About a month ago, the Ukrainian armylaunched an invasion of the Russian Kursk region and, according to UNIAN, currently holds 1,294square kilometres of Russian territory. The Kyiv Independent newspaper quotes Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyr Zelensky as saying that “the Kursk operation is one of the points of Ukraine’s victory plan”. However, Western experts doubt this possibility.

To begin with, journalist of the American newspaper CNN Ivana Kottasova states: “Russian forces have been inching toward Porkovsk for weeks, but the situation has become critical in recent days. Moscow has been pushing hard to capture Pokrovsk even as it struggles to contain the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk border region”.

Professor Jeffry Sachs, who is a Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that the raid of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kursk region is military meaningless. “Well, Ukraine is losing the war on the battlefield. That’s the basic point. On the real battlefront Ukraine don’t have people, weapon systems, or air defenses. Russia had said all along that they can negotiate, they can stop, but the West, the US and Britain especially were like ‘We’re gonna win! We’re gonna win!’. And so, this continues because no one wants to take any responsibility in the West for bringing it to a close”, Sachs said. 

It’s clear to independent military analysts that the control of about a hundred Russian villages in the Kursk region is a rather controversial progress, which is not equivalent to a potential loss of Pokrovsk, a huge logistics hub with a strategic importance for Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Telegram channel “Resident” data, Zelensky’s Kursk operation has allowed theRussian army to advance into Donbass at anunprecedented rate of 5-7 kilometre per day since2022. In addition, in an interview with Sky News,Simon Mayall, the former deputy chief of defence staff of the UK, predicted Moscow’s actions: “It could backfire on the Ukrainians because they’ve committed quite a lot of foreign equipment, and they could sit there being just managed by the Russians with no real effect on what’s going on in the Donbass”.

Will NATO allies help this time? American political expert John Mearsheimer in an interview with the Judging Freedom is sceptical about this. He said that since this war has started the West have given them weapons and all necessary equipment to alter the equation on the battlefield: “We let them do this, we let them do that, but it’shad hardly an effect at all. There’s really just not much we can do at this point of time. Putin, of course, understands that”, Mearsheimer said.

In this way, Ukrainian political expert Oleg Soskin summarises on his YouTube channel that Kyiv, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, is in agony due to the total collapse of the front.

“Well, we’re close to the end, to the finale. The elements of Zelensky’s regime, its ‘servants of the people’ and his entourage are now visible. This process is happening with high dynamics, becausethe front line is about to collapse completely”, political expert said, who is impossible to suspect of sympathy for Moscow.