In recent days, the Russian army has regained control over a number of towns in Russia’s Kursk region, which had been held by Ukrainian forces since August last year. On March 13, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that Russian troops had regained control of the city of Sudzha. There was no official confirmation of this as yet from the Ukrainian side.
Recently, Russian media reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin had visited troops at a command post in the Kursk region. Putin appeared on camera in a military camouflage uniform alongside the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, Valery Gerasimov.
Why is Ukraine withdrawing?
On Wednesday evening, March 12, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, stated that fighting was continuing in the suburbs of Sudzha and surrounding areas of the Kursk region. He said the Ukrainian army intended to “maintain defense for as long as is appropriate and necessary.”
However, Syrskyi also emphasized that the priority was to preserve the lives of Ukrainian soldiers, and that the units would therefore “retreat to more advantageous defense lines if need be.”
Ruslan Leviev, a Russian opposition activist and founder of the independent organization Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), told DW that the Ukrainian military was withdrawing from the Kursk region in an orderly manner. He also said that, in doing so, the army leadership was aiming to save the lives of as many of its soldiers as possible.
Leviev did not believe the Ukrainian withdrawal from the Kursk region was connected to the recent negotiations between Kyiv and Washington. However, he did not exclude the possibility that it may have been slightly accelerated by the temporary suspension of intelligence sharing between the US and Ukraine, which was instigated, then rescinded, by US President Donald Trump following a heated exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House.
However, Leviev says a retreat has in fact been on the cards since December, when Russian troops attacked both flanks of the Ukrainian bridgehead in the Kursk region. After this, the military analyst explains, hardly any possibilities remained for Ukraine to supply its troops with ammunition, or evacuate the wounded.
Does a continued operation on Russian territory make sense?
Serhii Zgurets, the director of the Ukrainian consulting firm Defense Express, also believed that the Ukrainian army’s logistical problems, and the fact that they are significantly outnumbered by Russian forces, meant that the Ukrainian army would withdraw from the Kursk region. He told DW that Russia had stationed around 60,000 soldiers along this section of the front.
“The logistical component is the Achilles heel,” he said. “If Ukraine retreats to its own territory, this will improve the defense capability of its brigades.”
Zgurets did not think it made political sense any longer for Kyiv to maintain positions in the Kursk region for use in a possible territorial exchange between Ukraine and Russia, since US President Trump had completely ignored this as a potential component of negotiations.
“Military objectives are now taking precedence, and these have largely been achieved: minimizing the risk for Ukraine’s Sumy region, diverting a certain number of Russian troops from other fronts, and inflicting maximum damage on them,” the defense expert explained.
Among Western observers, opinions differ with regard to the outcome of the Ukrainian military’s Kursk operation. In an interview with the German broadcaster ZDF, Nico Lange, a former advisor to Germany’s defense ministry, assessed it as a success.
“From the Ukrainian perspective, it’s clear: As long as there is fighting in the Kursk region, those forces are not engaged in fighting in Ukraine. As long as the Russians are deploying their air force to drop glide bombs on their own villages, those bombs are not falling on Ukrainian towns,” Lange said.
In his view, the Kursk operation has revealed the weakness of the Russian army. The Kremlin demanded that it expel Ukrainian forces from Russian territory as fast as possible, and it was unable to do so.
Putin pays surprise visit to Russian front region in Kursk
Was the Kursk operation a mistake?
However, some Western experts have also criticized Ukraine’s Kursk operation, and consider it a waste of resources. Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, is one of those who take this view.
Miron commented that Russia did not transfer troops into Kursk from other fronts — in Donbass, for example — as the Ukrainians had hoped. Furthermore, she said, the occupation of Russian territories lost significance for Ukraine when it became clear that it would not succeed in capturing strategically important sites such as the nuclear power plant in Kursk.
“From a perspective of military strategy, it was a catastrophic choice,” Miron said. “It prolonged the line of contact, with Ukrainian armed forces having already, at that point, shortages of equipment and manpower.”
The Austrian colonel Markus Reisner believed that a definitive assessment of the outcome of the Kursk operation could only be made once the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Kursk — which he saw as inevitable — was complete. Only then would it be clear whether the withdrawal proceeded in an orderly manner, and what losses were incurred.
“The biggest risk factor is that chaos or panic will break out — a scenario that affected Russian troops near Kharkiv in 2022,” Reisner said. Back then, the Russians were not prepared for a Ukrainian counteroffensive, and were forced to beat a hasty retreat from Ukrainian territories they had captured. Many Russians were taken prisoner, and Ukraine was able to seize large quantities of heavy military equipment.
This article was originally written in Ukrainian.