The Kursk counteroffensive, decisive for the ceasefire

BarcelonaCoinciding with the key meeting this Thursday in Moscow between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump's envoy to negotiate a ceasefireThe Kremlin has announced that it will soon recover all of the territory occupied by Ukraine in the Kursk province. In fact, President Putin has conditioned the "next steps" toward a truce on the advance of his troops in that region. "Depending on how the situation develops on the ground, we will agree on the next steps to end the conflict and reach an agreement acceptable to all," he said.

In recent days, Russian troops have made a powerful push on this front and have recovered, according to Moscow, 86% of the territory that Ukraine had invaded since its incursion in August of last year. Putin himself made a surprise visit to this point of the war front yesterday, Wednesday, to ask his soldiers to "finish the job" and completely expel Ukraine from this Russian province.

The Russian military offensive of recent days has taken advantage of the temporary suspension of US military and intelligence aid in Ukraine. Russian troops have been encircling Ukrainian soldiers and forcing them to retreat, to the point where they now control less than 100 square kilometers, compared to 1,250 at the start of the Kursk offensive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said he wanted to use the territory they had occupied in Kursk as a bargaining chip to negotiate with Russia when the long-awaited US-sponsored peace talks finally take place. But Moscow is not willing to allow this.

The Russian army has recaptured three towns in Kursk in recent days, including the town of Sudzha, which fell to Russia on Wednesday. However, fighting continued in the surrounding area on Thursday, while the ceasefire agreed upon by the United States and Ukraine has not yet been implemented, pending Putin's green light. Ukrainian military sources acknowledge to Reuters that Kiev will not be able to recapture all of the territory currently controlled by Russian troops, and that the recapture would have to be done through diplomatic channels.

Ukraine shocked the world on August 6 with an incursion into Russian territory. and soon occupied a portion of Kursk. It forced the evacuation of 200,000 people and in less than ten days controlled 1,250 square kilometers and 96 settlements, according to Reuters. "The goal wasn't to have a bargaining chip, but to divert Russian efforts to that point of the front they had left unguarded" and force them to send forces from the Donbas, explains military analyst Pol Molas. To reinforce this point of conflict, in addition to redirecting troops from the Donbas, Putin asked for help from North Korea, which last October sent him around 11,000 soldiers, according to data from Kiev. With this reinforcement, Russia has gradually managed to push back the Ukrainian army. In November, it had already recovered 40% of the ground initially occupied by Ukraine and last month it had already recovered 64%, but this week it made the final push.

Molas claims that the loss of US intelligence aid It has not influenced the Kursk front in any way, because the data it provided to the United Strata is key for long-range attacks on primarily moving targets, such as with HIMARS rocket launchers, but not for combat on the front lines. Defense specialist Jesús Pérez Triana agrees with this assessment. The suspension of military aid, which Donald Trump has used to force Zelensky to negotiate a ceasefire, has not affected the battlefield either because "Ukraine had sufficient arsenal to resist at least three months" without receiving any new US aid package, he explains.

However, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) points out that precisely this Wednesday, the day after US intelligence aid was resumed, Ukrainian forces carried out HIMARS attacks against Russian forces in the Kursk province. The Russian president's visit to the area, his first since the start of the war—and in military uniform—shows, according to ISW, "Putin's desire to use the capture of Sudzha to project strength and military achievements as a backdrop for the proposed temporary ceasefire between the US and Ukraine."

"A matter of honor" for Putin

"Recovering Kursk for Russia has become a matter of honor, because the entry of Ukrainian troops into its territory was more of an insult than a real threat: they failed to capture any major city, not even the provincial capital, Kursk," Triana points out.

It's likely, then, that Putin wants to recover all the lost ground on this front—or at least as much as possible—before agreeing to a ceasefire, but not so much because he fears it could be used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations, because the area in Ukraine's hands is very small, but rather to be able to present a positive assessment of his military operation.

Russia controls nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory, with a war front that has been frozen for months. And it has achieved this at an extremely high human cost, sending thousands and thousands of soldiers as cannon fodder, experts agree. Ukraine refuses to cede all this territory to Russia, but Putin might not even have enough. "Putin's ultimate goal of the war is to turn Ukraine into a state like Belarus, a puppet state that serves as a buffer to separate it from NATO, and he hasn't achieved that; quite the opposite: the conflict has strengthened Ukrainian nationalist sentiment even among the Russian-speaking population," he says. That's why he believes Russia will resist a ceasefire that "is of no interest to it right now," given that Donald Trump's United States has so far sided with its demands. "The only hope," says Triana, "is the fear that it could be caused by the same unpredictability as Trump, who has already said that if Russia doesn't agree to sit down and negotiate, he will interpret it as an offense and it could translate into more sanctions and pressure measures."

Molas, on the other hand, believes that the Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russia, "which guarantees a land corridor from the Donbas to Crimea," may be reward enough for Putin, despite not having achieved the goal of turning Ukraine into Belarus. "They can make up for the loss of personnel and are willing to do so, as has been demonstrated, but what they cannot make up for indefinitely is the loss of material," he says.