Ukraine’s shock invasion of Kursk takes away one of Russia’s biggest advantages and may force it to rethink how this war is fought

This includes units being pulled from Kharkiv in northern Ukraine and some other areas, like Kherson, Zaphorizia, and Luhansk.

US officials told CNN last week that Russia appears to be diverting thousands of its troops from Ukraine into Kursk. And a NATO country said that Russia moved troops from its enclave of Kaliningrad to Kursk.

Barros said Russia has not been observed taking forces from its priority areas in Ukraine’s east, in Donetsk, where Russia is gaining ground. He said he doesn’t “expect the tempo of operations there to decrease” anytime soon.

Warfare experts have told Business Insider that stretching and straining Russia’s forces is likely a motivation for Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.

Barros said that “if the Russians do indeed decide they have to redeploy a lot of forces and properly defend an additional thousand kilometers worth of border, that’s a substantial change because that is not a trivial amount of manpower and resources that now have to get bogged down for a larger undertaking.”

“It will reduce the Russian command’s flexibility for planning operations within Ukraine,” he said, “and ideally, in the long run, it will drastically increase the cost of protracting and extending this war.”

Russia has had huge advantages

Barros said that the time Russia spent not protecting its borders demonstrates how much of an advantage it had for so long.

He described Moscow as being “the beneficiary of a laundry list of luxuries” that allow the Russian military to focus its resources on Ukraine.” These luxuries include how Ukraine is not allowed to use some Western weapons on Russian territory, he said.

He said it’s not clear what will happen in such a fast-paced operation and how it will play out.

But so far, he said, for Russia, “it is a moment of embarrassment because it shows the Russian response to this — whether in terms of evacuating people or dealing with this Ukrainian incursion on multiple fronts — has been disastrous. There’s just no other way of putting it.”

Barros said that so far, the invasion of Russia has been a win for Ukraine after it spent months on defense, holding against Russian attacks with little territory changing hands.

Ukrainians, he said, “are no longer stuck in the rut where they no longer have the initiative.”

“It is now no longer the Ukrainians lying on their back for nine plus months at a time simply trying their best to triage,” he said, and “deal with a buffet of bad decisions and dilemmas that the Russian command was serving up for them.”