Kursk incursion lifts Ukraine’s hopes but some expect ‘nightmare’ in Donbas

Olena Dovzhenko no longer feels depressed after reading wartime news reports.

For months, the 27-year-old fitness club manager was disheartened by reports about bloody fighting and continual losses of towns and villages in eastern Ukraine.

These days, she smiles whenever she reads or watches videos about Ukraine’s surprise incursion into the western Russian region of Kursk.

“We’re kicking a**. Within days, we seized more land than the [Russians] had occupied this year,” Dovzhenko said with a smirk, showing an online map of the Kursk areas seized since August 6 on her smartphone.

Russian forces are just kilometres away from the town of Pokrovsk which sits on a strategic highway and serves as a key military hub.

They tire its defenders with ceaseless attacks and shell the town whose pre-war population stood at 67,000.

Meanwhile, the regional administration has urged civilians to leave Pokrovsk.

‘Russia showed its weakness’

Politicians have cast the Kursk offensive as a “table-turner”.

“The Kursk operation is doing for a peace deal more than 100 peace summits combined,” lawmaker Oleksiy Honcharenko said in televised remarks on Sunday referring to the summit held in Switzerland in June.

The Kursk operation, however, has not resulted in a significant pullout of Russian forces from the crescent-shaped front line that stretches almost 1,000km (620 miles).

“Obviously, a political decision has been made to keep fighting for what is really important to Putin – Donbas,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

Only limited Russian reserves have been dispatched to Kursk from Ukraine’s east and south, and Moscow’s push in Kharkiv and the southeastern region of Zaporizhia is decreasing, he said.

“But it did not in any way help Ukrainian forces regain ground there because they don’t have reserves either,” Mitrokhin said.

He said Ukraine may end up occupying three districts in western Kursk that are confined by the Seym, Sudzha and Psel rivers and are easy to defend with limited forces.

The Ukrainians, however, are manoeuvring in areas to the north to “possibly” keep the Russians away from the fortifications they’re building or to occupy strategic heights, Mitrokhin said.

Ukrainian politicians and media already call the occupied areas an “exchange fund”.

But they are more than just something to be swapped for Russia-held Ukrainian areas in the future, a Kyiv-based analyst said.

Moscow’s allies in the former Soviet Union states turned a blind eye to the Kursk invasion, while President Aleksander Lukashenko pledged last week to amass Belarusian troops next to the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy.

But the chances of Minsk actually entering the war are “zero”, said Tyshkevich, who was born in Belarus.

“It’s not a deployment but a demonstration of a deployment,” he said.

The Kursk offensive already played a multipronged role in the war.

It preempted Moscow’s plans to invade Sumy and allowed Kyiv to create a “buffer zone” that weakens Russia’s potential offensive there and in neighbouring Kharkiv, said Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of Ukraine’s General Staff of Armed Forces.

It forced the Kremlin to scrape together inexperienced servicemen from all over Russia, including Arctic and Pacific regions, and triggered fear “deep within the Russian nation”, he said.

It also reinvigorated Western efforts to aid Kyiv – but only to a limited extent, Romanenko said.

“We have a very positive international reaction, but not decisive, because they’re still not letting us use their [advanced] arms” for strikes in Russia, he told Al Jazeera.

The Kursk offensive also appeared to expose Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deepening distrust in the military top brass.

Some Russians are ‘dumbfounded’

And while Kremlin-controlled media claim a rising number of volunteers want to fight in Kursk, some everyday Russians seemed confused and indifferent.

“People are … dumbfounded, the chief is a guest abroad,” a Moscow resident who requested anonymity told Al Jazeera, referring to Putin’s visit to Azerbaijan. “Everything is going according to the plan, but who’s seen this plan?”

He said during the Sunday sermon, the village priest urged parishioners to collect money, clothes and canned foods for the displaced residents of Kursk.