Russia Threatens to Open Another Ukraine Front in Strategic Gambit

Russia is reportedly massing troops at multiple points along Ukraine's northeastern border. It threatens to develop its recent incursion into Kharkiv Oblast to include an attack on neighboring Sumy Oblast and further expand an active front line that Kyiv is already struggling to contain.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported this week that Moscow may be "concentrating limited, understaffed, and incohesive forces in the Sumy direction." Photos and videos shot inside Russia seemingly confirmed the transfer of a large amount of military equipment to the frontier of Sumy and Russia's border Kursk region. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry by email to request comment.

Fixing Ukrainian units including reserves in the northeast might stretch Kyiv's forces enough to allow Moscow to achieve a significant breakthrough in the eastern Donbas region, where Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts have long been the focus of the grinding and costly Russian offensive.

The ISW said it is unlikely that "such a Russian grouping of forces will be able to achieve the likely desired effect of drawing and fixing Ukrainian forces in the international border area."

The threat of a broadening northeastern offensive campaign is causing concern in Kyiv, where civilian and military leaders have spent more than two years urging Western partners to do more, faster, to help defeat the Kremlin.

It is unclear whether Russia's mauled military is capable of significant offensive success. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, this week cast doubt on Moscow's apparent ambitions.

"In Russia, there is also lack of ammunition, ballistic missiles, armored vehicles," Podolyak said. "They have a different level of training for the mobilized forces. This is not the level of special training that we saw at the beginning of the war."

However, even a limited offensive in Sumy might complicate Ukraine's defense, potentially adding more than 100 miles to the active front. Andriy Demchenko, the spokesperson for State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, told Radio Svoboda that Kyiv "can never rule out the possibility."

"The enemy can at any time, even though it does not have sufficient forces, try to do something similar to what is happening now in the Kharkiv direction," Demchenko said of the Sumy border area. "It is in order to stretch the front line, the line of active hostilities and actually stretch the defense forces of our country."

Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and now an adviser to the Ukrainian parliament's national security, defense and intelligence committee, told Newsweek that there are "several potential scenarios—it could be one of them or all of them together."

Among the ambitions, Stupak said, may be the "distraction of the Ukrainian general command and crew—reserves—from other front lines; an attempt to cut Ukrainian supply lines toward the Kupiansk direction, which could potentially force Ukrainian commanders to retreat from cities of Kupiansk and Lyman."

Kharkiv—Ukraine's second city and an important political, economic, and cultural center—could also be in Moscow's crosshairs. The Economist reported this week that Russian units advancing into Kharkiv Oblast intended to put the city in range of Moscow's fearsome artillery corps.

The ultimate aim, Stupak said, might be "to move as close to Kharkiv as it is possible, at least 15 to 20 kilometers [9 to 12 miles] from the city. In this case, Russia could start chaotic shelling of the city using cheap artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems; the cost for one old Soviet-era 152 mm shell is $500 versus $5,000 for one NATO shell."

The intention would be "to provoke panic and force people to become refugees, and to turn the city into a lunar surface," Stupak added. This would make any operation to eventually seize the city—or whatever is left of it—"much easier," he said. "In general, the Russian General Staff is limited with its resources."

Neither side appears able to deliver a decisive blow capable of winning the war outright. Kyiv is still publicly pursuing full liberation of all territory per its 1991 borders.

Moscow has offered little clarity on its professed plan to "de-Nazify" and "demilitarize" Ukraine, though Russia is committed to cementing control of the occupied and partially occupied Ukrainian regions—Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—it claims to have annexed.

Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst and visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in Boston, told Newsweek that Russia's intensifying summer offensive "goes further than Ukrainian reserves and locations."

"Russia's plan is aimed to improve Russia's political positions, to demoralize Ukrainian society and authorities, and to force Ukraine to negotiate about the ceasefire," Luzin added. "The failed assassination of Zelensky was part of this plan."

Earlier this month, Luzin said that it is "hard to say" whether Moscow has the resources to make a successful new push. "What we do see is that Russia was trying to surround a significant group of the Ukrainian forces in Avdiivka, exactly like in Ilovaisk in August 2014 and in Debaltseve in February 2015, but was incapable of doing this.

"Perhaps, Russia will make another attempt in the same way, because it needs stronger positions in order to get a break in the war... They need a break, but they are not going to end the war," Luzin added.

"For today, they want to get at least Donetsk and Luhansk," Luzin said. "The problem is that the Kremlin claims Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as Russian territory as well."

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.