Did the U.S. approve of Ukraine's plans to attack Kursk?
What a week! Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region of Russia will set a new direction for the war. It is too early to say what the exact consequences will be, and much will depend on the type of response that the Russians will manage to put together. But we can already say that Ukraine has successfully managed to change the narrative, and this offensive marks the beginning of a new phase in the war. There will be a before and after the Kursk offensive, and we probably have to go almost two years back in time – to Ukraine’s Kharkiv offensive – to find events with a similar significance.
So there is definitely much to uncover about the events that are unfolding right now, both in terms of what is happening on the ground and about the consequences for the war and the future of Putin’s government. But what I want to do here is to focus on something that has been suspiciously absent over the last week. Sometimes it is important to listen to the dog the doesn’t bark, and in this case it truly is noteworthy that there is been almost no criticism of Ukraine’s actions from the Western countries.
Did Ukraine have Western approval?
When I made my video with first impressions about the Ukrainian offensive last week, I think I got most things right about what Ukraine was trying achieve, and how the bigger trend is that the war is moving gradually onto Russian territory. But I also made some snarky remarks about how this offensive shows that the Biden administration’s approach to escalation management has been counterproductive, and how Western hesitation to arm Ukraine has led to more escalation and not less. I also speculated that there would be limits to how much Ukraine could advance in the Kursk region because the Western countries would put limits on what types of Western equipment they could use for the task.
My hunch at the time was that the Ukrainians had started the offensive without consulting their Western partners, and that the policymakers in Washington and Berlin had been taken by surprise when the Ukrainian forces started rolling into Russia.
But as time passes, it looks more and more as if this was coordinated, and that Ukraine had received prior permission to use Western equipment for the task. Both American and German vehicles are used in the offensive, and Ukraine seems to be supporting the fight with HIMARS artillery. Yet, there is been no discernible negative reaction from Washington or Berlin. No warnings about escalation, no reminders to the Ukrainians about remembering the concerns of their partners, and no particular signaling to the Russians about how the Western countries had absolutely nothing to do with it.
On the contrary, the United States announced a new weapons package for Ukraine after the launch of the Kursk invasion, and the messages from Washington have been supportive. U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R) and Richard Blumenthal (D) visited Kyiv and expressed their full support for bringing the war onto Russian territory. President Biden stated that he is in close contact with the Ukrainians about the operation, and that it creates “a real dilemma” for Putin.
A change in American policy
The official line from the Americans is that they didn’t know about the Ukrainian plans, but that they don’t see any problems with what is happening, and that the Ukrainian use of American weapons is in line with American policies. This is truly remarkable to hear. It has been less than three months since Biden changed the policies that prohibited Ukraine from striking on Russian territory with American weapons, and at the time Ukraine could only use the American weapons in immediate connection with the Russian attacks into the Kharkiv region. Now we have American tanks and infantry fighting vehicles driving around in Russia’s Kursk region, and apparently this is in line with American policies.
Something has definitely changed. The policy that today allows Ukraine to occupy a part of Russia with American weapons is not identical to the policy that 10 weeks ago allowed them to stop Russian attacks into Kharkiv. But as I indicated in my video about Biden’s decision at the time, the Russians brought this on themselves by opening up a new front in the north:
The last problem that this creates for the Russians is that now the taboo has been broken about using American weapons to hit targets on Russian territory. As I said before, there are still many limitations to what Ukraine can do, and of course, it could have been worse for the Russians. It could have been just the decision that Ukraine is now free to just do whatever they want. But these new limitations, they're not nearly as useful as a red line for the Russians to talk about as the old ones were, because they're just too complicated. Before, it was a very black and white kind of thing. You can strike with everything here, and you can strike with nothing there. Like that's simple to understand. There is a line on a map. Everyone can understand that.
But now what we have instead is a kind of gray zone. Nobody knows exactly what the rules are, because the details are secret, and they're a matter between the Americans and the Ukrainians. That means that the rules are also flexible in a way where you can change the rules without it actually causing public debate.
We will probably have to wait for Biden’s memoirs before we can fully understand what caused him to change his mind. Maybe he realized that Putin is never going to stop the war unless it threatens to undermine his rule in Russia. Or maybe the decision not to run for reelection in November made it clear for Biden that he will have to hand over the leadership of the Western coalition to someone else, and that he has to do something quickly if he wants to have a decisive impact on how the war ends. We don’t know.
But the policy of restraining the Ukrainians with overcautious limitations on how they can use their weapons seems to be over. There are still a few decisions that can be made. It would be nice to see the Ukrainians being allowed to use ATACMS missiles to hit airfields in Russia. It would be good to see Germany providing Taurus missiles. But in the big perspective, it is approaching the level of absurdity to talk about remaining red lines and the dangers of escalation when we have Bradley IFV’s and Leopard 2 tanks driving around in Kursk.
That could have been a nice segue into a discussion about another dog that didn’t bark, namely the remarkable absence of nuclear threats from Russia following the first land invasion of Russia since World War II. But because this is already long enough, I will save that discussion for another day and just note that clearly that is not something the Russians want to talk about at this point.