Maneuver vs attrition. Why the AFU has been so successful in Russia’s Kursk Region

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Kursk Region: Ukraine turning the tables

Since the first months of its full-scale war with Ukraine, the Kremlin has been determining the scope of the war zone arbitrarily. The “special military operation” was initially intended to remain confined exclusively within the territory of Ukraine (excluding Crimea and the city of Sevastopol), while Ukrainian strikes on internationally recognized Russian territory were qualified by Moscow as terrorist acts.

Following Russia’s withdrawal from the northern regions of Ukraine in 2022, the country’s military command announced that the fighting would be centered in the Donbas. Meanwhile, Russia’s borders were guarded by comparatively weak units, some of which included conscripts. Neither the army units at the border nor the border guards were supplied with drones and electronic warfare equipment, nor were they entitled to “special military operation” bonuses, which they could have used to purchase the missing items themselves. They had hardly any heavy equipment or anti-tank weapons.

Combined with a history of largely unsuccessful incursions into Russian territory by Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) sabotage and reconnaissance units, the Kremlin propagandist cliche about the inviolability of Russia’s state borders lulled Moscow into a false sense of security. Russia’s “North” grouping of forces, which was created in the spring of 2024 for the defense of the border region, among other purposes, was diverted for use in an offensive in the Kharkiv Region. However, Russia’s spring maneuver offensive did not succeed, and the troops ended up stuck in positional battles around Vovchansk.

The Ukrainian command, which was not expected to launch a serious counteroffensive until 2025, seized the opportunity. Having won some time by giving up several kilometers of land in the Pokrovsk, Toretsk, and Bakhmut sectors, the AFU replenished their reserves and prepared a new offensive. In April, after the U.S. finally passed its long-delayed military aid bill, Ukraine’s stocks of air defense equipment and artillery ammunition were suddenly replenished. The Ukrainian forces also leveraged the permission to use Western weapons against enemy positions across the border, which was granted against the backdrop of the Russian attack in Kharkiv Region.

Ukraine’s Air Force had also had time to master the use of Western glide bombs, which are far more accurate than their Russian counterparts. Ukraine’s offensive grouping was also reinforced with strike UAV units from Kyiv’s newly created Unmanned Systems Force.

Unlike Ukraine’s underwhelming counteroffensive of 2023, the Kursk incursion managed to achieve the surprise factor, pulling AFU forces to the Sumy Region as if in preparation for a Russian offensive and informing its own personnel about the operation mere days — or even hours — before its start. In addition, the units that entered Russian territory were well-trained and battle-hardened — nothing like the inexperienced formations that were sent into battle in Zaporizhzhia a year earlier.

The Kursk offensive surpassed in scale all previous Ukrainian actions on Russian territory. Having crushed Russia’s border defenses, which consisted mainly of conscripts, border guards, and Chechen Kadyrovites, Ukrainian motorized and mechanized columns covered dozens of kilometers, cutting deep into the Kursk Region. The Russian command was forced to hastily move reserves but faced the familiar problem of Ukraine’s advantage in “internal lines” — Russian manpower and materiel had to traverse a greater distance than Ukrainian assets in order to get into position. During the movement of troops, Russian units were hit by drone strikes and precision rockets.

Today, the Russian grouping in the Kursk sector is a motley crew of heterogeneous forces that largely do not coordinate with one another. Due to their small numbers, the defense is disjointed, allowing the AFU to cut in between Russian units and formations and even accomplish local encirclements, allowing them to capture prisoners and trophies. Although the front line has remained virtually unchanged in recent days, the sides still have a long way to go before the final transition to positional warfare occurs.

Eventually however, the Russian command will probably be able to squeeze the AFU back to the state border using the usual methods of positional warfare — provided that it manages to gather a large enough group of forces (according to The Insider, this will require up to 30,000 fighters). On that account, one cannot but wonder whether the Russian leadership is prepared to destroy its own country’s infrastructure with shelling and airstrikes the way that it has — and does — in Ukraine.

Two strategies

Whatever the outcome of the Kursk operation, it has already become a vivid example of how the sides utilize, with varying degrees of success, the two main modes of fighting: positional and maneuver warfare.

Positional warfare implies methodically and consistently “chewing through” the enemy's defensive positions, occupying them, and laying the groundwork for the next stage of the offensive. The key to success is superiority in numbers and firepower. Commanders are required to carefully coordinate artillery (and other firepower, such as aircraft and drones), infantry, and armored vehicles. This, in turn, implies a rigid top-down model of troop management with minimal initiative on the ground.

The clearest example of success in positional warfare is the Hundred-Day Offensive of the Entente forces on the Western Front of World War I in 1918. Thanks to the combined industrial capabilities of Britain, France, and the United States, the allies enjoyed superiority in artillery, tanks, and aircraft, and they applied the tactics of combined arms warfare to break through the Hindenburg Line and exhaust the army of the German Empire to the extent that it was forced to request peace despite the fact that no enemy soldiers set foot on German territory.

By contrast, maneuver warfare is based on the rapid breakthrough of enemy defenses with subsequent maneuver exploitation, attacks on rear areas and supply lines, and the encirclement — followed by the destruction or capture — of individual enemy units. Maneuver operations require well-trained and proactive commanders, experienced personnel, and effective communications, as interacting with friendly units deep inside enemy territory may be difficult. A special emphasis is placed on intelligence, which allows the attacker to anticipate the enemy’s counter-maneuvers.

The most famous example of successful maneuver warfare is the actions of the Wehrmacht in the early years of World War II. The German armed forces largely reinvented their doctrine after the crushing defeat in World War I, opting for maneuver operations similar to those favored by past German military commanders since Prussian King Frederick the Great (1712-1786).

The update to the time-tested tactic offered a means of overcoming a positional stalemate with new technologies, such as tanks, aviation, and radio communications. In 1939-1940, this strategy worked both against Poland and against the incomparably more powerful French army, which was preparing for a repeat of 1918. Its failure, however, occurred in the war against the Soviet Union (1941-1945), largely due to logistical challenges and the enemy's vast human and material resources.

By the end of the war, all members of the anti-Hitler coalition had staked their success on maneuver warfare in one form or another. This experience became the basis of Cold War-era military doctrines and combat manuals, with the addition of elements such as tactical nuclear weapons and, later, precision strikes.

In the wars of the second half of the 20th century, the sides switched to positional warfare only when maneuver operations failed — for example, during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988. The Russian command also favored the scenario of a rapid maneuver operation in preparation for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

February-March 2022: How not to wage maneuver warfare

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. Its plan envisioned a lightning-fast seizure of the largest cities and “decision-making centers” and the establishment of a pro-Russian puppet regime in Kyiv. U.S. military officials warned that “a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine could result in the fall of Kyiv within 72 hours, and could come at a cost of 15,000 Ukrainian troop deaths and 4,000 Russian troop deaths.”

At the very beginning of the war, Russian columns captured dozens of kilometers a day, quickly reached Kyiv’s administrative boundaries, and on the first day of the invasion created a bridgehead near Kherson on the right bank of the Dnieper River. However, only a month later, the Russian Armed Forces were forced to withdraw from Kyiv and Mykolaiv and completely abandon Ukraine's northern regions. Still, the operation cannot be called a complete failure: the Russians created a land corridor to Crimea, seized the right-bank part of the Kherson region, blockaded and captured Mariupol, and occupied the east of the Kharkiv region, threatening Donbas from the north.

Nevertheless, despite territorial losses, the Ukrainian state and Armed Forces withstood the brunt of the enemy offensive, turning what was supposed to be a three-day operation into the longest and bloodiest war in Russia's modern history. This development appears particularly surprising given that Soviet military doctrine, along with the Russian doctrine that succeeded it, were conceived precisely with such operations in mind — and not against a military like Ukraine’s, but with NATO's high-tech forces as the likely adversary.

The failure of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine occurred due to several factors. Perhaps the most profoundly analyzed among them is the failure of intelligence and covert operations. The success of the Kremlin’s plan depended on the work of agents of influence recruited by Putin's Ukrainian associate Viktor Medvedchuk, and Russian forces thus did not expect to meet organized resistance from the AFU — other than from perhaps a handful of “nationalist” units.

The offensive plan was intended to “smear” Russian forces in a thin layer over the entire territory of Ukraine — except for Kyiv, which was to be handled by five or six combined arms armies and an airborne force. Such a plan, however, was in contradiction to the Soviet school of maneuver warfare, which calls for the use of a second echelon of armored forces to build on the success of combined arms units breaching enemy defenses.

However, Russia’s armed forces should not have counted on success even with a “classic” plan. The Russian generals at the head of the invasion groups (each consisting of several armies) had no experience in leading such large formations under combat conditions. Many Russian military commanders had fought in the Syrian war, but in Syria, the number of forces under their command did not exceed a corps (a formation occupying a layer of military command structure in between army and division).

Things were no better with the mid-level command staff, as officers struggled to manage heterogeneous forces of infantry, tanks, and artillery combined into battalion tactical groups. These formations of up to 800 men, which were supposed to act as autonomous combat units, have proven themselves to be virtually incapable. The Russian command soon abandoned this structure, returning to the conventional setup in which larger brigades and regiments formed the core of mid-level combat units.

The sluggishness of Russian troops in combat was aggravated by the deplorable state of automated command, control and communication systems, despite significant pre-war investment into these capabilities. Field reconnaissance was hampered by a shortage of UAVs. In addition, in the first weeks of the war Russian troops on the ground failed to establish interaction with the air component. Russian Air Force aircraft failed to suppress Ukrainian air defenses and therefore practically stopped appearing over the battlefield. Russia’s advantage in long-range missiles was not enough to turn the tide. As a result, the Russian army failed in its first attempt at maneuver warfare.

September 2022: The Kharkiv gambit

By the late summer of 2022, the attention of military observers and Russian commanders had been drawn to the right-bank section of the Kherson Region, where Ukrainian forces had been setting the stage for a large-scale counteroffensive. Ukrainian troops were hitting bridges and crossings over the Dnieper River, disrupting Russian logistics. The Russian Armed Forces, in turn, moved in elite airborne units as reinforcements. The Kherson area was seen as the most likely location for further dramatic developments on the battlefield — until the AFU suddenly struck near Balakliya in the Kharkiv Region.

After breaching the Russian defenses with an attack supported by artillery — including HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems — and armored vehicles, Ukrainian forces began advancing at a rate of several dozen kilometers per day, sending forward “flying squads” in lightly armored vehicles. Russian units made up of National Guard personnel, recently mobilized soldiers from the Donbas “republics,” and regular units of the Russian Armed Forces (which had thinned significantly during the months of fighting) soon lost control and communication with each other and could no longer put up organized resistance.

The hasty transfer of reserves from Russia’s newly formed 3rd Army Corps did not save the day, and the AFU soon liberated not only Balakliya but also Izium and Kupiansk. Russia’s 11th Army Corps and 1st Tank Army thereafter lost combat effectiveness for a significant period due to major equipment losses.

The Russian command, represented by Colonel-General Alexander Lapin, tried to build a defense along the eastern bank of the Oskil River. However, it failed to stop the Ukrainian forces and soon had to leave Lyman, located in the north of the Donetsk Region. The Ukrainian operation reached its climax only at the Svatove-Kreminna line. By this point, Vladimir Putin had launched mobilization, and the first untrained Russian reservists had arrived at the front to plug the gaps. Kyiv's offensive was ultimately halted, but at the cost of heavy losses on the Russian side.

In addition to operational surprise, Ukraine’s choice of a front where the Russian units in defense were the most depleted also played an important role in the success of the Kharkiv operation. The challenges faced by Russia's Balakliya grouping became publicly known after the seizure of documents from its HQ, but the Ukrainian command probably had an idea of the enemy's situation beforehand.

The experience of Ukrainian commanders is also worth noting. The AFU’s then-Commander-in-Chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, had been in charge of one of the sectors of the Donbas war that broke out in 2014, while the commander of the Ground Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi — who was directly responsible for the Kharkiv operation — had led the defense of Debaltseve and the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from anticipated encirclement there in 2015.

Ukrainian mid-level commanders, a group that included many individual officers who had trained in the West, were better adapted to autonomous actions in isolation from the main forces than their Russian counterparts, who often wasted time waiting for orders — orders that were simply impossible to receive in the absence of communication.

Ukraine’s advantage in communications and reconnaissance UAVs also played a role. With their help, the advancing AFU units could coordinate timely fire support with high-precision HIMARS rockets. In general, we can say that in Sept. 2022 the AFU passed the maneuver warfare test, albeit on a much smaller scale compared to the failed Russian blitzkrieg Feb.-Mar.

Summer 2023 counteroffensive: A positional failure

The Ukrainian offensive near Kharkiv gave the country's military and political leadership — along with its Western partners — serious cause for optimism. Ukraine believed in the possibility of repeating the Kharkiv success in 2023 and ending the war on terms acceptable to Kyiv. For this purpose, Western countries supplied a significant amount of military equipment, including tanks and armored fighting vehicles. With the help of its allies, Ukraine prepared more than 10 brigades, which were intended to break through Russian defenses in the south and reach the coast of the Black and Azov seas, cutting off Russia’s land corridor to Crimea.

However, by the summer of 2023, the situation at the front was strikingly different from that at Balakliya. The critical miscalculations of the Ukrainian counteroffensive came down to the following:

• The counteroffensive was publicly announced long before it began, and the direction of the main strike north of occupied Tokmak was obvious to many observers.
• Ukrainian commanders made the controversial decision to use experienced brigades to repel the Russian winter offensive of 2022-2023 and to prepare untested new formations for the counteroffensive.
• Russian defenses turned out to be much more resilient and better prepared than was anticipated, with defensive lines extending up to 30 kilometers deep along the entire front, and defending troops reinforced with recently-mobilized soldiers.

(More about the reasons for the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive can be found in The Insider's earlier pieces 1, 2.)

As a result, Ukrainian mechanized columns encountered dense minefields, and their engineering equipment was not sufficient to allow them to break through. They also faced heavy fire from artillery, anti-tank missile systems, and FPV (first-person-view) drones. The attempt to impose maneuver warfare on the enemy failed, and the AFU was forced to switch to positional battles.

Instead of armored companies, small groups of infantry were used to break through the defenses, and the advance became measured by individual treelines. Ukraine's success depended on whether its forces could deplete Russian reserves and break through the front line, but they lacked the superiority in equipment, artillery, and manpower necessary to achieve those objectives.

Only the actions near Bakhmut, where Russia’s advancing units had not had the time to create a deep defense, looked successful — at least at first — but even there Ukraine could not break through the front or regain control over the destroyed city.

By the fall of 2023, Russian forces had sufficient reserves to resume the offensive in several sectors of the front. Ukrainian forces lost in a clash of resources characteristic of positional warfare and had to fend off subsequent Russian attacks while struggling with a shortage of manpower and artillery rounds.

An endless grind starting in the fall of 2023: Avdiivka, then everywhere else

By October 2023, Russian commanders most likely felt they had concentrated enough force near Avdiivka to take the long-contested Donetsk suburb in a matter of days. The offensive of the Russian Armed Forces developed in the best traditions of techno-thrillers and computer games about a “hot war” in Europe, with huge columns of Soviet armored vehicles moving into battle with support from artillery and air force, which had by then regained its advantage on the battlefield thanks to the massive use of glide bombs equipped with UMPK guidance kits.

Nevertheless, a maneuver operation in the style of “Seven Days to the River Rhine” did not succeed for more or less the same reasons that had derailed the AFU counteroffensive a few months earlier. Faced with minefields and massive drone strikes, the Russian army was forced to switch to positional warfare and small infantry group attacks. But superiority in numbers — which held despite immense losses during the “meat-grinder assaults” — allowed Russia to make more progress than Ukraine had in a similar situation.

By replacing mobilization with the recruitment of contract soldiers, who were paid exorbitant money by Russian standards, the Russian Armed Forces maintained an advantage over the AFU despite its heavy losses. Ukrainian mobilization had by then stalled, the flow of volunteers had dried up, and a proposed law on conscription still required long negotiations in the Ukrainian government and Verkhovna Rada. In the meantime, the U.S. military aid bill remained stalled in Congress, suspending the supplies of American weapons — including badly needed artillery ammunition. The imbalance was exacerbated by the Russian Armed Forces’ receipt of artillery rounds from Iran and North Korea, in addition to domestically-produced munitions.

After months of bloody fighting, Russian forces managed to take Avdiivka and then moved on towards Pokrovsk. In parallel, more and more new “fronts” were opened: in the vicinity of Marinka, near Chasiv Yar, in Zaporizhzhia, in the north of the Kharkiv region, and around the Toretsk agglomeration. Russian forces have not managed to breach Ukrainian defenses and gain freedom of maneuver in any of these areas, but in each case, the emergence of a new threat forced the AFU command to stretch the already small number of its reserves.

Despite a steady stream of casualties in “meat-grinder assaults,” Russian forces are slowly but surely advancing into the western Donetsk Region. The Russian offensive has yet to run out of steam, proving that misguided tactics, lack of unit interaction, and insufficient training of new recruits are not insurmountable obstacles to winning a positional war through all-around superiority in resources.

However, the Kursk operation has demonstrated that the AFU has no intention of playing by the positional warfare rules imposed by Russia. Ukraine is offering an asymmetrical response to the positional successes of Russian troops. And the incursion may not be limited to the capture of two districts in Russia’s Kursk region. Provided it has some reserves to spare, the Ukrainian command could be capable of finding another gap in the Russian defense on another seemingly uneventful section of the front and creating a new operational crisis for Russia there.

As former AFU Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi once wrote, moving the war into a maneuvering phase is precisely what Ukraine needs to do if it is to reach a turning point. As the experience of 2022-2024 shows, it is with such a strategy that Ukrainian forces fare much better than the adversary.