Ukraine’s army escapes from Kursk by the skin of its teeth

The signals were coming fast and furious by the first week of March. Ukrainian forces in the Kursk bridgehead, an area of Russia that Ukraine seized last August, were becoming trapped. Aided by North Korean forces, Russia had tightened a noose around the Ukrainians’ flanks and was within firing range of their last remaining supply route. The Russians had also massed at least 50,000 troops, four times the Ukrainians’ numbers. It remains unclear how they pulled it off, and what role Donald Trump’s decision (subsequently reversed) to limit intelligence sharing with Ukraine on March 5th had played. Some Ukrainian intelligence officers insist they were blindsided. “The Americans are lying if they say we had everything we needed for defence,” one says.

For those in the trenches, the American pressure coincided with waves of Russian terror from the skies: drones, bombers, glide bombs. Many junior officers decided to flee, with or without equipment, with some retreating 15km on foot. It is not clear whether they all had orders to do so, but their decisions probably made the pullback less damaging.

The partial withdrawal—from the town of Sudzha and other villages inside Kursk—is a blow to Ukraine’s military leadership. But it is not quite the complete disaster claimed by Russian propaganda, which Donald Trump inexplicably decided to amplify in a social-media post claiming that “thousands of Ukrainian soldiers” were “completely surrounded”. That was never the case. There have been serious losses; the withdrawal was chaotic in parts, and Russia captured at least dozens of prisoners. But the Ukrainians retreated relatively intact and a sizeable force still remains up to 10km inside Russia, having taken up more defensible positions on high ground. “Trump appears to be getting his information from Russian Instagram reels,” one military commander says.

For now, there are no signs they intend to leave the area they still hold, regardless of Vladimir Putin’s wishes. The man in the Kremlin was humiliated by the Ukrainian operation last summer, which at one point involved the occupation of 1,200 square kilometres of Russian land. He has spoken viciously of the soldiers taking part, demanding those captured be “treated like terrorists”. Some of his troops appear to have taken the instruction literally. Widespread video evidence suggests some Russian units in Kursk have a policy of executing prisoners. Ukrainian military sources say the Russians began to take more prisoners as time went on, but they fear this may be preparation for a future show trial.

On March 14th Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, told journalists that the Kursk operation had “done its job”. He said he had originally decided to establish a presence inside Russia to protect Ukrainian cities such as Sumy from a boomerang offensive. One reason for launching the Kursk operation was to disrupt Russian attempts to create its own buffer zones inside Ukraine. “We don’t want it to turn into an offensive for the Russians,” Mr Zelensky said: “we have experience with that.”

Ukraine is reasonably prepared for the threat, having now fortified its border with several new lines of defences and trenches. Still, Russian reconnaissance groups of up to 30 men have already been seen in some Ukrainian border villages. In Sumy the atmosphere is tense. Military authorities have set up checkpoints blocking entry to non-locals, even accredited journalists. Soldiers have orders not to speak to the press.

A high-level source in Ukrainian intelligence says the Russian surge seemed timed to coincide with Mr Trump’s push for a ceasefire. On March 10th, during talks in Saudi Arabia, Ukraine agreed to an American proposal for a ceasefire; Mr Putin is yet to reciprocate. “The Russians will not agree to a ceasefire while we are still in their land,” the source says. “They don’t want us to have that bargaining chip when the fighting stops.” Some in Ukraine think Mr Trump may have knowingly assisted the process. One intelligence officer believes the American president was trying to make Ukraine more pliable by stripping away possible negotiation levers, which could be used for future territorial swaps. A government source says he thinks it was a coincidence. “What is clear is that Trump can’t stand us,” he says, “and that in seven weeks we have switched from being allies to customers, and with largely imagined debts.”

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk continues to divide opinion. Some top officers opposed it from the start; the commander of one of the four elite units spearheading the August 2024 offensive resigned before it started. Others who had been excluded from the armed forces commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky’s decision-making thought it a mistake. Some have since tempered their opposition, admitting it diverted (and killed) some of Russia’s best troops. “We’ve lost lots of good men, and maybe it was a rash decision”, says one intelligence officer, “but you have to ask what the tens of thousands of soldiers Putin diverted to Kursk might have done elsewhere.”

The chaotic final weeks have certainly left a sour note, and many question why Mr Zelensky and General Syrsky left it so long to retreat. But the operation was undeniably a boon for the nation’s morale in an otherwise grim 2024. It demonstrated that Russia was struggling too. “For too long Russia was seen through a kaleidoscope of fakes…the supposedly second-best army in the world, a nuclear superpower,” says a source in Ukraine’s general staff. “We showed the emperor had no clothes.”  As Ukraine enters its most uncertain period since the war’s start, the source said the army understood it has no choice but to dig in. Perhaps Mr Trump, too, will eventually realise that Mr Putin is not who he pretends to be. “What we need is one emperor to see an important truth about the other. But we need it to happen fast.”