Only a few weeks ago, the Ukraine war seemed to be reaching some kind of diplomatic endgame: The war had long settled into what was more or less a bloody stalemate; Washington was distracted by events in the Middle East; and even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had long rejected any negotiations if they meant giving up territory, had publicly softened his stance on the idea.
Then the Kursk invasion happened. Barreling through miles of poorly defended and sparsely populated Russian borderlands, Ukrainian forces went close to eight miles into Russian territory. They took control of 28 settlements, according to Moscow (many more per Kiev), and forced more than 121,000 residents to be evacuated. Maybe most importantly, the Ukrainians have inflicted another painful humiliation upon President Vladimir Putin, while giving a shot in the arm to their own flagging morale at a time when Moscow seemed to hold all the cards.
Whatever comes of the Kursk incursion, the first thing to say about it is that it marks another reminder—for Putin, but for hawks of any kind, anywhere, too—of how wars of choice often prove more trouble than they’re worth. Putin decided to invade ostensibly for security reasons, over the concern of Russia one day having to deal with a militarized, NATO-backed Ukraine on its border. But the decision has proved far more damaging to Russian security: Since the invasion, Russia has seen its infrastructure sabotaged, several serious terrorist attacks inside its capital, and a coup attempt that represented the most serious challenge to Putin’s quarter-century rule. Now comes the first foreign invasion of Russia’s contiguous territory since World War II.
But whatever does come of Kursk shouldn’t be a mere afterthought in this cautionary tale. Because if Putin’s original decision to invade shows how rash, reckless militarism can quickly prove self-defeating, especially once the escalation train starts picking up speed, there may be similar lessons for Ukraine and the West, too.
For Kiev, it is far from clear whether the momentary tactical success of what its forces have done in Kursk will actually help in the medium to long run. Reportedly, among the chief motives for the operation were to seize land the Ukrainians could bargain with in eventual peace talks, and to hopefully induce Moscow into pulling forces from the front line in Ukraine, relieving pressure on its troops. If so, neither has so far succeeded. Russian forces have continued to make gains in eastern Ukraine, where towns are having to be evacuated.
Meanwhile, the consensus in Russia seems to be that this move has made Putin now less inclined to the peace talks he has been publicly and privately advocating for months. In fact, the incursion reportedly scuttled partial ceasefire talks that had been secretly taking place in Qatar that would have ended attacks on both countries’ infrastructure, while Moscow has vowed to hit back with a “worthy response”—a threat the Kremlin no doubt will carry out, since every previous, much-celebrated Ukrainian attack on Russian territory has been followed by a vicious counterstrike, including the start of and subsequent escalating attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. None of this is good for Ukraine, since the nation’s fundamental problem isn’t the territory it could lose, but that the prolonging of this war has, besides ravaging its critical infrastructure, created demographic, debt, and economic crises that will last many years.
But at least Kiev can say it has something real to potentially gain from this audacious gamble. When it comes to NATO partners in Europe and North America, it is harder to see what the Kursk gambit brings the West that outdoes the risks it entails.
Ukraine’s incursion undermines what has been a core priority for both US and European officials: managing the war’s escalation and preventing it from pulling NATO into direct conflict with Russia. For Russia’s part, its leadership already views this as a NATO-designed and -approved operation. The Kremlin points to the presence of British tanks and other NATO arms being used to capture Russian soil. Keir Starmer’s UK government has opted to confirm these Russian suspicions by publicizing its role in the operation.
American and European leaders would do well to think about how their own societies reacted to far less serious provocations from their own adversaries, including Russia. Russian interference in the 2016 US election, for instance, was not only viewed as akin to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and other literal acts of war, but put the country in a vengeful mood that made the diplomacy and de-escalation needed to stave off this very conflict in the first place all but politically impossible. The (ultimately false) story that Moscow was paying the Taliban bounties to kill US troops likewise triggered calls from some US politicians for US attacks on Russian troops. The mere presence of a Chinese balloon in US airspace triggered a mini-hysteria that led to missiles being fired at balloons over Americans’ heads, and helped set us on the current course of open hostility to China.
Now imagine if instead of all that, Russia or China had armed, supplied, and funded to the tune of billions a foreign force that rammed through the US border, seized land, and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
“Foreign-policy decisions are much more complicated than moralism permits.”
Many will correctly point out that turnabout is fair play, and that Washington and NATO are on solid moral ground in backing Ukrainian forces to do to Russia what it has done to Ukraine. But the problem, as it has been throughout this war, is that foreign-policy decisions are much more complicated than moralism permits.
In this case, the United States and NATO aren’t just creating a now hyper-militarized, irrevocably aggrieved, and potentially vengeful adversary in Russia, but they have taken a major escalatory step that would have been considered unthinkably reckless during the Cold War. In those decades, so strong was the understanding that direct hostilities between the two had to be avoided that Dwight Eisenhower refused to even send military aid to Hungary while its reformist uprising was being crushed by the Soviet Union, for fear of embroiling the United States in a war that could turn nuclear. That US and NATO leaders have seemingly underwritten a foreign invasion of Russia will only further convince Russian foreign-policy experts that Americans policymakers have lost the fear of nuclear war that kept US-Soviet relations table for so long, and that Moscow must do something dramatic—or, from another set of eyes, foolish and dangerous—to reestablish deterrence.
The Ukraine war is happening in the first place because the United States brazenly tested Moscow’s red line for decades, telling itself Russian protestations were merely a bluff—until one day, they weren’t. Now, driven by moral self-justification as it has been so many times in the past, Washington has made that approach its Ukraine policy in microcosm, viewing Moscow’s lack of response to creeping NATO escalation as a reason to keep pushing, with the assumption that there will never be a breaking point. It’s hard to know if the US government has lost control of the Ukraine war, or whether it is consciously taking such risks with its citizens’ lives. It’s also hard to know which would be more worrying.