What can Ukraine gain from Russia incursion?

"Eyes open, move swiftly and keep your country in your thoughts."

That was the instruction given to soldiers of Ukraine's 82nd air assault brigade last week, said the Financial Times, as they prepared to launch the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign army since the Second World War.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the weekend that Kyiv wanted to "push the war on to the aggressor's territory" and put "pressure" on Russia to "restore justice". But more than a week after the operation was launched, said The Times, it remains "unclear what Ukraine’s ultimate ambitions are".

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What did the commentators say?

There are three "non-mutually-exclusive answers", said National Review. First is an attempt by Ukraine to relieve pressure on its embattled eastern front. Second, that by taking control of Russian sovereign territory Kyiv will be "in a much stronger position" in any upcoming negotiations with Moscow. Finally, every war is "fundamentally a contest of both sides' willingness to continue fighting" and Ukrainians are reminding Russia that they won't back down.

German journalist and Ukraine expert Winfried Schneider-Deters told DW: "It is possible the Ukrainian leadership wants to demonstrate to Russia, but above all to the West, that Ukraine is not at the end of its tether." Kyiv hopes the success of the incursion will boost the morale of Ukrainian troops "who have 'only' been defending their positions in a gruelling war of attrition for that last year-and-a-half", while demonstrating that "it's still able to win the war – with further shipments of Western weapons".

The Ukrainian army's advance into Russia has "profound implications for perceptions of the war", said Peter Dickinson, editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service. It "directly challenges the widespread belief that Russia's invasion has reached a stalemate and can no longer be decided on the battlefield". Crucially, it also "exposes the emptiness of Vladimir Putin's red lines and the folly of the West's emphasis on escalation management".

For the first time since the Kharkiv counter-offensive in the autumn of 2022, Ukraine has "caught Russia by surprise", said The Times. Ukraine can never realistically hope to win a war of attrition and the incursion into Kursk could provide a "template for a new style of warfare, one that favours Ukraine better than the grinding losses of the past six months towards its east".

“Ukraine should never get into a slug match with Russia, because they'll lose," John Foreman, a former British military attaché in Moscow, told The Times. "They have to use superior tactics and morale to offset numerical superiority."

What next?

Vladimir Putin has called the takeover of hundreds of square miles of Russian territory by Ukrainian forces a "provocation", but his response so far has been surprisingly "uncertain and unsuccessful", said Tortoise.

It is still too early to tell whether the incursion will divert significant numbers of Russian troops away from the existing frontline in eastern Ukraine, but "what is clear" is that Kyiv has used weapons donated by Nato members on Russian territory, and the Russian leader has "not escalated".

"Russian territory that is internationally recognised is occupied and Putin did not [turn] to nukes and so on," the Ukrainian MP Olexiy Honcharenko said. "We are showing the world that the world should not be scared of escalation or the reaction of Putin."

Russian propagandists have adopted an "equally low-key approach", said Dickinson. Instead of attempting to rally the country, state media has reportedly received instructions to avoid stirring up the situation, "most definitely not the actions of a self-confident military superpower on the verge of a major escalation".

With the response from Moscow muted, Jen Spindel, assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, told DW that Ukraine does not need to advance "particularly far" into Russian territory in order to achieve its goals.

"I don't think anyone wants to see this escalate to a conflict where Ukraine is sending troops toward Moscow, or flying drones or planes in that direction," she said. The further the Ukrainian army advances, the greater the risk that troops will be cut off from supply routes.

This kind of limited operation "may not be what ends the war", said National Review, but "symbolic operations sometimes need not be ultimately rational to be successful".  The Ukrainians have "rolled the dice" – and, for the moment, "stolen the initiative from the Russians". 

Zelenskyy's game is "paying off", said Tortoise, at least "for now".