Is the Kursk operation still worth the cost?

Gruesome images of dead North Korean soldiers sprawled in the mud and snow have flooded military Telegram channels this week. Pyongyang’s troops joined the battle for Russia’s Kursk region, but so far haven’t been able to evade the Ukrainian drones. South Korean intelligence claimed that at least 100 North Korean soldiers have been killed and 1,000 wounded this month as Vladimir Putin races to strip Volodymyr Zelensky of his only bargaining chip before Donald Trump takes office in the US next month.

Since November, Russia has deployed around 12,000 North Korean troops to reclaim the Kursk region from Ukrainians. The language barrier and difficulties with integration into Russian military ranks have caused delays in getting them battle-ready. Ukrainian soldiers say the North Koreans have been an easy target for the drones as they lack experience in modern warfare and just ‘stand there trying to shoot the drones down instead of hiding’. Russian soldiers send them running across the fields towards Ukrainian positions, and most die on the way. Zelensky has accused Moscow of trying to conceal the heavy North Korean losses as their bodies are the first to be removed from the battlefield.

Ukraine’s security service this week intercepted a phone call in which a Russian nurse complained to her soldier husband about waves of wounded North Korean fighters flooding into her hospital in Moscow. ‘Yesterday there was a train with about 100 people. Today there are 120,’ she said, adding that wards were being cleared for them. ‘Are they elite, or what, these Koreans?’ she asked, swearing. She also claimed they ‘all look the same’, making it hard for her to distinguish between them, and added that staff were barred from speaking to them in English. ‘North Korean soldiers are with us, and South Korean with America,’ she explained.

The past month has been Putin’s costliest yet, with daily losses hitting 1,500 troops. But his second world war-style tactics are paying off: Russian forces are slowly advancing, swarming Ukrainian positions with endless waves of soldiers. Kyiv has lost nearly half of the territory it captured in the Kursk region since September. Ukrainian troops now hold roughly 250 square miles of Russian land while facing relentless daily attacks. Russian forces are erasing their defence positions using guided bombs.

The mounting casualties and the dire situation in the Donbas region are fueling doubts among Ukrainian soldiers about whether continuing the Kursk operation is worth the cost. Last week, Ukrainian forces suffered heavy losses when the Russians recaptured Plyokhovo, a village southeast of Sudzha. Some Ukrainian fighters were left encircled, with Russian military bloggers claiming that 300 were killed. Even if this was an exaggeration, frustration is growing among Ukrainian soldiers who argue that holding a sliver of Russian land isn’t worth the sacrifice, especially when they are urgently needed to counter Moscow’s offensive in the east. Russia seized five times more territory last month than it did in the whole of last year, advancing mainly in the Donetsk region.

General Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s army chief and the man behind the Kursk operation, defended the offensive this week, saying it was necessary to stop a potential breakthrough of Russian forces into the Sumy and Kharkiv regions. In July, 30,000 Russian soldiers amassed north of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian border town, planning a push towards Kharkiv. ‘That’s why I decided to advance where the enemy was vulnerable, with very few troops guarding the border,’ Syrskyi said. For Ukrainian officials, the Kursk incursion is more than a potential bargaining chip for peace talks: it’s also about bringing the war into Russia, stretching Putin’s forces and easing the burden on Ukrainian troops in the Donbas.

But the Ukrainian defence is being stretched, too. While 60,000 Russian troops have been drawn into bombing their own territory instead of Ukraine, this hasn’t slowed Russia’s advances in the Donetsk region. Moscow has redeployed soldiers from quieter fronts in Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, convinced North Koreans to join the war and coerced young conscripts into signing contracts to fight for Kursk. In October, a 19-year-old from Tatarstan was shot in the head at a training ground for refusing to sign. The Russian defence ministry is also paying troops £3,000 each when they sign the contract, a deal that has enabled Putin to boost Russia’s troop numbers in Ukraine by 100,000 this year, bringing the total to nearly 600,000. Ukraine’s numbers, on the other side, are thinning fast due, obviously, to casualties – but also to mass desertions.

The Ukrainian command belives redeploying troops from Russia to the east won’t make a difference, while holding Kursk could be used to pressure Putin into a compromise during peace talks next year. This explains why the Kremlin is fighting so hard to push Ukraine out of its territories, relying on North Korean troops to tip the scales. But as Ukrainian soldiers question the value of holding a fragment of Russian territory over defending their own homeland, the reality of their situation looms large. Putin has occupied 20 per cent of Ukraine, and a little piece of Kursk won’t bring that back. The city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, however, still belongs to Ukraine and still can be saved. But should it fall, the blame will not only rest on Syrskiy – it will come crashing down on Zelensky himself, and it will hit hard.