THE ‘STRATEGY’ OF KURSK

Everyone wants to be excited about the Kursk offensive. I get that, after months of retreats and hard fought battles it’s fascinating to see highly mobile forces move so quickly - they’ve ‘occupied’ as much land as the Russians took in the whole Avdivka-Pokrovsk region in ten months.
The Ukrainians still haven’t explained their objectives or reasoning and there are only two things that now stand out as having any merit.
Either they plan to seize land and try and hold it, to exchange for similar sized territory occupied by Russia, or they are aiming for a potential wide enveloping sweep to cut off the rail lines to the Kharkiv front, and potentially come down behind it, though it’s a hell of a distance.
How will they hold the area they take once the Russians get their act together, though right now they seem almost comically incompetent? Is this a take and keep operation? Ukraine doesn’t have the resources to open such a large front and occupy it for good. It seems frankly incomprehensible that they could manage this.
Ukraine doesn’t have the machines or the manpower to sustain such a huge front once it settles down- and all fronts eventually settle down in wars like this.
Is it a distraction- trying to pull Russian ‘reserves’ of which there are far fewer than you might think. Rather than reserves it’s more accurate to describe what Russia has as deployed forces that are slightly in excess of what’s minimal. It’s those forces, in Kherson and Zaporhizia that can be pulled away. Would that enable another strike over the river and an attempt to rapidly reach Crimea?
Only time will tell.
As it stands like it or not (and a lot of people don’t), it looks like a very large scale raid until such times as it becomes clear what the aims are.
The facts are that right now it’s causing a big surge in Ukrainian morale, the Russians are deeply embarrassed and knocked totally off guard. Putin’s face during a briefing Friday, looked like a thunderclap, and if looks could kill most of the defence ministry is dead.
Will whatever this is actually be worth the effort in the end? Again, only time will tell. One advantage is that if we can’t guess what the Ukrainians are doing - neither can the Russians and that’s going to drive them insane.

‘The Analyst’ MilStratOnX
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦!
@ukrainejournal