Ukraine’s war is also about land

Learning the lessons of Kursk

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk has been a shock to everyone – to the Russians, to the West and even to some Ukrainians. The decision itself to invade Russian territory appeared seemingly out of nowhere, with no obvious prior indications from Ukrainian government or military sources.

So far, while we still know little of the true goals for Ukraine’s armed forces, the operation seems to be a net positive. It has put Russia on the backfoot, once again exposing how poorly organised the Russian forces are as they scramble to put in place defences and bring in reinforcements. It has demonstrated to the West that Ukraine is far from done and can still inflict serious defeats on Russia when given the tools and opportunity to do so. It has also regalvanised the Ukrainians themselves, whose morale was being worn down by the steady encroachment of Russian forces in the East.

Moreover, the invasion of Kursk has brought us back to the reality of this conflict.

It’s very easy to get lost in the high-minded abstractions and ideals of the war in Ukraine. Much commentary looks at the struggle between democracy and autocracy, the geopolitical competition between great powers, the history of Russian imperialism or the Westernisation of Ukraine.

But we must not forget that there are firmer, harder things being fought for. While there is a war of words over values, the tanks and guns of the physical plane are waging war for territory, for land.

There is at times a reluctance to see the war in this light. It feels improper – too base and too common to do justice to the sacrifice and nobility of the Ukrainian people. How, we ask ourselves, could they be dying only for land?

Yet we must not be so squeamish. Land, as much as language or culture, is the essence of a people.

In the West this point has become increasingly forgotten. Major western powers have few, if any, serious territorial disputes (taking it as given that, for instance, Argentinian sabre-rattling over the Falklands is not serious).

But in other parts of the world, the territorial definition of a country can be deeply meaningful to its people. Just look at the flags of Cyprus or Kosovo, which prominently display the borders, as they see them, of their countries. While not emphasised today, the full texts of the German and Italian anthems – two more recently unified countries in Europe – both establish geographic boundaries as essential elements of their patriotic fervour (“from the Meuse to the Neman” and “from the Alps to Sicily” respectively).

A country or nation cannot ever be just an idea, it must also be a place and part of being a place is defining where it begins and ends.

Ukrainians are familiar with and attached to that sense of place. Precisely because Ukraine’s borders have been obscured by imperialism throughout so much of history, an understanding of the extent of Ukraine, of Ukrainian identity in the physical space, is important. Even when split between three different empires (Russian, Ottoman and Polish-Lithuanian), there was a common understanding of which parts were Ukrainian, forming a continuous stretch of territory. That territory was then given political meaning in the form of independence (attempted in 1918 and then achieved in 1991) but the order of these events must be stressed and considered. Ukrainian land came before the Ukrainian state.

In the West, the failure to appreciate this has led to repeated misunderstanding of the war, particularly as it is perceived by Ukrainians.

Time after time, surveys of Ukrainian public opinion have shown that there is little desire to trade away Ukrainian land in order to end the war. This is especially true of the territories that have been lost to Russian occupation since the start of the 2022 invasion. One recent survey found that 77% of people would deem such a concession an unacceptable price for peace. Such a depth of feeling exceeds even the priority given to joining NATO (71% would see ruling it out as unacceptable). Only abandoning EU membership comes close (76% say this would be unacceptable).

For those with the will to see it, this reality has been obvious in Kyiv’s military strategy so far. Once the initial defence was secured and the first Russian attack repelled, Ukraine’s forces have focused on territorial liberation, not limited to those lands that were assaulted in 2022 but also the land occupied since 2014. The repeated strikes against supply lines and infrastructure in and around Crimea reveal the Ukrainian ambition to retake control of this symbolic territory whose people have never been Russian.

Any Western vision for peace that does not recognise the need of the Ukrainians to liberate at least the whole southern part of the country is simply ignoring the people they claim to be helping. Even well-meaning ‘allies’ trying to chart ways for Ukraine to more rapidly join the EU and NATO are not engaging with reality when they imagine the Ukrainians settling for a de facto partitioning of their state along the model of Germany from 1945 to 1991 or Cyprus today.

The Russians, for what it’s worth, have understood this dynamic better than the West. From what we know it does not seem Moscow ever considered it worthwhile to occupy the entirety of Ukraine. But Russia has based its ambitions on occupying enough of Ukraine to severe the connection between land and people and so to ‘break’ Ukrainian identity.

So we return to the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk. Naturally the Ukrainians have no interest in Russian territory itself. There is no vision for peace that would interest Ukraine where they hold on to possessions in Russia and Russia retains possessions in Ukraine. Ukraine’s fight is not for any land, it is for Ukrainian land and for the territory within Ukraine’s borders. Nonetheless, by occupying Russian territory, Kyiv can call Putin’s bluff when the Russian dictator says he would accept a peace deal based on current actual control (indeed Ukraine is forcing a reckoning for everyone who has suggested the idea of a settlement based on actual control, very few of whom imagined it would also involve Russian land). This builds pressure for real negotiations where the issue of returning land to their pre-war owners is forced onto the table.

In this regard, Ukrainians have shown more imagination with the Kursk operation than officials in either Russia or the West. People thought Ukraine was aiming for a total military defeat of Russia inside Ukraine and therefore could not see any options beyond another attempt at a counteroffensive into the occupied territories. This was a mistake. That Ukraine was able to subvert expectations and surprise everyone is not because Kyiv is stuffed with military geniuses, it is simply because they understand what the war is really about – liberating Ukrainian land.

Having been shown the way forward by the Ukrainians themselves, it is time for Western politicians, officials, advisors, analysts and commentators to learn the right lessons and grasp the true goals in this war. Yes, it is a war for democracy and Ukraine’s place in the West. It is also a war for the ground beneath our feet.