OPINION: Kursk Salient, Euro Maneuvers, Clever Poles

Probably the biggest news this week was reports about the incoming Trump administration’s plans, or lack of them, for intervening in the war and imposing a ceasefire. I’ll take a swing through that later on in this review, but the fighting first.

The first image is of an infantryman from the 92nd Mechanized Brigade, which some of you will know as one of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU’s) most experienced and combat-efficient. They are now in the Kursk region.

Kursk and the psychological baggage of invading Russia

It is pretty clear that the Russians, last week, made a concerted attempt to reduce the Ukrainian perimeter here and they got their heads handed to them. As we strongly suspected last week, the Russians launched their big offensive to liberate the Kursk region and it turned out the Ukrainians were ready and waiting.

I’ve seen, and many of you probably also have seen, video of hundreds of caskets stacked four high in a warehouse, with more than a few corpses lying on stretchers waiting for a pine box to be built, and credible links between those remains and 810th Naval Infantry Brigade, which was one of the spear tips of the Kursk assaults. I’ll spare you that video.

Other Topics of Interest

Australian Foreign Minister Visits Kyiv, Confirms Reopening of Embassy

The announcement comes with the promise of further support and follows criticism within Australia of the government’s slowness to act.

You also can find credible images of soldiers from the 810th declaring they won’t carry out more attack orders, and POW video, on Ukrainian internet, of 810th soldiers confirming they were sent into the teeth of prepared Ukrainian defenses and were chopped to bits. Lots of it. More than usual. I’ve put together some random screen grabs of 810th Brigade soldiers now POWs, plus one KIA. It’s not possible to confirm it 100%. It’s hard to believe most of it was faked. It looks credible to me.

(There is also more than a little evidence that the Russians fell for the now-not-new trick of clearing a path through a Ukrainian minefield, and then somehow expecting that once the Russian combat engineers left, the Ukrainians would not use drones to re-seed the gaps with more mines.)

On the operational level, since then, the energy of the Russian assaults in the Kursk region has visibly fallen off. Although there are plenty of rumors that the North Koreans might be the next wave, they haven’t been spotted on a battlefield. If you go strictly by geo-located engagements that can be confirmed by more than just a report, like by a video or a photograph or reliable text reports from both sides, then for the past 48 hours, the Kursk sector has basically been quiet.

Just to be clear, First Person View (FPV) drones hunting down individual soldiers and vehicles is still 24/7 and very lethal, so “quiet” is meant here in the sense of ground operations.

Part of my job this week has been hunting for even a hint of North Koreans shooting at Ukrainians. The best I and others like me could come up with was a weird North Korean cannon, it fires like once every five minutes, spotted on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The theory is North Korean leader Kim Jong Un apparently decided Russian leader Vladimir Putin could use a couple.

But in the Kursk sector, sourced from both sides, it’s very clear the Ukrainians (meaning Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrksy and his staff) are committed to holding Russian real estate. We’ve seen new formations rotated into the Kursk salient (never thought I would ever, in my life, write those two words together in any but a 1943 context), like the Marines and the 92nd Mechanized Brigade.

There is a pretty hot debate going on in Ukraine about whether the Kursk incursion was a good idea or a bad idea, and in turn whether General Syrsky is the the greatest defensive tactician since Wellington or just a man-mincer like Haig. Wellington image attached. We’ll see, but as we watch events in the Kursk sector unfold I think it’s important to bear in mind a few things that are screamingly obvious if you are in Ukraine, and apparently a lot less so if you are not.

In simple terms, if one must fight the Russian army and if one is going to do that against near-total Russian air superiority and major Russian ground firepower, then it is far, far preferable to do the fighting in Russia, and make the Russians level their own villages and towns and infrastructure.

But on an personal, emotional level, for pretty much anyone here, it is difficult to communicate what a gut-punch for the average Ukrainian it is to drive by a home or office building just like ones he knows personally, or see it on video or in a photograph, because it’s not foreign and happening to “other people.”

It’s in his country, it’s property owned by people just like him. Excepting death and injury of the people themselves, the worst part of the war for the Ukrainians is the demolition and damage of homes and things they connect with normal life like schools or shops or cars or farm buildings. For them, you can’t blame a hurricane or a tsunami for what it does. But they sure can blame Russia and the Russians.

In that sense, from the point of view of the Ukrainians, Ukraine’s invasion of Russia and transfer of the ground war onto Russian soil, isn’t a clever move, it’s the only rational response possible. It’s not really about revenge. Generally speaking, I think it’s safe to say the Ukrainians would expect people living in Kursk region to be as pro-Putin, or more exactly, unwilling to oppose Putin – even if that means death and destruction for Ukrainians – as the rest of Russia.

But the Ukrainians know better than anyone that a politically-uninformed idiot probably shouldn’t be sentenced to live in a major war and have his house destroyed and relatives killed, just because what he thinks is stupid and dangerous.

The way retaliation is seen, I think, is that OK, war is destructive, it won’t stop quickly, and if it’s possible to decide where the fighting takes place, then better in the enemy’s country.

Yes that will be unfair to enemy civilians. But, we didn’t asked to be invaded and we are simply defending ourselves. I would say that’s how most Ukrainians see the Kursk incursion.

For Ukraine, this war is not total war, that’s a different thing, but it’s absolutely a national war. It’s not a developed nation’s expeditionary war where the professional soldiers live on bases with internet and then go fight with lavish resources, while back at home elected officials argue in legislatures about lots of things besides the war, and meanwhile, the entertainment industry manufactures fantasy movies and spectacle sports, and the electorate’s priorities are bigger houses and nicer cars.

In Ukraine, the war has left no one untouched. It has affected everyone’s lives. Every time the fighting shifts in direction or intensity, it is not something you just thumb past on your device.

Families might have to evacuate. Maybe one of your relatives or friends. Funeral arrangements might have to be made. Jobs might disappear. Maybe your job. Then how to live? Even if the last Russian missile raids didn’t hit one’s neighborhood, the next ones might. Live with it, and it wears on you. Everyone is human.

For the national leadership, weakening public morale isn’t a way to lose votes. National wartime morale and willingness to resist is existential, lose it, and that’s the fastest path to defeat.

I am tempted to cite the classic example, 1940 France, as an object lesson in what happens when national will to resistance collapses. But aside from the really unwarranted disrespect that would be towards the French nation and the French soldier – this is foreshadowing – the far more relevant historical reference must be the US voting public, and Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s hard not to see a pattern. I’ll stick in a France 1940 image but that’s only because I already illustrated 1975 and 2001 in the last review.

There is, of course, the negotiation/poker chip aspect of the Kursk incursion, i.e. now Ukraine has land to trade with Russia in peace talks. That may or may not turn out to be useful to the Ukrainian side.

But right now, considering the Ukrainians had their country invaded and tens of thousands of people killed and millions made refugees, I would say, anyone wondering why the AFU invaded Russia and what are they trying to do there, might ask themselves this question: “And what if the Ukrainians hadn’t? How would the Ukrainian people look at the war, their national leadership then? Ukrainian national will to resist — improved or harmed?”

I’ll close this section with a video link (hopefully now working) to a recent operation run by some guys from the 73rd Maritime Special Operations Center, in other words, Ukraine’s version of the US Navy Seals.

Apparently on Monday or Tuesday night, some of them got tasked with an emergency mission to drive fairly deeply behind Russian lines in the Kursk region. My understanding is the distance was – cross the line of contact, drive about 15 kilometers give or take in the Russian army rear area, meet up with a total of 16 Ukrainian soldiers splintered from their units and cut off from friendly lines, and bring them back.

A source tells me it went off without shooting and it boiled down to finding and then negotiating concealed routes that vehicles shouldn’t be able to use, to one or two (source isn’t clear) pickup points, and then do the return trip.

There was pretty much zero time to plan but all went well. Just armored Humvees, night driving on crappy roads. Supposedly air support was a ton of local drone overflights.

Those of us with a stake in balanced reporting on military skill and relative effectiveness might speculate how the real US Navy Seals, with the helicopters, airpower, satellites, analysts, and precision-guided missiles at their disposal, might have approached the same mission. But that would be even more off-subject than usual and the main thing is some average Ukrainian soldiers caught behind Russian lines got out of that mess thanks to some risk-taking and skill by some Ukrainian special ops guys.

The reason I thought this was worth attention, is not to rah rah Ukraine, but rather, to point out that the SSO (Ukrainian military special ops) only rarely makes details of its operations public and even more rarely its ground operations.

My guess, we have a video and some local reporting about this small success, because someone somewhere in the AFU understands the ancient truth of war – that soldiers will fight harder and better if they believe that in a critical situation, others will come to help.

This was a small, successful little operation – but also, it was the Ukrainian military leadership trying to prove to its soldiers that if you get surrounded you won’t necessarily be abandoned. Or put another way, and I would argue this is possibly the main reason Ukraine invaded Russia in the first place, Ukrainians need not to lose hope, they need to believe that it’s worth it to keep fighting.

Surely it’s coincidental. Europe isn’t clever enough to do tag-team diplomacy…wait a minute…

Although without question, the biggest Ukrainian geo-political news this week has been the Trump administration’s cabinet and senior official appointments, and all manner of readings of tea leaves, coffee grounds, and goat guts trying to figure out what that means for Ukrainians, there has been a lot of activity on the European diplomatic front as well.

In hard-nosed geopolitics, i.e. more than politicians saying things, without question the most important development has been that Russia stopped all natural gas shipments to Austria.

It was coming. Vienna knew it. They have been stockpiling gas since summer, prices are very likely to remain stable and homes from Salzburg to Graz will stay warm.

The point is, that leaves only two EU members — Slovakia and Hungary — heavily dependent on Russian natural gas deliveries. Would you like to guess which two NATO members, are most opposed to strong NATO support to Ukraine, and who want a quick end to the war with as many Ukrainian concessions as Russia wants?

The thing to remember is – Europe is big. This week, there was a real wave of European countries seen bilaterally coming forward to declare they think sovereign Ukraine is really important, and putting hard money behind it. I’m beginning to suspect it wasn’t random either.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov met with his Norwegian counterpart and Oslo confirmed $500 million assistance it announced in October was on track and a significant portion of that will go to arms manufacturing inside Ukraine.

General Syrsky, whose press section controls his public appearances about as tightly as Vatican media managers shepherd the Pope’s, had a telephone “conversation” this week not with the US Chief of Staff, which is a fairly regular event, but with the head of France’s Chief of Staff, General Thierry Burkhard. This is not a guy Syrsky is profiled to have telephone calls with, pretty much ever.

I am not saying that, in Ukraine’s time of need, as Ukrainians are fighting for their liberty against a foreign tyrant, they have appealed for help, and now France and Frenchmen are answering the call.

However, I am a fan of 18th-century equestrian art, so attached is a Mount Vernon painting of US President George Washington, a Trump predecessor, and the Marquis de Lafayette, a French officer important in getting French military assistance and aid to the American Revolution. The image is supposedly from Valley Forge, when the US Army was really in poor condition and lots of people were telling it and Washington just to give up and that you’re fools to try and resist a superpower like Britain.

Also this week, both French and Ukrainian media updated a long-running story about Ukraine’s 155th Brigade, which is the first major AFU formation to have been trained and equipped, in toto, abroad.

One wonders how it is that the US with its giant training infrastructure didn’t manage that in the past three years, but water past the bridge. In any case, the news is the brigade finished training at the end of October and now will deploy to combat.

You don’t have to be, OK, a Napoleon, to figure out that Syrsky’s handlers, or the bosses of their boss, decided to talk about Franco-Ukrainian military cooperation this week so everyone can know the deployment of the 155th is still on track. This is Ukrainian and French messaging to Moscow and Washington alike: Ukraine and France can field major combat formations in a war against Russia.

Possibly, the subtext is: if it comes to it, without the Americans.

It is worth bearing in mind that the 155th and this very real French contribution to Ukrainian combat capacity wasn’t and won’t be in the news in the US, at all. So in the US public consciousness, the 155th didn’t, doesn’t, and won’t exist, and the French have done nothing but take the US for a ride on Ukraine. This ignorance affects foreign policy decision-making.

The next section will pick up on that. Image of some promo video screen grabs of the brigade in training.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz phoned Putin and according to the general weight of rumors and German media, told Putin he was a bad guy and he really should stop bombarding Ukrainian homes and businesses, to which Putin responded Russia was defending itself and killing Nazis in Ukraine, and Russia is strong and will never back down.

Zelensky predictably said that this was awful German diplomacy and talking to Putin after two years of no communication was just a step towards ending Russian isolation. Of course, now the German political media, which pays a bit more attention to Ukraine than the US media, but right now is laser-focused on upcoming elections in Germany, is tying itself into knots trying to decide if Scholtz was trying to position the SPD as the party of peace, or maybe the party that knows how to handle Putin, when Germans start voting.

Me, I don’t know, but I am starting to have a hunch we are seeing the European diplomatic version of good cop/bad cop, where the continent comes up with an umbrella stance towards an adversary or a problematic ally, and then individual foreign ministries play to individual strengths, and press the diplomatic buttons they are best at, when maneuvering the adversary/problematic ally.

This of course assumes Europe as a geo-political entity could be effective and clever, and I know it’s not fashionable even to suspect that. But still, could it be, the Europeans talked it over and decided it would be useful to message to the Russians and the Trump administration that the Europeans are pretty hardline and in lockstep on Ukraine?

Had that been the case, then, an excellent way to do that would be for supposedly soft-on-Russia Scholtz to call up Putin to exchange incompatible positions both sides already knew. Maybe Scholtz was just grasping at electoral straws. But you have to admit, if one were to try and pick a person to tell Vladimir Putin the Europeans aren’t going to back down and that Europe is darn solid on that point, then the Chancellor of Germany — you know, Russia’s former natural gas cash cow — is a pretty darn good messenger.

Just this morning, out of Brussels, our dear friend Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, per BILD, telephoned Trump and presented the transactional part of the European stance towards the incoming US administration, to wit: “The EU is going to support Donald Trump in economic pressure on China….In return, Brussels hopes to strengthen its partnership with the United States in matters of supporting Ukraine and countering Russian aggression.”

So on Friday, Scholtz calls Putin, and then on Saturday von der Leyen calls Trump. It sure looks coordinated.

Then there are the British. Who, on schedule, this wasn’t a surprise, this week, published their 2024–25 Ukraine assistance bill, so once again (and I know I am on thin ice when I call the British “Europeans,” but being a New Worlder my alternative is to call them Australians or Africans, which I think would be even less accurate), we have a major European state signaling, exactly as the Trump administration decides what to to about Russia and Ukraine, that Europe is not kidding around on how angry they are about Russia thinking it gets to rewrite European borders and decide which European states may or may not be in NATO.

As we have seen, the British military may be small, but no one not even the Americans, deny their military skill. We have seen the British repeatedly accept political risk and demonstrate military daring. It was the British that first OK’d long-range Storm Shadow missile use by the Ukrainians, who were the first to transfer NATO-standard main battle tanks to Ukraine, and who have taken on pilot training for the Ukrainian Air Force because the Americans “don’t have the capacity.” Plus some other stuff I really shouldn’t mention here.

So if you are in a war and the British have your back, that’s the kind of thing third parties — even newly-elected American Presidents — can’t ignore.

It is, of course, a bit of an open question as to whether the Americans now in power have sufficient imagination even to consider Europe a player in European power politics. Great power is not always accompanied by great wisdom.

Dumb Polacks? Well, you have to ignore a lot to buy that one

I think, however, the best European diplomacy I saw this week came out of Warsaw.

No less than the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, took to Twitter/X (OK, his media managers and translators really, but he signed off on it) and graced us with this gem, posing as Duda’s personal view on the incoming US national leadership, and European security, Russia, Ukraine and especially Donald Trump in particular.

I quote:

“We know that President Donald Trump, as a person, is a successful person. Certainly, he is a born fighter, he likes to fight, and, above all, he does not like to lose — he is a winner, which was also shown by the recent elections in the United States. President Donald Trump respects, we also know that — the money of the American taxpayer. He has said it many times, he has emphasized it many times.

I myself have also heard him many times at the NATO forum when he said that all these burdens, expenses, which the United States implements, are money that is collected in the budget of the United States by American taxpayers — it is his duty to respect this money.

If we take this into account, how much the United States has already invested in helping Ukraine, how huge amounts have been transferred to the defenders of Ukraine in various forms of military equipment, financial aid, so that Ukraine could survive and defend itself, then my conclusions are clear — President Donald Trump, I cannot imagine that he would allow Russia to destroy Ukraine, a Ukraine in which the United States, in which the American taxpayer, for whose money President Donald Trump will soon be held accountable when he takes office, has invested such huge amounts.

This is a matter of respect for the American taxpayer’s money, and this is also a matter of America getting involved, and America not losing.”

Tell me this wasn’t a tour de force.

In terms of America, the Poles, to some extent, have the same problem the Ukrainians have. The American mainstream assumes the Poles are irrelevant and stupid and that they live in a primitive place much worse than America, that is only good for sausage.

Anyone who’s been to Krakow knows what a crock that is, but typical American voters don’t go to Poland on vacation much. So whatever Duda says as the President of Poland, is ‘ho-hum, don’t care’ as far as the US information spectrum and mainstream news reporting is concerned.

Not the same thing as Twitter though. You would have to look long and hard, to find a better example of how well President Duda and the Polish national leadership has Trump’s number.

Duda and the Poles took to Twitter specifically, and when they did they didn’t talk about the actual, serious issues – which include balance-of-power, containing Russian aggression, European security, and Ukrainian sovereignty.

Why? Because all of that is BO-RING. Topics a duly-elected American ADD politician couldn’t possibly be expected to stay awake during a briefing on.

The Poles knew, just like we all know, that the next US President is a fanatic Twitter reader, and the odds are near certain Donald Trump would read every single word of this message and take it personally.

It is inconceivable that the Poles didn’t calculate that.

I bet Trump’s handlers are pissed Warsaw just did an end run around them, and I bet they are even madder that it isn’t going to be the last time European foreign policy is going to work because some sneaky European flattered their boss’s social media.

BTW stay tuned to KP, I’m reading books written by some of Trump’s foreign policy advisors.

Let’s just say “useless Europeans” and “all-powerful America” is a recurring theme. But my final slam would be, of course, what are the chances President-elect Trump read his advisors’ books?

Reprinted from https://stefankorshak.substack.com/ with the author’s permission. You can find the original article here.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.