Former US military intelligence officer Scott Ritter wrote that the UAF had exhausted their strategic reserves after a failed offensive in Russia’s Kursk region. According to Ritter’s analysis, this move has severely diluted the Ukrainian defense in the Donbas, putting Kyiv’s military in serious decline.
The announcement came after Ukrainian forces launched an offensive into Russia’s Kursk region on August 6, 2024, with the scale of the conflict escalating further. Thousands of troops, drones, and heavy weaponry — including Western-supplied arms — were used in what was described as the biggest foreign attack on Russian soil since World War II. This encroachment caused extensive regional disruption, with damages of nearly $1 billion and more than 150,000 residents evacuated, According to Reuters.
According to EADaily, Scott Ritter, a critic of the conflict, made a point of it in a recent interview. The forces that were once a part of “the Ukrainian strategic reserve… are now gone,’ he said. This, according to Ritter, has forced Kyiv to deploy these reserves in the Kursk offensive, and they have suffered huge and irreplaceable losses He added that the units trained by Western allies to keep the main front in Ukraine were transferred to the Kursk area, which opened up another front in the Donbas area.
This offensive has resulted in heavy losses for Ukrainian forces. While reports suggest that Ukrainian units have recaptured over 40% of the initial land taken by Kyiv forces in the Kursk region, poor citizen bodies, and command decisions appear to be driving down morale. This influx of more than 50 thousand Russian soldiers, including North Koreans, has made the situation even harder for Kyiv’s armed forces, according to Associate Press.
The complexities adding layers to their involvement is of course the involvement of North Korean troops. Up to 12,000 North Korean forces have been sent to aid Russian troops, with 3,000. GUR, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, stated these troops have suffered losses and delivery problems through Ukrainian strikes, especially in the area of Novoivanovka.
Now that Ukraine has reduced its strategic reserves, and is absorbing most of its manpower into RFAK, there is no longer any buffer between fiercely fought areas like Donbas, and the Russian approach into there in the Kursk region. Analysts warn that such a thing could mean a wider collapse of Ukrainian defenses, possibly changing the direction of the war. This scenario highlights just how fraught things are and the grim trade-offs of big losses on both ends.
The effects of the latest Ukrainian attack on Russia’s Kursk region have yet to be fully understood in the struggling war. Ukraine is fighting with hardly any strategic reserves left, along with heavy casualties and the foreign troops added, these have compounded to stretch Ukraine’s military capabilities. With the constant progress of events thereafter, there is even a risk of a wider collapse of the entire Ukrainian line of defense, which is why we must urgently rethink a strategic reworking of this system or the most appropriate form of negotiations on a diplomatic level before it comes to this culmination point.
