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Ukraine Needs Kursk

The Key to Unlocking Freedom

Shankar Narayan
4 min readJan 9, 2025

It was August 6th, 2024.

104 days had passed since the American Congress approved an aid package for Ukraine, after leaving the country to fend for itself in the wilderness for nearly six months. Avdiivka had fallen, its defenders forced to withdraw due to a crippling ammunition shortage. Patriot long-range air defense systems were nearly out of missiles, threatening to tip the balance of the war. Ukraine had also stumbled on its own, delaying the mobilization law that languished in the political process for over a year before finally reaching President Zelensky’s desk in mid-April.

Ukraine was just beginning to climb out of the trough. American weapons were starting to arrive, and recruitment was slowly gaining momentum. It would never be enough, but Ukraine was working with less than the bare minimum. The Biden administration had drawn a hard line: Russian territory was off-limits — not just for American weapons, but for any Western arms. Any attack on Russian soil risked not only catastrophic escalation in the eyes of Western leaders but also a collapse of trust between Ukraine and its most sophisticated ally.

If the ground invasion into Kursk went badly and Ukraine suffered a severe beating, it wouldn’t have been a simple setback — they would have risked losing a critical ally at…

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Shankar Narayan
Shankar Narayan

Written by Shankar Narayan

He didn't care what he had or what he had left, he cared only about what he must do.

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