Name: Why Ukraine Suddenly Decided to Invade Russia
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T17:11:21.000Z
Duration: 37 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The war in Ukraine has been raging on for more than two and a half years now, with little end in sight.

Adverbs of degree

But just a few weeks ago, in the 895th day after Russia launched its initial full scale invasion of the country, the Ukrainians did something that is completely changing the course of this entire conflict.

Reflexive pronouns

Because on 6th August 2024, it was the Ukrainian army that flipped the script of this war by launching their own invasion of Russia, shifting themselves into the role of the invading army for once, after fighting for years on the defensive on their own territory.

Early that morning, after weeks to months of quietly preparing and concentrating their forces, the Ukrainian army began crossing the border from Ukraine's Sumy province into Russia's Kursk Province in a major surprise attack that as up to this video's writing, met little resistance.

Since then, as many as 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of armored vehicles have invaded Russia's Kursk province.

And they've punched roughly 20 miles deep and 40 miles wide into the country in only the first 10 days of the attack.

The capturing more than 70 Russian villages in the process and coming to occupy an area roughly 1,000 square kilometers in size, an amount of land that's roughly equivalent to the size of Hong Kong.

And while that might not initially sound like very much, that is a lightning fast advancement compared to what's been happening elsewhere in the war over the past two years of attritional trench warfare in the east.

For context, in only the first 10 days of their offensive in the Kursk province, the Ukrainians ended up capturing about as much land from Russia as the Russians have captured from Ukraine this entire year to date since the start of January, over the past nearly nine months of warfare at enormous costs in both lives and machinery, which is all rapidly evolving into a major embarrassment for the Kremlin.

Already, nearly 200,000 Russian civilians have been given mandatory evacuation orders to leave their homes for safety further behind the front front, while the border provinces of both Kursk and Belgorod have each declared federal emergencies in light of the attack.

And as many as 2,000 Russian soldiers have already been captured as prisoners of war and taken back across the border to Ukraine.

This major Ukrainian attack in Kursk is very historically significant for many reasons, but

to only name a few, it is the biggest armed invasion of foreign troops into Russia since the Second World War.

While it is also the first time in history that a nuclear weapons armed state has suffered a major hostile invasion of its sovereign territory, which is testing the very limits of what we understand about escalation.

So what are Ukraine's goals and objectives with launching this unprecedented surprise attack into Russia?

What does Ukraine hope to achieve by invading and occupying Russian territory?

How did Russia's intelligence agencies fail to predict this attack and how did Russia's army fail to adequately prepare for it?

And how is this whole series of events becoming one of the most significant turning points in the biggest wars seen in Europe since 1945?

To begin to understand the answers to these questions, you first need to understand how the horrible war in Ukraine has been developing for both sides over the past year since the start of 2024.

Throughout the second half of the previous year in 2023, the Ukrainian army carried out a major counteroffensive operation against the Russians, primarily in the southern Zaporizhia province, with the ultimate objective of of driving across the Russian lines and reaching the coast of the Sea of Azov, thereby splitting the Russian occupied parts of Ukraine in half in the process.

They were heavily armed with Western supplied weapons for this attack, but

as the Russians were anticipating a Ukrainian attack in this direction, they smashed themselves against very heavily fortified Russian positions in the area and ultimately failed to make very much ground and likely suffered enormous casualties in the process.

The New York Times reported that as much as 20% of the weapons and vehicles the Ukrainians committed to the 2023 counteroffensive were destroyed in it, while the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that the Ukrainians suffered more than 90,000 casualties during the whole campaign, although those numbers are heavily disputed and Western sources like the Institute for the Study of War consider those losses to be implausibly high.

Regardless, Ukraine failed to meet any of its objectives during the 2023 counteroffensive and they burned through a huge amount of resources and manpower even trying, which forced them to shift back to the defensive for 2024 and fight against the Russians in a brutal attritional style of warfare instead.

Since then, throughout 2024, Ukraine has struggled deeply with both chronic manpower and equipment shortages after two and a half years of horrific trench warfare that has likely resulted in a minimum of 200,000 Ukrainian military casualties, both killed and wounded since the invasion began.

4 Finding new volunteers for the Ukrainian armed forces voluntarily has become more and more challenging as time has gone on, while draft dodging has also become more common as well.

In November of 2023, the BBC estimated that 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age had fled the country abroad over the past two years since the Russian invasion began, with most of them having slipped over the western borders into Poland and Slovakia.

The despite the Ukrainian government's total ban on all fighting age men from being able to leave the country.

And this shrinking pool of manpower for the army has been undermining the remaining soldiers morale in multiple ways, most notably in terms of troop rotations at the front.

Early on into the war, when Ukraine had significantly more volunteers, soldiers were able to be rotated out of the front about every two weeks and were able to enjoy an entire week off.

But now in 2024, with fewer numbers, frontline Ukrainian soldiers are enduring an average of a month at the continually with only four days of rest in between, significantly affecting their ability to keep fighting effectively.

In order to try and address the manpower shortage, the Ukrainian government has already adopted several reforms this year, such as by lowering the military draft age for men down from 27 years old to 25 years old, allowing most of the country's prison population except for the most serious offenders to enlist with the armed forces in exchange for early release.

And In May of 2024, the Ukrainian government also cancelled all of its consular services for all male Ukrainian citizen abroad aged between 18 and 60, including canceling all renewals of passports in an attempt to force more Ukrainian men living abroad to return back to the country again and potentially face conscription.

And in terms of artillery alone, the Ukrainians were getting outgunned by the Russians and artillery all across the front line by as much as 20 to 1 before April of this year when a new $60 billion US military aid package for Ukraine finally passed through the US Congress.

But even after that, as recently as August of 2024, the Ukrainians have still been getting outgunned in artillery shells along the front line by a ratio of about 8 to 1.

These manpower and supply issues for Ukraine, on top of the failure of their 2023 counteroffensive, shifted the momentum of the war in the eyes of many back over to the Russians again across 2024 and since the start of the year the Russians have managed to continually make slow but steady and methodical gains across the eastern front with their superior advantages in both firepower and manpower.

Since the start of the year, the Russians have thrown hundreds of thousands of their soldiers against the Ukrainian defenses in the Donetsk province in the east, and

They've gained nearly 1,200 square kilometers of territory in the process, including the significant capture of Avdiivka that was accomplished In February of 2024, a major suburb of the city of Donetsk that had a pre war population of 31,000 people.

Since then, the Russians have methodically advanced at enormous cost across an axis in the Donetsk province, towards the towns of Chasivyar, Kostiantynivka, Toretsk and New York in the north, and

towards the highly strategic town of Pokrovsk in the center.

With a pre war population of around 60,000 residents, Pokrovsk is a major town and a highly important logistical center for the Ukrainian army as it sits precisely on the highway T054 which links several other currently Ukrainian held cities in Donetsk like Konstantinivka and Chasiv Yar and Kramatorsk and Sloviansk further to the north as it currently stands.

As of mid to late August 2024, when I made this video, the Russian army has punched a beam within only 13km of Pokrovsk and if they succeed in capturing it, it will sever one of Ukraine's primary highways that they use to supply their forces in Konstantinivka and Chasiv Yar.

And then if the Russians are able to capture those under supplied towns near next, their path will become fully opened to advance on the major cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk in the north next, which are the final two major cities in the Donetsk province that continue to remain under Ukrainian control outside of Russian occupation, each of them with pre war populations of more than 100,000 people.

If Russia ultimately succeeds in capturing these final two cities in Donetsk, then they will effectively complete their occupation of the entire Donetsk province, and

it will become very difficult for the Ukrainians to then eject them from it militarily.

Especially when considering that Russia already effectively controls the entirety of the neighboring Luhansk province as well.

It all starts with Russia's capture of Pokrovsk, and

if they're successful there, it could eventually lead to Russia's full control and occupation of the entire Donbas region next, a major wartime goal of the Kremlin's and which could then lead to Moscow focusing their army's next moves on pursuing their other major wartime objectives in the southern theater, completing their occupations of the provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson too, all of which Russia has already unilaterally declared to have annexed and declared to be core Russian territories.

And at the same time as this major Russian push towards Pokrovsk has been ongoing, the Russians also opened up another new front in the war in May of 2024 when they launched a renewed invasion of Ukraine's Kharkiv province in the north, with only moderate gains in success.

And as a result of all of these huge Russian offensives in 2024.

The scale of the fighting that's been going on throughout Ukraine this year has been at its most intense level of the entire war, especially across this summer, even more so than at the beginning of the invasion in early 2022.

Russian casualties alone along the front line are estimated by Western sources to have been more than a thousand soldiers lost per day on average since May of this year, a rate of losses that is comparable to some of the most ferocious combat seen during the Second World War.

By comparison, American forces during the brutal Battle of Okinawa against the Japanese in 1945, the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought during the entirety of the Pacific theater of the war, suffered only around 600 casualties per day in combat on the island, which implies that the current state of the war going on in the east of Ukraine is bloodier and more ferocious than even that terrible battle was for the Americans.

It is truly world war levels of combat that hasn't been seen in Europe in more than 80 years.

And the fighting has been so brutal here that you can now clearly see the scar across eastern Ukraine from space that marks the current position of the frontline.

And as Russia has continued gaining ground against the Ukrainians throughout the year, there has become a growing narrative, both in Ukraine itself and in the rest of the world, that against its much larger opponent, Ukraine is supposedly destined to lose eventually in this attritional style of warfare that inherently favors the country with the larger pools of manpower and equipment to pull from, and

that as a result, Kyiv should supposedly sue for peace sooner rather than later.

In June of 2024, with the momentum seemingly on his side, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, finally set out his own terms to begin peace negotiations with Ukraine.

He demanded that all Ukrainian forces withdraw from the territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, just to even start negotiations, and

that Ukraine would have to agree to permanently cede all of these territories in their administrative entireties to Russia, despite Russia not yet fully controlling all of the territories.

He also demanded that Ukraine would have to recognize the loss of Crimea as well, and

formally adopt a status of permanent neutrality and irrevocably abandon its ambitions to join the NATO alliance.

This offer was immediately rejected by the Ukrainian government, which so far continues to assert that peace will only be possible if and when all Russian forces leave from Ukraine's internationally recognized territory and Ukrainian sovereignty is fully restored across all of its pre2014 borders, including Crimea.

But that doesn't mean that international pressure on Ukraine to begin making concessions to Russia hasn't been growing.

A month later, In July of 2024, the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, visited Ukraine's President Zelenskyy in Kyiv and pleaded with him to accept a ceasefire deal with Russia along the current military frontline in the country, which was again refused.

The month before that, in June, Switzerland hosted a major summit on peace in Ukraine that explicitly didn't invite Russia and that saw 78 countries from all around the world all signing a communique that asserted restoring Ukraine's pre2014 borders was the ultimate basis for any lasting peace in the conflict.

But many other major countries from around the world did not agree to that and did not sign on to it, including all of the BRICS states besides Russia, like Brazil, India, China and South Africa, in addition to Pakistan, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Thailand, among many others.

At the same time, there's also been growing discontent about continuing to support the Ukrainians in the Western world.

Donald Trump, who very well may be elected as America's president again in November, has vowed to immediately halt all American military aid to Ukraine if he returns to office again in an attempt to force the Ukrainians to negotiate on an end to the war, a possibility that the Ukrainian army has to consider in their ongoing calculations.

And at the same time, as the war has raged on in Ukraine for the past two and a half years now without an end in sight, and

as the casualties and burdens of the war have continued mounting, war weariness within Ukrainian society has also naturally increased.

When the Russian invasion began in early 2022, polling data from the Kyiv Institute of Sociology found that an overwhelming 82% of Ukrainians flatly rejected any consideration that the country should ever surrender any of their territory to Russia in exchange for peace, which remained more or less consistent for the next year and a half through October of 2023.

But after the failures of the 2023 counteroffensive and the grinding attritional war in the east that has taken place since then, the numbers of Ukrainians saying that they would consider surrendering territory in exchange for peace have increased dramat to as high as nearly a third of the Ukrainian population by the time of May 2024.

And because of all of this pressure building both within and outside of Ukraine to surrender land to Russia in exchange for peace, and

after slowly losing ground all throughout the year to Russia in the east, the Ukrainian military leadership likely calculated that they needed to throw down the dice and gamble with a bold attack somewhere to shift this prevailing narrative boost their own morale and to try and reverse their fortunes.

And sometime this summer, they ultimately decided that launching a major attack into Russia itself would be exactly that high stakes gamble that they needed.

Over the past few years, the Ukrainians have launched a few cross border raids into Russia, but

they were always exactly raids like the ones launched in May of 2023 and in March of 2024 into Russia's Belgorod province by only a few hundred fighters, each time in pro Ukrainian militia organizations rather than Ukrainian army soldiers that both times only made small territorial gains and attacks before escaping back over across the border again.

A big Ukrainian attack into Russian territory with the objective of hanging onto that territory had never been attempted.

But as the Ukrainian military planners began scanning around their frontiers over this past summer, they noticed a major vulnerability.

This is a map of current Russian military fortifications that have been built up throughout the front line in Ukraine in the south and the east, and

along the northern Russo Ukrainian border stretching into Belarus.

This map is sourced from data that's been collected by Brady Afric, an American analyst who maps out Russia's defenses on his website.

Russia's fortifications along the front line within Ukraine in the south and the east are strong because they're multi layered lines of trenches, minefields and anti tank defenses that were strong enough to block Ukraine's counteroffensive operation here in 2023.

But Ukrainian military planners noticed this vulnerability in the northern section along Ukraine's border with Russia's Kursk province.

Here there were gaps in between the defensive lines and there were far fewer anti tank obstacles, minefields and anti tank ditches than elsewhere.

Presumably just because the Russians weren't anticipating a major Ukrainian attack happening into Russia itself.

So for months over the summer, the Ukrainians began quietly redeploying troops and equipment from across the country into their northern Sumy province under the pretense of training and picking up new equipment and slowly built up mass there for an attack into Russia's more lightly defended Kursk province in the process.

And even though this buildup of forces was being done in total secrecy, the higher Ukrainian troop concentrations in Sumy still didn't exactly go unnoticed by the Russians.

After the Ukrainian assault took place in August, Andrei Gurulyov, a member of Russia's parliament and a former high ranking Russian military officer, claimed that a report had been submitted to the Russian military authorities around a month beforehand that that read forces had been detected and that intelligence indicated preparations for an attack.

Nonetheless, as Ukrainian troop movements through the Sumy province towards the active front lines in Kharkiv and the Donbas were pretty common.

Russian intelligence appears to have failed to have ever capitalized on that report and to have anticipated an attack coming from this direction.

The secrecy surrounding the attack was so great on the Ukrainian side that only a small handful of top Ukrainian leaders even knew about the operation at all.

While most of the Ukrainian soldiers who would be participating in the attack weren't even informed about the plan until the very last moment, some of them only a couple days beforehand, the Ukrainian leadership didn't even inform their greatest international supporter, the United States, about the operation at all.

Which led to officials in Washington waking up to a huge surprise on the morning of the 6th of August, when they learned that hours beforehand, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers armed with American supplied weapons had just invaded Russia.

And now, weeks later, the second battle of Kursk rages on atop of the very same battlefield that was fought over between the Germans and the Soviets in that titanic battle of Kursk in 1943.

And just like how that World War II era battle here proved to be a decisive turning point during that war, so too could this second battle of Kursk in the ongoing Russo Ukrainian War.

And while Ukraine's ultimate military objectives related to this offensive into Kursk are still fairly secretive, we have a lot of room to speculate.

Early on into the attack, there was a lot of speculation that one of Ukraine's primary military objectives was going to be the capture of the small town of Sudzha, located just across the border.