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SUMY, Ukraine — More than three weeks into the plan by Ukraine’s military chief to turn the tide of the war by sending troops into Russia, much looks as if it’s proceeding as intended — except that Russians are still advancing inside Ukraine.

Russia’s offensive continues even with hundreds of its soldiers in Ukrainian prisons and hundreds of square miles of its sovereign territory under Ukrainian control.

If the bold plan by Kyiv’s Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky fails, Ukraine could lose many well-trained soldiers and much of the foreign equipment it has deployed to Kursk, as well as land in its own east, where Russian troops — who far outnumber Ukraine’s — persist in their grinding assault on the key transit hub of Pokrovsk.

Analysts say it is not at all clear what the end game is — or if Syrsky’s gamble will pay off.

Nico Lange, a former German defense official who is now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, noted that the incursion into Russia gave Ukraine “tangible gains,” including prisoners of war and a much-needed morale boost. But Russian President Vladimir Putin is downplaying the incursion and keeping the focus on Ukraine’s east.

“He’s basically telling the Ukrainians: ‘You can stay, you can leave — do what you want. For now I will be busy with other things,’” he said. If Ukraine’s goal was to exchange land for land, Lange added, “it’s clearly not working and Putin is calling it.”

“There is an asymmetry: The territory that is lost now in Donbas — Russia will keep it. But Ukraine cannot keep Kursk, and Putin knows it,” he said.

In a rare news conference this week, both Syrsky and President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that the Pokrovsk front remains the most difficult in the war. “Their goals have not changed,” Zelensky said of Russia’s intention to seize all of the Donetsk region, which is within Donbas. Syrsky noted that 30,000 Russian troops have been moved to respond in Kursk, but not from Donetsk. In recent days, throngs of terrified Ukrainian civilians have fled Pokrovsk and surrounding villages as Russian forces advance and troops prepare for potential street battles in the city.

The jubilance of Ukrainian troops who plowed through minimal defenses in western Russia and seized about 500 square miles in a matter of days stands in stark contrast to the state of their exhausted comrades fighting off waves of Russian troops in the east of Ukraine.

Lt. Ihor Sholtys, 28, a deputy battalion commander in Ukraine’s 14th Regiment, whose troops are split between Kursk and the eastern front, said that “there is a difference in the moral and psychological state” between the two groups.

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Still, many across Ukraine support the operation in Russia, which reinvigorated a military that has largely been on the defensive for two years. Outnumbered and outgunned in Donetsk — where its troops have spent years engaged in bloody trench warfare — Kyiv had to hatch an unusual plan to pressure Russia, Sholtys said.

“The effect we aim to achieve should not so much be reflected on the battlefield as it should in the impact on the international community, the moral and psychological state of the Ukrainian people, and the demoralization of Russian society.”

Ukraine learned the hard way in 2023 that a much-hyped plan for a southern counteroffensive gave Russia too much time to prepare, thwarting any hopes of a Ukrainian advance. The operation in Kursk had to be planned in total secrecy — with key details kept even from high-ranking Ukrainian officials and from allies whose equipment would make the assault possible.

Soldiers who were moved to Sumy, near the Russian border, thought they were being rotated away from the toughest front lines in the east for a well-deserved rest or a defensive operation. Most didn’t know that anyone would be crossing into Russia until days or hours before the attack began.

“Remembering the counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhia, we remember how we hyped it up and in the end we failed,” said Tourist, a soldier fighting in Kursk who launches night bomber drones.

The secrecy worked: Russia was caught unawares, and hundreds of disoriented Russian troops — unprepared for battle — surrendered, boosting what Zelensky calls Ukraine’s “exchange fund” for its many troops being held by Russia.

Kyiv needed this win — and so did Syrsky. The former ground forces commander had been named the military’s commander in chief in February, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/08/valery-zaluzhny-commander-ukraine-removed/" target=_blank>replacing the popular Valery Zaluzhny</a> in a move that was widely seen as controversial.

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Syrsky took up the role with a mixed reputation: He was seen as the mastermind of the defense of the Kyiv region in 2022 and a later successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv. But he was also nicknamed “The Butcher” for his Soviet-era tactics that some soldiers blamed for the fall of the eastern city of Bakhmut.

Within days of his taking the job, Ukraine announced it would retreat from the eastern city of Avdiivka. Russian forces have since advanced steadily from that city toward Pokrovsk. And in May, Russia launched a cross-border attack on the Kharkiv region in the northeast, catching Ukraine unprepared.

Largely on the back foot since late 2022, Kyiv knew that its soldiers were demoralized and that it could soon face increased pressure to negotiate from a weak position. The surprise seizure of Russian territory, it hoped, would turn that narrative on its head and put domestic pressure on Putin to end the war.

Among the troops relocated to Sumy was Arkan, 30, one of more than a dozen Ukrainian soldiers interviewed by The Washington Post for this article. Most spoke on the condition they be identified by only their first name or call sign, in keeping with military rules.

Arkan was instructed on Aug. 4 to move from positions in eastern Ukraine to the Sumy region, a move he said he suspected was to prepare for a defensive operation. The next night, under a clear sky with a crescent moon, he drove to a tree line next to an open field and prepared to launch one-way drones at a long list of highly prioritized targets inside Russia.

When he realized the attacks were part of an incursion into Russia, he said, his first reaction was: “Hell yeah!”

“For the third year of war, we started to move the war to their territory, which is very clever,” Arkan said. “You should operate on the enemy’s territory with the help of the enemy’s resources.”

Soon, more Ukrainian units were called up to support the move into Kursk. Tourist, who was still in Pokrovsk, was stunned to see how quickly Ukrainian forces had advanced into Russia.

When his commander asked him if he, too, was ready to join the Kursk incursion, he jumped at it. “I was already so depressed back when I was in Donbas, and here it all disappeared,” he said.

In Kursk, he said, Russian troops are using 15 times less artillery than in the east, relying instead on glide bombs to pound Ukrainian positions. Near Pokrovsk, there is just a Russian “conveyer belt of death,” he said.

The road into the city, he added, “is a wasteland where nothing exists anymore.”

“Pokrovsk was always a plan for Russian forces, irrespective of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion,” analysts at the Janes defense intelligence firm told The Post this week, adding that Ukraine’s decision to commit military might to Kursk “is likely having a negative effect” on the front line near Pokrovsk.

Meanwhile, the troops left in Donetsk are struggling to hold on to land for as long as possible.

When asked about the Kursk incursion at his makeshift base camouflaged under trees on a road on the edge of Pokrovsk, Oleksandr, a 58-year-old in charge of MaxxPro armored vehicles in Ukraine’s 68th Brigade, shrugged.

“Here, we are not doing great,” he said.

His brigade had just lost six miles in a week, and during the interview, soldiers listening in shouted at journalists that the United States should provide them with more vehicles, including M113 armored personnel carriers to save them from constant artillery attacks.

The fight for Pokrovsk has only intensified since Ukraine invaded Kursk, he said. “They changed their priorities to concentrate on this direction from all across the front line,” he said.

Throughout the city, civilians boarded up windows and packed bags to leave. Artillery rumbled constantly in the background. On board an evacuation train moving hundreds of people west, an old woman voiced her fury at Russian troops. “Why did they come and destroy our lives?” she sobbed.

Local resident Dmytro, 47, stood outside his apartment, damaged in a Russian strike. “I support the operation in Kursk with both hands,” he said. “But I also want Pokrovsk to be saved.”

Serhii Korolchuk and Anastacia Galouchka in Kyiv and Alex Horton in Washington contributed to this report.

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Siobhán O’Grady is The Washington Post's chief Ukraine correspondent.

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