Notes

Ukraine attacks. For nearly a year, the war in Europe had settled into a stalemate, with Russian and Ukrainian forces both dug into fortified positions, unable to gain more than a few kilometers of territory.

Until last week. On August 6, Ukraine launched a sudden cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, seizing some 28 villages—and catching the Kremlin’s armed forces completely by surprise. It marked the first time since World War II that a foreign military had invaded Russia.

The operation seems also to have caught the United States by surprise—the U.S. being the Ukrainian military’s biggest funder and supplier. Kyiv didn’t tell Washington that it planned to go into Russia; and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been notably quiet about it—saying only that Russia had used the region to launch strikes against Ukraine and that Kyiv was drawing up a humanitarian plan for the area’s residents.

So far, neither Zelensky, his military, nor the country’s closest allies in America have explained what Ukraine intended to accomplish by taking control of all these villages in Kursk. So why’d they do it?

Zelensky has been clear that Kyiv doesn’t expect to hold the territory; the region has never been part of Ukraine. But the operation has clearly invigorated the Ukrainians: Reporting and social media show lots of illustrations of boosted morale among their soldiers and civilians—as well as somber questions and recriminations among Russians about how this could happen.

For his part, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says he figures Ukraine wants to force the Kremlin to redeploy troops to Kursk so they won’t be available to fight in Ukraine—and possibly to improve Kyiv’s negotiating position in any potential peace talks.

But Ukraine’s strategy is unclear—and the scale of the Russian response, uncertain. Ukraine has meanwhile faced critical shortages of manpower—and now, it has some of its most effective units exposed in Russian territory.

—Michael Bluhm