Ukraine goes on the offensive

The Ukrainian army had seemed helpless in the face of Russia’s advance, and especially so in the Donbass, where Moscow was concentrating its offensive. Then the unimaginable happened: on 6 August, regular Ukrainian troops entered Russia’s Kursk region and began a rapid advance. The offensive is ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than in the first few days when it had the advantage of surprise and met with little Russian resistance. The big question now looms: how has this gambit changed the war?

From a military point of view, the jury will be out on the Kursk operation until the war is over. But the move has already had some tangible political effects, notes Irena Molyar in Espreso. Ukraine has proved to itself and its Western partners that it is capable of planning and launching a successful offensive, that its military is well informed about the enemy’s positions, and can therefore hit them where it hurts. The Kursk operation has clearly raised the morale of war-weary Ukrainians and given a much-needed boost to their faith in their armed forces.

Another positive outcome has been the large number of Russian soldiers captured. These will serve as exchange for Ukrainian POWs held in Russia. But the most important political consequence of the offensive is that it exposed the Russian side’s ambivalence. Another of Moscow’s famous “red lines”, always invoked when it threatens nuclear strikes, has been crossed and Vladimir Putin kept his finger off the button. Indeed, Kremlin propaganda is not even talking about a general mobilisation to defend the homeland, and has rather downplayed the attack and the occupation of Russian territory. On 5 September, Putin suddenly proposed a return to dialogue and indicated three countries that he would welcome as intermediaries: China, India and Brazil.

Putin’s conditions for peace negotiations are those set in Istanbul in early 2022: in return for a security guarantee, Ukraine would be required to accept neutral status outside any defensive alliance. But after two and a half years of war, nobody in Ukraine believes in any guarantees other than the one offered by Nato membership. In a poll in November 2023, 77% of Ukrainians were in favour of that outcome, with only 5% totally opposed to it. But there’s the rub: what is Ukraine to do when the West seems in no hurry to let it into Nato and yet the war keeps dragging on, month after month? The weariness is clearly felt on the other side too: Russia’s newfound interest in talks is a sign that it is trying to buy time to replenish its military resources, both human and material.

In an article published on the Polish website Nowa Europa Wschodnia, Andreas Umland discusses the role that major non-Western countries would play in any talks. He believes that for countries such as China, the Kursk operation has provided a good argument for forcing an armistice on fairer terms than those envisaged by the Russians.

Bombed power stations and the prospect of a cold winter

Ukraine’s civilians continue to be shelled in their towns and cities, and others closer to the front are also dying every day in the crossfire. Indeed, such stories have become so commonplace that the Ukrainian media no longer reports them systematically.

Last spring in particular, Russian missiles and drones caused extensive damage to the Ukrainian electricity grid. As a result, the country is currently enduring scheduled power cuts. Worse is to come with the onset of winter. In Oukraïnska Pravda, Youriy Koroltchuk, an expert at the Energy Strategy Institute, envisages two possible scenarios. The first is optimistic: if there are no further attacks on the network, allowing some of the infrastructure to be repaired in the coming weeks, and assuming a mild winter, then the power cuts will be limited to 12 hours a day. 

But if those conditions are not met then Ukrainian households can expect to be without power for up to 20 hours a day. And that is not all: the Russians have also been hitting communal heating infrastructure. Some Ukrainians will try to escape the hardship by fleeing to relatives or friends in the countryside. Others will go abroad. Perhaps Western societies will see these refugees as an unwelcome burden – or perhaps as a slap in the face to remind them that Russia’s war on Ukraine is far from over.

Poland’s ultimatum for Ukraine

Meanwhile, Polish politicians have found nothing better to do than to issue an ultimatum to Ukraine’s government over the Volhynia massacres of 1943. During the German occupation, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army carried out a massacre of Poles in Volhynia, in the north-west of Ukraine. It was followed by Polish reprisals against Ukrainians. These events continue to sour relations between Warsaw and Kyiv, even in times of war with Russia – a shared menace for both countries. And yet leading figures of the Polish government have declared that if Ukraine does not resolve the Volhynia issue, it can forget about joining the European Union, reports ONet. Needless to say, Ukraine will not be devoting much time to this issue in the near future. It has other things on its plate, and indeed some of its historians are at the front. What Ukrainians know is that their future depends on the outcome of the current war, not on events that took place 80 years ago.

It should be noted, however, that the Polish government’s rhetoric is intended more for internal consumption than for Ukraine. The new coalition is showing that it has no intention of tackling the changed attitudes in Polish society, which has been radicalised by eight years of national-populist rule. Indeed, it is rather choosing to exploit the situation by going along with anti-Ukrainian, anti-migrant, anti-German and perhaps soon anti-European public opinion. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has always had better press in Europe than in Poland, but even that could change as the reality of Polish politics pushes him down the slippery slope of Euroscepticism, points out Andrzej Sadecki in Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich. Implausible? See: Viktor Orbán. He too was once a liberal.