Losing Kursk has weakened Zelensky's hand in ceasefire talks
He gambled on being able to trade land in Russia for the return of land in Ukraine, and failed.
Ahead of Trump’s call with Putin today, see below, my article of yesterday that was published by Responsible Statecraft.
President Zelensky should have pressed ahead with peace talks in August 2024, rather than invading Kursk. Ahead of talks between Presidents Trump and Putin this week, he has no cards left to play.
According to the New York Times on Sunday, Ukrainian troops are all but gone from the Russian Kursk region. At the peak of last August's offensive, Ukraine held 500 square miles of the Russian territory. After fierce fighting it holds just a sliver of that today.
It is perhaps ironic that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s audacious offensive took place in the midst of secret talks in Qatar towards a partial ceasefire. It is no coincidence that Russia’s offensive in Kursk over the past week took place while Ukraine was agreeing with the U.S. on the notion of a possible ceasefire during talks in Saudi Arabia.
The inauguration of President Trump in January made U.S.-led pressure to end the fighting both inevitable but also, more importantly, predictable. It is absolutely clear to me that for President Putin, retaking Kursk was essential to putting him in the best possible place to negotiate.
Zelensky had gambled on improving his hand of cards in future ceasefire talks by being able to trade land in Russia for the return of land in Ukraine. That gamble has failed. Prior to the past week, based on the Institute for the Study of War battle map, Russia had already occupied three-to-four times more land in Ukraine than was seized in Kursk.
Over the past 11 years, I have witnessed Russia’s preference for upping the military ante to put themselves in the strongest possible position before striking a deal. What has happened over the past week has been, in many respects, a carbon copy of the tactics Russia used immediately before the agreement of the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 peace deals.
After the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk seized power following the February 2014 ouster of President Yanukovych, the Ukrainian army launched an Anti-Terror Operation to regain control of the Donbas. This led to considerable success on the Ukrainian side and the recapture of several large towns. With Ukrainian forces reaching the outskirts of Luhansk and Donetsk cities, the Russian military stepped into the conflict. On August 29, 2014, Russian formations encircled the town of Ilovaisk, inflicting a bloody defeat on the Ukrainian formations who are thought to have lost up to four hundred personnel. Just days later, the First Minsk agreement was signed, offering concessions to the separatists in the form of progress towards devolution.
The Ukrainian side didn’t push forward with devolution or a promised ‘national dialogue’. While the line of contact largely held, there were repeated violations of the ceasefire and casualties on both sides, including civilian casualties in the separatist areas which were verified by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission. In late January 2015, Russian backed Wagner troops mounted a brutal and, ultimately, successful encirclement of the town of Debaltseve, causing a withdrawal of Ukrainian troops.
This battle of Debaltseve precipitated the negotiations in Minsk on February 11-12 to agree to the second Minsk agreement, with Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande at the talks. Minsk II strengthened the requirements on the Ukrainian side to push forward with devolution in the Donbas. Russia finally called a halt to the fighting on 18 February, as the UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II deal.
The reported Russian encirclement in Kursk over the past week is audacious. According to reports, several hundred Russian troops crawled around nine miles through an unused gas pipeline to emerge behind Ukrainian formations. This caused panic and confusion among the Ukrainian formations who retreated, as larger Russian formations drove into the area from the west and east, threatening a complete encirclement.
The Ukrainians dispute this record of events, and have been backed up by the Institute for the Study of War, which told Western media on Friday that it has “observed no geolocated evidence to indicate that Russian forces have encircled a significant number of Ukrainian forces” in Kursk or anywhere else along the frontline in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, if reports are true, it offers further proof of Russia’s penchant for encirclement, going back to World War II, and the encirclement of the German army outside of Stalingrad. All across the Ukrainian front line during 2024, Russian forces have mounted a series of small tactical encirclements to capture villages and towns. Pro-Russian military bloggers were gleeful that the Kursk encirclement was made possible by gas pipes that were empty because of Ukraine’s decision to halt Russian gas transit to Europe as of January 1.
Let’s be clear, Ukraine had been fighting hard to keep hold of the Kursk bridgehead as part of Zelensky’s land-trade gamble. This year saw a major Ukrainian counter-attack, following a build-up of military material from western donor nations. At best, this Ukrainian operation ended in a draw, with some Russian gains in the west of Kursk and some marginal Ukrainian gains north of Sudzha.
Even if Ukraine had held onto its remaining bridgehead in Russia, it would have gone into any US-brokered peace talks in a weaker position than it was in August. In characteristic fashion, President Zelensky has this week been being throwing out chaff about President Putin avoiding the possibility of a peace deal. But, right now, and to echo President Trump’s words during their fated Oval Office meeting, he has the weakest hand of cards.
U.S. Special Representative Steve Witkoff has announced that Presidents Trump and Putin may speak in the coming week. I assess that President Putin will go into that conversation ready to settle if he receives the assurances that he seeks.
The question for Washington is what incentive they can offer to Putin to line up behind a ceasefire? UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European leaders have been advancing, frankly unworkable, ideas about tightening sanctions on Russia to force a settlement. But Putin will not agree to stand down his troops and face yet more sanctions having gained the upper hand. Anyone who believes that he will is, I am sorry to say, quite deluded.
The biggest hint of what might persuade Putin was provided by the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte this week in an interview with Bloomberg. In possibly the most consequential ‘mm-hmm’ of this century, he offered the strongest signal that Ukrainian membership of the military alliance may now have been taken off the table. This is Russia’s top ask of any peace process. If President Trump makes that offer explicit and unequivocal, then I judge that President Putin would embrace a ceasefire and peace talks.
Going into the mainland Russia in hope of exchanging Russia's land for any Ukrainian territories was never a smart or a realistic idea.
The fact that Ukrainian troops breached Russia's border, then abducted, tortured, terrorised and murdered civilians in the Kursk region would only make Russia's resolve to defeat the current regime in Kiev even stronger as it reinforces and validates their security concerns.
The Russians also made it clear that it is completely out of the question that any of their territories will be subject to any negotiations with Kiev. It is astounding that anyone could have believed otherwise!
Putin's latest commentary on the situation in the Kursk region and Russia's subsequent actions that so closely preceded Witkoff's visit to Moscow may suggest that Kursk may have really been put on the negotiation table as a leverage (a dumb idea!), which Putin acted promptly to remove!
While Putin has politely responded to Trump's request to spare the lives of the soldiers trapped in the Kursk area by suggesting that they put their arms down and surrender and promised that they would not be mistreated, he also reminded that those people are considered terrorists by the Russian state and would be tried as such when captured. So far, it doesn't look like those troops received the orders to surrender. Frankly, given that the Russians reported that they are currently using diplomatic channels for communication with all countries whose citizens were captured in the Kursk region, it is my suspicion that when Trump is asking Putin to spare anyone's lives, he is referring to the Americans who are also present there in whichever capacity they were deployed in that area! He would be keen to avoid any diplomatic scandal associated with the presence of American troops in Russia, not to mention that it's not a great look for NATO or America's status as a superpower! I would imagine that Putin will indulge Trump on negotiations regarding any Americans present on the ground in Russia as he wouldn't want to hinder the progress of any other negotiations happening in parallel.
What would be interesting to see is how Trump and his administration plan to deal with Zelensky, who has once again made it clear that absolutely nothing has changed in his position since his performance at the Oval Office and that's despite the fact that the Ukrainians have allegedly agreed to the ceasefire! And just look at the tone he uses to address Starmer and his coalition of the willing to fight to the last Ukrainian!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZJlfDOOHY
Interesting article, Ian.
One thing is for certain, the road to peace isn’t under US or European fire control.
However, the N07 highway in the Kursk salient is - just go ask the Russians.
On this issue, John Helmer of Dances with Bears references a retired NATO infantry operations veteran, Major Mark Takacs.
It’s worth quoting at length:
‘Takacs’… military analysis reveals the reason for the announcement of the “immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire” on March 11 in Jeddah by the US and Ukrainian delegations, after the plan had been composed by UK and US officials in Kiev over the previous weekend. This is to restore command and control communications with the Ukrainian units still occupying about 20% of the Kursk territory they had taken last August; restore and refill the primary NO7 highway and secondary routes into the Kursk salient for supplies of fresh arms, ammunition and troops; and construct new defence lines and fortifications which had either failed or been missing during the Russian offensive movements of the previous week.’
Of course, the Russians are aware of this; they are, after all, a nation of chess masters. Looking into a glass darkly, once we put Trump’s boorish antics and narcissism aside, we see the formation of a plan to reorganise the narrative:
1. pose as the anguished peacemaker;
2. present a scrap of Chamberlainian (I think I just made that word up!) paper to the world;
3. turn off and on the arm’s spigot (Trump’s art of the spiel tactics);
4. loose the wily fox of Russian threat into the Eurocrat’s hen house;
5. line up all those juicy, future arm’s contracts (VW are promising to make family-friendly tanks - on your street soon);
6. pivot to the Middle East and threaten Iran (as Russia busily extricates itself from the Ukrainian morass);
7. rearm, rearm, rearm!
And none of the above necessarily in that order because this isn’t the fog of war - it’s a pea souper.
The pivot to Yemen is telling, coinciding as it does with genocide redux. Witkoff and Rubio barking out orders to Iran - on cue: we pause a war here, we start one over there. How’d you like that?
Ad nauseam.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes in Russia, among the military bloggers and cognoscenti, pressure builds. Putin is aware that he is being watched - by his own people. No more failed Minsk initiatives. No more botched agreements. Too much blood has been spilt.
I’m afraid we have a way to go in this wicked wood.
And the wolves are everywhere.
6.