Kursk shows it never pays to underestimate Ukraine

The Kursk submarine disaster on August 12, 2000, was the worst military humiliation of Vladimir Putin’s early years as president of Russia, with all 118 sailors killed when an accidental explosion sank the nuclear-powered vessel.

Almost exactly 24 years later, Ukraine’s daring decision to cross its borders and invade the region (and site of a famous World War Two battle) after which that submarine was named is giving Putin another military humiliation.

It is too soon to judge whether Ukraine’s Kursk invasion will succeed in its strategic objectives, especially as it is not yet clear what those objectives are. But it is already clear that this invasion, along with two associated attacks on Russian airfields and ammunition stores at Lipetsk and Morozovsk, both hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian front line, represents a major blow to the Russian military.

Ever since Russia attempted its full invasion on February 24, 2022, and then quickly had to pull back to the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine, which it had already largely controlled since 2014, it has been hard to make firm assessments about which side in the war has the advantage. This is because, once the Russian invasion failed, this became a war with many front lines and no obvious measures of success or failure.

Survival as an independent, sovereign state was the first test for Ukraine, a test that the country passed magnificently in 2022 and has shown few signs of failing ever since. However, after initial success in pushing Russian forces back during the autumn of 2022, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023 failed to regain much more territory.

And then, in the spring of 2024, Russia began its own new offensive seeking to regain land it had lost the previous