C’est magnifique: Ukraine’s Russian incursion
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre was General Pierre Bosquet’s timeless judgement on the charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in October 1854. Balaclava, on the Crimea Peninsular and today claimed as sovereign territory by Ukraine, is displaced by 400 miles and approaching 200 years from the Ukrainian incursion into Russian but, at first glance, the operation into the Kursk Oblast invites the same conclusion. To strip the best people and the best equipment from the hard-pressed front-line defence of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, in order to make a surprise but ultimately probably indefensible incursion into Russian territory, has a certain Quixotic quality to it.
It also means the Ukrainians have abandoned the advantage of operating on interior lines – the military technical condition that grants a defending force operating in constricted space and forced back on to its bases the ability to switch men, materiel and military effect more quickly across a tactical frontage than an enemy operating on exterior lines and with inherently less tactical agility. (Think Robert E. Lee’s masterclass against Ulysses S. Grant during the Wilderness Campaign of 1864 in the American Civil War.) No military commander forgoes this advantage lightly, so what is the Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, General Oleksander Syrskyi, up to and what effect is he trying to achieve?
Popular commentary has come up with any number of explanations but there are probably only two possibilities: the creation of a defensible enclave within Russia, or a raid. So let’s examine both in turn.
Much play has been made of the historic resonance of Kursk, the site of what has a claim to be the single largest battle in the history of warfare, fought out by Soviet and German forces in the high summer of 1943. To compare an engagement involving over a million soldiers on both sides to the divisional strength Ukrainian operation (circa 10,000 men) is risible and evidence of gross journalistic licence. What’s more, the savvy Ukrainians cannot afford the luxury of symbolic gestures and will only be embarked on something that delivers palpable military advantage.
That said, there is one striking similarity between 1943 and 2024. In 1943, the Russian exploitation from the preceding battle of Stalingrad had created a prominent salient in the area of Kursk that created a standing invitation to the Germans to “pinch out” the bulge in their front line by simultaneous attacks against the northern and southern flanks, an operation known in the trade as a double envelopment and a German tactical speciality. But the vulnerability of the Kursk salient was obvious to the Russians too and a herculean military engineering effort produced three concentric defensive lines on both flanks, while powerful reserves were held outside the salient to be committed only at the crisis of the battle. History records the eventual outcome: a decisive Soviet victory.
The Russian salient in 1943 pointing West bears at least a passing resemblance to the Ukrainian salient now pointing East and perhaps invites the same tactical response, by both sides. At which point armchair speculation needs to end and military reality intervene. A limited Ukrainian force has created some tactical space within Russian territory but is now operating on exterior lines, without the military engineering capability to create defensible barriers, dependent upon stretched logistic support, at the very limits of their organic electronic warfare and air defence capabilities and without a capable reserve to reinforce success or cover tactical failure.
Despite the almost comic incompetence of the Russian defence so far, it is only a matter of time before increasingly fixed Ukrainian forces will be on the wrong end of overwhelming volumes of indirect Russian fire, and eventually ground manoeuvre. The chances that the Ukrainian objective is the creation of a defensive enclave on Russian territory are therefore vanishingly small.
Which leaves us with the only other alternative: a raid. In the popular imagination a raid conjures up images of small bands of proverbially determined men, blacked out faces and commando daggers clenched in teeth. And, indeed, there are legion examples of that type of operation varying from the neutralisation of the German heavy water plant at Rjukan in Norway in 1943 to the more recent operation to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011. But the technical definition of a raid is no more than a military operation with a pre-planned withdrawal and so it can vary in scale in purpose. As originally envisioned, the Israeli incursion into Gaza meets the doctrinal criteria.
If the Ukrainian intention is to conduct a raid, we should briefly pause to consider how the operation was constructed. The withdrawal from contact and subsequent concentration of a highly capable force, including some signature equipments like the Stryker fighting vehicle, in an almost transparent battlespace is an extraordinary achievement of concealment and deception in its own right, before a single shot was fired. To then create an electronic environment which did not immediately betray tactical intent and subsequently attack across the Russian border at a point where complacent assumptions allowed local defence to be conducted under the authority of Federal Security Service (FSB), rather than the Ministry of Defence, and engage and defeat a hotch-potch mix of FSB, Rosgvardia (home defence) and Russian conscripts, speaks to tactical competence of the highest order. The Ukrainians were clearly confident of achieving operational surprise, in that the Russians may have seen it coming but were unable to do anything about it. All that remains is to conform to the doctrinal definition and now conduct a pre-planned withdrawal with the same elegance and brevity as the original incursion was made.
If this is what now happens, what effect have the Ukrainians achieved? The Russian government and defence establishment has been roundly embarrassed, tactical redeployments from Donetsk and Luhansk to reinforce the Kursk area are changing the terms of engagement in Ukraine’s eastern provinces and Russian domestic and international opinion is being re-shaped in a way which might prefigure diplomatic negotiations. Perhaps most crucially, Russian planning can no longer assume that the 1,000-kilometre-long international border it shares with northeastern Ukraine can be considered a dormant front; rather, military resources, revised command and control arrangements and the constitution of in-depth reserve forces will be required for its defence. In turn, this will have implications for the entire Russian campaign plan, and, in a seminal example of an economy of force operation, a tactical level raid might achieve strategic level consequence.
Intentions on either side are, as yet, unclear and I would prefer this article to be an attempt at objective military analysis rather than simply the award of a podium place to the Ukrainian general staff. Political imperatives may trump military judgement and insist that Russian territory is held through the US elections in November, in which case all bets are off. If, however, the Ukrainians can now break clean and complete the raid successfully, we will have witnessed something which is bold rather than Quixotic and may lead us to revise Bosquet’s judgement: c’est magnifique et c’est la guerre.
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