The barrage of airstrikes that Russia launched against Ukraine over the past two days, with hundreds of drones and missiles, provided punishing evidence of Moscow’s enduring military might.
Yet for all that firepower, Russia is still struggling to reclaim a small patch of territory in its Kursk region that Ukraine seized earlier this month. And on Tuesday, its military faced attempts by Kyiv’s forces to break into the Belgorod region of Russia.
Precisely why Russia has so far failed to repel the biggest foreign incursion into its country since World War II appears to be not just a matter of personnel and lack of battlefield intelligence, but also of priorities, according to Western officials and military experts.
While caught off guard by the offensive into Kursk, Russia remains more intent on capturing Pokrovsk, a city that serves as a key logistics hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and its leaders have been reluctant to pull troops from that front, the Western officials and military experts said.
“The aim of the Russian summer offensive is at least to take possession of Pokrovsk,” said Col. Markus Reisner, who oversees force development at Austria’s main military training academy and closely follows the war in Ukraine.