Ukraine's Kursk gambit upends some old assumptions about Russia and the war

The Russian military's plodding reaction to Ukraine's surprise attack — and Ukraine's plan to create a buffer zone in the Kursk region — should compel Western political and military leaders to question many of the assumptions they're been making about this long-running war.

A former top U.S. commander and a senior defence analyst with deep ties to Ukraine both say no one should be quick to draw hasty conclusions from the events of the past two weeks.

Still, a number of suppositions about the direction of the conflict have been upended since Kyiv launched this bold action — the first ground invasion of Russia since the end of the Second World War.

There are questions the West should be asking itself as this operation plays out. What are Russia's real capabilities? And what kind of capacity does it have to sustain military operations?

Implicit in NATO's multi-year resurgence and rearmament has been the belief that Russia won't stop at invading Ukraine and wants to carry on to places like the Baltic States. In Latvia, one of those states, Canada leads a multinational brigade.

Expert observers, mostly from European defence and intelligence agencies, have been warning darkly that the West has only a few years to prepare for a possible confrontation with Moscow, and perhaps with other authoritarian powers.

Yet Ukraine — which has been on the defensive in the eastern part of its own territory — was able to launch a surprise offensive on Russia. Until this past weekend, the goals of that offensive were cloaked in strategic ambiguity.

In his nightly address on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country's daring military incursion aims to create a buffer zone to prevent further attacks by Moscow across the border.