The war in Ukraine keeps throwing up surprises. For the past few months, the news has been almost universally bad for the Ukrainians. The Russian army has been making slow but steady progress across the front, while the Ukrainians have been suffering from widely broadcast shortages of both men and materiel. While there were rumours that the Ukrainian army planned to undertake an offensive of its own, using the new recruits it has mustered since passing a revised mobilization law earlier this year, few commentators paid much attention. The balance of power in the war is so skewed in Russia’s favour that such an offensive would be unlikely to achieve significant military results and would probably just end up destroying Ukraine’s remaining reserves.

As a result, when the Ukrainians advanced into the Kursk province of Russia this week, it took almost everybody by surprise, including, it seems, the Russian high command. There have been cross border incursions before, but the latest attack is on a much larger scale, involving several brigades of troops (a single brigade consists of 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, if at full strength). The area in question was also only very lightly defended, with Russian reserves being held some distance to the rear. As a result, the attack has made unexpectedly large progress, with Ukrainian troops advancing some 20 kilometres into Russia.

Initial reactions to the offensive included bafflement and indignation. From a military point of view the advance into Kursk province does not make obvious sense. Capturing some Russian villages makes for good PR photos, but if nobody is defending them it doesn’t contribute to weakening the Russian army. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army is suffering heavy losses on other parts of the front, and in some areas, most notably around Pokrovsk in Donetsk province, it is steadily retreating due to a lack of men and supplies. The troops and weapons sent to Kursk are troops and weapons that are not being sent to those other areas where arguably they are much more badly needed. Thus, one well-known Ukrainian military commentator reacted to news of the offensive by saying that “The situation in the Pokrovsk direction is critical, with defences in several areas collapsed and yet to stabilize, largely due to a shortage of personnel. Diverting nearly a brigade to launch an assault on Kursk, which lacks strategic sense, borders on mental disability.”

Since then, the criticisms have largely dissipated and been replaced on the Ukrainian side by some degree of euphoria as it has become clear that the incursion into Kursk has dealt a significant political humiliation to the Russians. Nevertheless, questions remain about the purpose of the operation, since when one is short of military resources of all sorts it seems strange to expend a large number of those resources on advancing into a region of no obvious strategic value rather than sending them to prevent the front from collapsing where it is under pressure.

One can only speculate as to the rationale, but to my mind it seems more political than military. War, as the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, is an extension of politics. Its purpose is to achieve some political aim. Ukraine’s political aim has long been to recover its lost territories and to get Russia to abandon its demands that Ukraine become a neutral country. As the balance of military power has shifted in Russia’s favour over the past year, it has become increasingly evident that these aims cannot be achieved by military means. That is to say that Ukraine also certainly can’t recapture its lost territories by force and has insufficient leverage at present to get Russia to moderate its demands. Given this, Ukraine has had to consider some alternative method. Simply sending more troops to prop up the front won’t do the trick. At best they might halt the Russian advance, but more likely they will merely slow it down a little. That will simply delay the moment at which Ukraine has to concede defeat. It certainly won’t help it to achieve its political objectives.

To do that, Ukraine needs to find a way to put such pressure on Russia that it feels that it needs to moderate its demands and make concessions at the negotiating table. The way to do that, the Ukrainians feel, is by striking Russian territory. This explains the regular requests to Western powers to give Ukraine long distance weapons that can strike deep into the Russian Federation. It also provides a logical explanation for the operation in Kursk. Militarily, the operation is unlikely to provide Ukraine with many, if any, advantages. Once the Ukrainians reach the natural extent of their advance, as dictated by logistical constraints and the arrival of Russian reserves, the advance will stop and the fighting in the region will probably settle down into the normal attritional pattern of the war, which is to say a very static front line in which vast amounts of ammunition are expended to make only very moderate movements forward. The Ukrainians in Kursk will find that they are being ground down there in much the same way as they would have been ground down if they had been sent to fight anywhere else. It may even be slightly less advantageous for the Ukrainians to be fighting there than in some other location because of the more limited logistical possibilities that come from being further away from one’s supply centres.

But there will be one crucial difference. The fighting will be taking place on Russian soil. And the Russians will find it much harder to recapture their lost territory than the Ukrainians found it to capture it, for the simple reason that when the Ukrainians attacked, there were hardly any Russian troops in their way, but when the Russians counter-attack they will face a large and well-prepared defence.

This means that the Ukrainian army may be able to hold on to much of what it has captured for a considerable length of time. That fundamentally alters the political calculations behind the war. For if it becomes clear that the only way that Russia can retake its lost land is by agreeing to peace, it will have to come to the negotiating table and when there will have to make some concessions to Ukraine as a quid pro quo for getting its land back. Thus, even if this operation is militarily pointless, and perhaps even counterproductive, politically it has the potential to be a game-changer. In that sense, it’s a very clever move.

That does not mean, however, that it is without risks. Starving other parts of the front to resource this operation may lead to a disaster elsewhere which more than compensates for the benefits gained. Moreover, the political assumption behind the operation—that Russia will be put in a position where it has to make concessions—may prove to be incorrect. It could also be the case that the attack on Kursk strengthens the hand of hardliners in Moscow. They might argue that the attack shows that as long as Ukraine retains its independence and is armed by the West it will pose a mortal danger to Russia, and that it must therefore be destroyed completely. As former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said this week, “From this moment, the special military operation should become openly extraterritorial in nature. We can and should go further into what still exists in Ukraine. To Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev. To Kiev and further. There should be no restrictions in terms of recognized borders.” The “terrorist” operation in Kursk, he said, should “remove any taboo” regarding Russian demands.

The Ukrainian attack on Kursk is thus a considerable gamble, driven perhaps by a sense that Ukraine’s weak military position left few other options other than a slow, grinding retreat. If it does induce the Russian government to negotiate, then it will have succeeded. But if instead it encourages thinking like that of Medvedev, it could end up extending the war rather than bringing it to a quicker end.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.