The D Brief: News from occupied Kursk; Saudi to get US bombs; Facebook lowers disinfo defenses; USAF dodges PFAS cleanup; And a bit more.
Dispatch from occupied Kursk, Russia: “On Monday, about a dozen Ukrainian soldiers, their faces covered with surgical masks, were grunting and cursing as they pulled dead Russian soldiers from a hall with passport control booths, zipping them into body bags,” Andrew Kramer and David Guttenfelder reported for the New York Times after traveling “a few hundred yards into Russian territory” with Ukrainian forces this week.
It’s now been six days since Ukraine’s surprise cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast, where Ukrainians claim to occupy 390 square miles of land.
Opsec trivia: “Only at the last moment…were even senior officers told of the offensive,” Kramer writes from an abandoned Russian border post. “Rank-and-file soldiers learned only a day before,” and even so, commanders did not confiscate their phones, “trusting they would keep the secret,” Kramer reports. Said one commander: “It is a blow to the authority of Russia, which presents itself as a victorious empire…But we created a buffer zone inside that country.” Continue reading (gift link), here.
The view from Kyiv: “Russia brought war to others, and now it is coming home,” said Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy in a video message Monday after speaking with U.S. senators, including Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal. “It is crucial that both Ukrainians and Americans emerge truly victorious in this shared defense of a normal life and people’s freedom.”
Mixed messaging: “Ukraine is not interested in taking the territory of the Kursk region, but we want to protect the lives of our people,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said in local media on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. “The sooner Russia agrees to restore a just peace... the sooner the raids by the Ukrainian defense forces into Russia will stop,” he told reporters, according to Agence France-Presse.
Expert reax: “Ukraine has achieved operational surprise against significant odds, exploiting Russia’s lack of readiness in its border areas,” write analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “This surprise on a partially transparent battlefield demonstrated that it is still possible to obscure intent even when the adversary can observe force concentrations.”
Prediction: “The Russian system's instinct will be to overcorrect and swing harshly at Kursk,” said Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing Monday in an 18-tweet assessment. With her expertise in Russian military command and control, Massicot reviewed Moscow’s likely considerations for tasking elements responding in Kursk. The Russians were revealed to have been notably distracted, she said.
The Ukrainians have “successfully exploited seams of responsibility between the FSB, Rosgvardia and MOD,” Massicot wrote. Looking ahead, “I suspect targeted leaks will emerge between MOD/GRU and FSB over who is responsible for intel and defense failures.”
At this stage, Ukrainian commanders in Kyiv have at least three options for what to do next, writes retired three-star Australian army general Mick Ryan.
- Consolidating “on the terrain they have seized so far and then defend[ing] it until some form of negotiation takes place.” However, the risks may outweigh the benefits since those risks involve the “high probability of losing a large number of forces,” Ryan says.
- Partially withdraw from the territory seized, “back to ground that is more defensible.” This approach, says Ryan, “would still require large numbers of combat and support troops to defend the seized Russian territory, and would demand a major engineer effort to build minefields and other obstacles [like] trench lines and deep bunkers and logistic storage locations.” But “the humiliation of Putin and his military…might be worth the potential gains,” he says.
- A full withdrawal of Ukrainian forces back across the border, which Ryan says probably “gives Zelenskyy the best domestic political boost and improvement in Ukrainian morale.” The goal here “would be to humiliate Putin [and] preserve Ukrainian combat forces, while sending a strategic message to Ukraine’s supporters that [they] can go on the offensive and do so in a manner which does pose an existential risk to the ground forces conducting the operation.”
Big-picture consideration (for the U.S. and its allies, in particular): “For nearly two generations now, Western nations have been able to cut military spending,” Ryan notes. This has run parallel to the rise of “slow decision-making cycles in Western military and political circles, and in military procurement.”
This confluence of multiple slow processes, the general argues, “is indicative of institutions that no longer understand the imperative to act quickly and decisively while taking major risks. This is not the case for the Ukrainians. They have faced an existential threat since February 2022,” and as such, “have a very different political and military decision-making calculus than those of their supporters.” Continue reading, here.
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1918, and for the first time in its history, 305 women were accepted for duty in the Marine Corps Reserve.
Newly revealed: Before its full-scale Ukraine invasion, “The Russian navy trained to target sites inside Europe with nuclear-capable missiles,” the Financial Times reported Tuesday, citing “secret files…detailed in a presentation for officers that predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Targets included the west coast of France, a British shipyard, Norway’s naval base in Bergen, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey—but also positions inside China, Iran, and North Korea.
Expert reax: “It’s one thing to have contingency targeting planning against other nuclear-armed states (even so called ‘friends’) or even their military allies,” wrote Dmitri Alperovitch, “but nuclear planning against nonaligned states without nukes? Hmm,” he mused on social media. Read the rest of FT’s report behind its paywall, here.
Developing: Russian military recruits are increasingly trending older and older, according to an analysis published Monday by a former Ukrainian officer who runs Frontelligence Insight on Substack.
The gist: “Between February 2022 and May 2024, the average age of Russian soldiers killed in action increased from 30.2 in early 2022 to 37.8 by July 2024.”
One possible implication: “The Russian government not only has to offer significantly higher payments to recruit individuals [see Reuters, e.g.] but also ends up with recruits who may be less fit for combat roles, either partially or fully.” Read on, here.
Related reading: “Iran to deliver hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia soon, intel sources say,” Reuters reported Friday.
U.S. lifts restrictions, will send bombs to Saudi Arabia. “The deliveries will include 3,000 Small Diameter Bombs and 7,500 Paveway IV bombs, which have been on hold since President Biden halted the shipments in 2021 over Saudi Arabia’s punishing war in Yemen,” the Wall Street Journal reports, adding that the move will remove “a major irritant between Washington and Riyadh, according to officials from both nations.” Read on, here.
Also: The U.S. joined nearly half a dozen nations in warning Iran “to stand down its ongoing threats of a military attack against Israel,” announcing in a joint statement Monday that they’ve “discussed the serious consequences for regional security should such an attack take place,” according to the White House.
Related reading: “US prepared for possible significant attacks in Middle East by Iran, White House says,” Reuters reported Monday after National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby spoke to the press.
Social-media firms are lowering defenses to foreign disinformation campaigns, researchers warn. After serving as a largely unchecked vector for influence operations during the 2016 election, the U.S. firms that run popular social-media networks seemed to be getting a handle on things for the 2020 cycle. But as the 2024 election approaches—and the intelligence community warns of foreign disinformation campaigns—the companies are lowering the barriers. First, Elon Musk fired the team that watched for foreign disinformation on Twitter, then Snapchat and Discord trimmed their trust and safety teams by 20 to 30 percent. Now Meta is about to shut down the most useful tool for tracking disinformation on its networks, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports.
National-security workforce needs young people, former NSA chief says. Paul Nakasone says fifteen times more 50-plus-year-olds work in national security than under-30s. At least one university is trying to step up. Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta reports from the DEF CON hacking conference.
And lastly: U.S. Air Force dodges PFAS water cleanup, citing Supreme Court’s Chevron ruling. The service is “refusing to comply with an order to clean drinking water it polluted in Tucson, Arizona, claiming federal regulators lack authority after the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ‘Chevron doctrine’,” The Guardian reports. “Though former US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials and legal experts who reviewed the air force’s claim say the Chevron doctrine ruling probably would not apply to the order, the military’s claim that it would represents an early indication of how polluters will wield the controversial court decision to evade responsibility.” Read on, here.