My impression, based on my lack of expertise, is that the Kursk offensive is the Ukraine equivalent of when Lee took his troops into the center of Pennsylvania in an attempt to make McClellan split his forces, and also as a psyops move to cause discouragement in the Union population and provoke a negotiated settlement allowing the Confederacy to continue. That ended poorly at Gettysburg, though without Custer and his Michiganers the result might well have been different.
(No, I’m not saying the Ukes are like the Confederates, good or bad; the backstory is very different, but military tactics are the same regardless of the backstory of a war.)
Have you noticed Putin fighting like George McClellan after the Uke counteroffensive failed? I feared Putin was going to fiddle fart around long enough for DC to escalate this across the nuclear threshold. I clamored to get on with the bloody arithmetic. It’s not only here that Putin drew off the best Uke forces. The Ukes were manipulated into putting heavy forces in the Kharkiv region which were, again, pulled off the Donbas front.
If this Kursk operation was a rope a dope and if a blitzkrieg column from Belarus is soon surrounding Kiev, Stonewall will look down and tip his hat.
Its an interesting analogy, which indicates this war is indeed a Civil War, perhaps encouraged and enabled by foreigners
My only quibble is that Lee attempted to invade the North 3 times, and do it while he knew there was still some relative parity between the two sides in manpower and material.