On Aug. 6, multiple Ukrainian brigades invaded Russia’s Kursk oblast in a daring offensive prepared in almost total secrecy. Within a week, they captured more territory than Russia’s entire advances in the Donbas region so far this year—at a tiny fraction of the cost in casualties. While observers continue to speculate about the next phase of this operation, the Ukrainians’ systematic destruction of the bridges across the river Seym makes it clear that they are planning to encircle Russian forces and take another swath of Kursk. If the Ukrainians succeed, they can either entrench in a Russian buffer zone along the border or move further north. The Ukrainians have turned a war of attrition into a war of maneuver with a massive surprise incursion that U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham called “bold, brilliant, beautiful.”
On Aug. 6, multiple Ukrainian brigades invaded Russia’s Kursk oblast in a daring offensive prepared in almost total secrecy. Within a week, they captured more territory than Russia’s entire advances in the Donbas region so far this year—at a tiny fraction of the cost in casualties. While observers continue to speculate about the next phase of this operation, the Ukrainians’ systematic destruction of the bridges across the river Seym makes it clear that they are planning to encircle Russian forces and take another swath of Kursk. If the Ukrainians succeed, they can either entrench in a Russian buffer zone along the border or move further north. The Ukrainians have turned a war of attrition into a war of maneuver with a massive surprise incursion that U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham called “bold, brilliant, beautiful.”
Observers trying to make sense of Russia’s war against Ukraine have invoked a host of historical comparisons. In the Donbas, a brutal war of attrition across a barely moving frontline recalls the Western Front in World War I. Others argue that the fighting in the hedgerows of Normandy in World War II is the more instructive parallel. When Ukraine routed Russian forces during a lightning counteroffensive in Kharkiv in 2022, military analysts invoked the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.
To make sense of what Ukraine has accomplished and may still achieve with the Kursk offensive, it helps to go back even farther in time. Three parallels from the medieval and early modern eras are particularly instructive.
One important purpose of a raid into enemy territory is to humiliate it. An incursion like the one into Kursk demonstrates that the enemy cannot carry out one of the most basic functions of government—security—within its own territory. Panicked and enraged, the enemy may now make rash, counterproductive decisions.
In this way, the Kursk offensive is comparable to the campaign preceding the 1346 Battle of Crécy in northern France during the on-again, off-again conflict known as the Hundred Years War. The French had successfully employed strategic patience during previous English invasions: Philip VI, the king of France, knew that his English counterpart, Edward III, was straining his finances to the breaking point with his costly expeditions to France. On those previous occasions, Philip had financially outlasted his enemy by keeping the French army in the field, checking Edward’s movements, but not engaging in fighting—forcing Edward to withdraw once his money ran out. This was a smart decision during the late Middle Ages, when individual commanders had little control over the course of battles once they began; as the German military strategist Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen wrote three centuries later, “it is better to force the enemy with hunger, ambushes, or fear than with battles, in which fortune or luck has more power than virtue or art.”
In the summer of 1346, Edward had once again marshalled his resources and was seeking battle. He goaded the French into fighting by embarking on a campaign of ostentatious destruction from Rouen to Paris, where he occupied the royal hunting parks just outside the city. Paris was choked with refugees. In an important precursor of modern concepts of public opinion, the French king had to address this breakdown of the social contract, whereby he and his nobles provided security in exchange for their right to rule. Ukraine’s offensive into the Kursk region similarly undermines the Russian social contract, in which the Russian middle class has traded its political relevance for the stability and security that Russian President Vladimir Putin supposedly ensured—until this war. More than 120,000 people have been evacuated from Kursk, while the Putin regime tries to downplay the first foreign invasion of Russia since World War II by urging Russians to regard it as the new normal.
Angry, humiliated, and badly rattled, Philip of France did not mount a coherent or unified response to Edward’s aggressive drive into northern France. New research suggests that Edward and some of his men knew the territory near Crécy firsthand and deliberately pulled Philip to that location to ensure that they’d have good defenses once they met him. When the French finally made contact with the English, Philip stepped into the trap, attacking even though his troops were tired and spread out, and even though his enemy was in prepared positions. He took these risks “because public opinion demanded it,” according to Jonathan Sumption, a historian of the Hundred Years’ War.
Philip was also moved by strong emotion: As the 14th-century chronicler Jean Froissart put it, Philip hated the English “so much that he could not renounce to fight,” regardless of whether fighting there and then was a good decision. Like the French at Crécy, the Russian army is now fighting in a context imposed on it by Ukraine’s military leaders. In one way, Putin has not yet taken the Ukrainians’ bait: Russia has not pulled troops out of the Donbas to contain—let alone eject—Ukraine in and from Kursk. But Russia’s counterattacks have been haphazard and poorly prepared, suggesting anger and panic in Moscow. If the Russian army does not clearly set out its objective and act in an organized way, it will not be able to respond and take back the initiative.
If Ukraine can maintain the offensive in Kursk, it may be able to force Russia to comply with Ukraine’s political goals at less cost than the deadly grind in southeastern Ukraine. This has an instructive parallel in a brief conflict between Sweden and Denmark late in the Thirty Years War. Denmark had been dipping in and out of the Thirty Years War, which devastated much of what is today Germany between 1618 and 1648. The Danes’ last attempt to intervene in the conflict in the 1620s had not been successful. But their domination of the strategic straits connecting the North Sea to the Baltic Sea was obnoxious to Sweden, which ordered an attack in 1643. The Swedish army fought its way across the German states to enter Holstein, from which they fell upon Jutland.
Like Ukraine’s surprise offensive into Kursk, the Swedish attack was startling and fast by the standards of that era. The attack was carried out in such secrecy that except for the Swedish general in charge, Lennart Torstensson, Swedish officers did not know where they were headed. One reason the Swedish army was able to move this quickly is that Torstensson had chosen the routes earlier, probably by having them scouted in advance. The Danes didn’t know Torstensson was in northern Germany until the Swedish army hit them. Similarly, a local Russian official said a Ukrainian soldier told him that Kyiv’s military planners spent two months deploying drones to map routes through Kursk before they attacked.
The Swedes did not fight to seize and hold Danish territory. Instead, their successful campaign allowed them to make heavy demands during negotiations: In the peace treaty, Sweden gained several provinces from Danish-controlled Norway and exemption from shipping tolls into and out of the Baltic for the next 70 years. Similarly, the Ukrainian attack on Kursk came at a time when Ukraine’s powerful allies may have doubted that it was still capable of fighting effectively; Ukraine has restored confidence that it can still beat Russia, an important change in narrative that could help secure future aid, and is now in a position to potentially trade the Kursk region for Russian concessions in future talks. By undercutting the Kremlin’s narrative of an inevitable Russian victory, the surprise offensive is also helping Ukraine strengthen its diplomatic position with key neutral powers like India.
My last example demonstrates how important these political calculations can be. Large operations like the Kursk offensive take place within material and social contexts that are shaped by the political constellation in which a belligerent finds itself. This example, also from the Thirty Years War, is of an unsuccessful raid: the army of the Holy Roman Empire’s advance into Pomerania in 1637. This was the empire’s first major action since the Peace of Prague in 1635, which established an alliance between the imperial government and the hitherto rebellious Protestant German states. At first glance, the Peace of Prague looks like a diplomatic triumph, establishing peace among many of the German states and putting an end to the German constitutional crisis that helped bring about the war. But one stipulation of this treaty was that armies were no longer permitted to finance themselves by extracting contributions from occupied friendly territories, which had allowed the combatant armies to bypass the budgets of their own governments (and caused famine, pestilence, and death among the plundered residents). Instead, the Holy Roman Empire and its allies were now intended to finance their armies from taxation, which they could not comfortably sustain. Although the requirement not to extract money or resources from occupied areas was an important concession to local interests, it hamstrung the imperialist task force during the Pomeranian campaign, and led to catastrophic losses—not from battle but from desertion, starvation, and disease. As the surviving muster rolls of the Holy Roman Empire’s ally Saxony demonstrate, this force simply crumbled.
Ukraine’s relationships with its Western supporters have also constrained the material context within which it fights. Because Washington believes that it would escalate the conflict, it has prevented Kyiv from using U.S. and U.K.-provided missiles for long-range attacks on military targets inside Russia, directing them to instead be used against Russian forces inside Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argues that the strike into Kursk disproves the White House’s theories about Russian red lines and their escalatory potential—and that U.S. restrictions should be loosened. However, according to Politico, U.S. administration officials are refusing to lift the ban on attacks into Russia for an additional reason: They believe it will prevent them from normalizing relations with Moscow after the war. Unlike Zelensky, U.S. President Joe Biden also fears the risk of nuclear war.
If an incursion into enemy territory has the proper objectives and is carried out with preparation and talent, it is usually successful. But the operation can wither if it does not capitalize on that success. The Ukrainian attack into the Kursk region looks like Edward III’s daring incursion into northern France, but the parallel isn’t complete: Russia has not only refused to take the bait and transfer troops from the Donbas front, but it continues to make advances there. As in the past, the military context is also often shaped by political decisions. Like all coalitions, Ukraine and its Western supporters, above all the United States, have had to reach limiting compromises. And like in all coalitions, their political goals do not fully align. Past wars offer ominous warnings, but it remains to be seen whether the lack of full U.S. support will fatally limit Ukraine.
The post How the Hundred Years’ War Explains Ukraine’s Invasion of Russia appeared first on Foreign Policy.
