On 6 August 2024, Ukrainian armoured columns crossed the border into Russia’s Kursk region, an operation so secret that even many senior Ukrainian commanders were caught off guard. Within days Kyiv’s forces had seized more than 1,000 square kilometres, captured the town of Sudzha and taken hundreds of Russian soldiers prisoner, the first occupation of Russian soil since the Second World War.
For Moscow the incursion was a humiliation that exposed the weakness of its border defences, and Russia responded with conscription drives, a partial evacuation of civilians and a counter-offensive that took months to begin eroding Ukraine’s gains. For Kyiv, the move was both a morale victory and a bargaining chip, territory that could be traded for captured Ukrainians in any future peace talks.
The Kursk operation proved that a war of attrition could still contain surprise, and it changed the conversation about what Ukraine could achieve on the battlefield at a moment when its eastern front was under intense pressure. The fate of that pocket of captured territory would go on to hang over every negotiation about how the war might end.