Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
For months, one strategic decision weighed heavier over Ukraine’s war effort than any other.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, the general dismissed as Ukraine’s commander-in-chief in July, has delivered his most detailed public account yet of the decision that defined his tenure: sending Ukrainian forces into Russia’s Kursk region in August 2024 while Pokrovsk, the Donetsk logistics hub, was buckling under Russian pressure.
Speaking to BBC News Ukrainian, Syrskyi said the Kursk incursion forced Russia to redeploy around 70,000 troops, among them airborne forces, marines and some of its best-trained motorised rifle units.
Within a month, he said, Ukrainian forces had seized control of 1,273 square kilometres of Russian territory.
Russia was pushed to halt its offensives on every operational-strategic front except Pokrovsk, Syrskyi told BBC News Ukrainian.
He said that on some days during the fighting, according to Russia’s own figures, the casualty ratio on the Kursk axis had reached one to five, meaning the defending Russian forces lost five times as many troops as the attacking Ukrainian units.
Why not reinforce Pokrovsk?
The counter-argument from critics inside and outside Ukraine has been simple: those brigades should have gone to Pokrovsk. Syrskyi’s answer is that the units he had would not have changed the outcome.
Only three understrength air assault brigades and two assault battalions were committed to the Kursk offensive, he said. Just one of them went in at full strength; the other two attacked initially with only two battalions each, with their third battalions joining later.
Second-echelon consolidation units were themselves at only 60 to 70 percent of their nominal strength, and the 95th Brigade, Syrskyi said, had come out of heavy fighting on the Toretsk front with little time to recover.
“Those two brigades, and later the third, would not have made any difference, given their technical condition,” Syrskyi told the broadcaster. At Pokrovsk at that moment, he said, Russia had already massed a force of almost 100,000 troops.
Russia’s offensive is spent
In the same interview, his first since being forced from his post this summer, Syrskyi told the BBC that Ukraine had stabilised the front line and broken Russia’s ability to advance by killing so many of its soldiers.
He said Russia’s overall losses in the war were six times Ukraine’s, or up to 11 times if counted only among the dead.
In the first six months of 2026, he said, Russia managed to seize about 61 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory in total.
