Ukraine's surprise invasion of Russia hasn't taken the pressure off the most dire front-line battles

A Ukrainian serviceman of the 25th Separate Airborne Brigade monitors the sky as he rides in a car near the front line around Pokrovsk, in Ukraine's Donetsk region, on August 31.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty/Serhii Nuzhnenko via REUTERS

• Ukraine's invasion of Russia, now about a month old, has produced some positive effects for Kyiv.
• But Ukraine hasn't eased the pressure on a key front-line battle, one goal of the Kursk invasion.
• Russian forces continue to advance toward the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.

Ukraine's surprising invasion of Russia has produced some tangible results for Kyiv, among them being that it has compelled Moscow to redirect some forces to the embattled Kursk region and exposed vulnerabilities in its defenses.

But a month in, the invasion so far has not produced some of the more immediate results that Ukraine was hoping for, such as easing the pressure on sectors of the front where Russian forces are advancing.

In Pokrovsk, a logistics hub in eastern Ukraine, the situation appears especially dire for Kyiv. Russia's best troops are fighting a grinding battle for the city and have made significant advances in recent days, according to Western intelligence.

Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi stated last week that an objective of the Kursk invasion was to redirect Russian forces away from the Pokrovsk direction. While Moscow has already redeployed some 30,000 soldiers to Kursk, these forces are mainly coming from other areas of the front line, he said.

"The enemy is trying to withdraw units from other directions, and on the contrary, it is increasing its efforts in Pokrovsk sectors," Ukraine's top general said.

A Ukrainian soldier walks past a car in Sudzha, in Russia's Kursk region, in August 2024.

AP Photo

Business Insider could not independently verify Syrskyi's figure, but US officials have previously confirmed the movement of Russian troops to Kursk from other areas of Ukraine.

Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank said Russia may have sent a limited force initially intended to reinforce the Pokrovsk advance to Kursk. However, these forces did not appear to have been engaged in front-line operations, and Moscow has primarily redeployed troops from the lower-priority areas of the front line instead.

"The Russian military command likely remains extremely averse to pulling combat effective units from frontline areas" in places like Pokrovsk and Toretsk, a nearby city under similar pressure, the ISW analysts wrote in a Saturday assessment.

"The redeployed units were likely reserve units that the Russian military command intended to use to reinforce the Russian grouping in these directions and stave off the threat of pre-mature operational culmination," they added.

A former Ukrainian military officer who goes by the social media handle Tatarigami said that Ukraine would typically move forces from quieter areas of the front line to stabilize more critical areas. But the Kursk invasion has limited the number of troops available for reinforcement.

Ukrainian army medics transfer a wounded Ukrainian soldier at a stabilization point in the direction of Pokrovsk on August 31.

Photo by Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images

"Does this mean that the loss of Pokrovsk is imminent? No, but the likelihood is increasing due to the balance of forces," Tatarigami wrote in a thread on X last week, adding that "despite Ukrainian efforts to draw Russian forces away with the Kursk incursion, Russian leadership is hesitant to redeploy significant forces from Pokrovsk."

Kursk has still left Putin in a bind

Although the shocking Kursk invasion has so far failed to slow the Russian advances around Pokrovsk, it has still produced some significant and positive results for Ukraine in just under a month's time.

Ukraine controls around 1,290 square kilometers, or roughly 500 square miles, of Russian territory in Kursk and some 100 settlements within that area, according to Syrskyi. It is the biggest attack on Russian soil by a foreign enemy since World War II.

"We continue to replenish the exchange fund for Ukraine and push the war into Russian territory," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said over the weekend, repeating a line he has said a few times now.

Destroyed Russian military vehicles on the outskirts of Sudzha, in the Kursk region, in August 2024.

KIRILL CHUBOTIN/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images

George Barros, the geospatial-intelligence team lead and a Russia analyst at ISW, said that the Kursk invasion underscores how Moscow left a major portion of its international border undefended. This leaves the Kremlin with a dilemma: does it continue to do this and risk more Ukrainian attacks, or does it move its forces to protect its borders?

"If the Kremlin goes with the latter, then that would drastically increase the resourcing requirements for Vladimir Putin to support and wage this protracted war of his indefinitely," Barros told Business Insider, highlighting the challenges for the Russian president.

"That's not a trivial requirement," he said.

This combat power would either hail from Russia's operations in Ukraine, stripping it of resources there, or Russian society, as Moscow is forced to rely on conscription or a build-up of local forces.

Russia appears to already be looking for additional volunteer forces in Kursk, according to Britain's defense ministry, which said in an intelligence update last week that prospective recruits for this effort have been told they will serve only within that specific region on a short-term contract.

Even though the Kursk invasion may not be forcing Russia to redirect front-line forces from Pokrovsk, that campaign will eventually culminate. When it does, Barros said, Moscow will look to its forces in other areas as it pivots attention to another sector of the front line. At that point, the reshuffling of manpower could come into play.

An aerial view shows smoke erupting from a Russian building on fire following a Ukrainian military operation in Korenevo, in the Kursk region, in this screengrab taken from a handout video released on August 29, 2024.

"Black Swan" unit of the 225 Separate Assault Battalion/Handout via REUTERS

Barros said that "the Kursk operation and the redeployment of those 30,000 troops are degrading the Russians' ability to plan for that contingency in the future."

But the invasion of Kursk is also challenging the narrative that the war is a stalemate and that the situation can't improve for the Ukrainians, Barros said. This realization could prove important as the US presidential election — in which future military support for Kyiv hangs in the balance — draws closer.

Additionally, the unexpected invasion of Russia is a reminder to policymakers that the US plays an important role in the war and can influence the outcome when it comes to decisions about the rules of engagement, Barros said.

Such considerations are top concerns for Ukrainian officials, who have long pushed for the US to drop all restrictions on using American-provided weapons to strike military targets inside Russia. These efforts have intensified since the start of the Kursk invasion.

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