-eating khokhol yokels. These citizens are loud, complaining and asking difficult questions - 'what is our aviation doing' is a common complaint I've seen in Russian telegrams. Slow incremental advances past Avdiika which fell fucking 6 months ago are simply not sexy enough to drown out concerns about Real Russian Territory being tainted by Ukrainian homogays.
Low caste Dagestani and Buryati volunteers taking money to be blown up in faraway Ukraine is an ignorable outcome for the Russian state. It is not relevant to their daily lives, let alone existential. Actual Russian territory, fought on a land Muscovites can actually recognize, being overrun by NATO? Something has gone wrong, and given the shakeups in the Russian political scene - Dyumin is now the leader of Kursk defenses, which suggests Putin thinks the problem of Kursk is 'not enough political will' as opposed to 'boss we literally don't have the 4th Guards Tank Army anymore'
It's not the lack of political will, it's the clash of political egos that his alleged appointment is supposed to solve. In 2022 Putin learned that his army wasn't prepared for a protracted war against an opponent in a comparable weight class. In 2024 he might learn that the army and the state in general aren't ready for defensive operations on Russian soil.
US army isn't ready for defensive operations on American soil too, but that's because the US can conventionally destroy Canada or Mexico as soon as they try. Russia has this stuff in the doctrines, but as usual, everyone's been sitting on their hands and not preparing for anything resembling a cross-border invasion. The situation is salvageable, but requires cooperation between multiple centers of power that are currently busy assigning the blame to each other instead: the FSB, the armed forces, the police, the national guard, the EMERCOM, the governors.
Dyumin's appointment is about replacing the lack of a well-tested efficient process with an ad-hoc emergency authority that can stop any power games by having Daddy Poo on speed dial.
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