LONDON: In a tense meeting in the Kremlin last Monday, military and intelligence officials explained to a visibly irritated Putin how Ukrainian regular forces had burst over Russia’s border.
Just when you thought the war in Ukraine had become predictable, with Russian forces slowly and incrementally moving further into Ukrainian territory, something extraordinary happened. Catching the Russians completely off-guard, in the early hours of 6 August Ukrainian forces ended a two-and-a-half year taboo over military operations on Russian soil by crossing the border into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. This was a watershed moment in the current war and an historic milestone in its own right. For the first time since the Second World War, Russia has been invaded by a foreign army. With proverbial steam coming out of his ears, an angry and embarrassed President Vladimir Putin was not amused.
In a tense meeting in the Kremlin last Monday, military and intelligence officials explained to a visibly irritated Putin how Ukrainian regular forces had burst over Russia’s border, overrunning meagre defences before advancing and capturing several towns and villages.
During the move they destroyed a Russian convoy 25 miles from the border, causing dozens of casualties and sparking mass evacuations of nearly 200,000 Russians from the area. As Ukraine captured more and more territory, Russian commanders played down the assault, insisting that the military had matters under control. But Ukraine now controls at least 440 square miles of Russian territory and, as of Saturday, 82 settlements have been seized in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian missiles have also destroyed two important bridges in the Kursk region, which will slow Russia’s ability to re-supply its forces in the area. In just eleven days, Ukrainian troops have taken more territory in Russia than the Russians have captured all year in Ukraine.
“Who planned this? Who thought about it? This is serious”, Andrei Gurulev, a Russian lawmaker and member of Putin’s United Russia party, wrote on Telegram on Monday, adding that it is “impossible” that the Russians did not know about Ukraine’s plans.
According to Gurulev, Russian border troops were the last to receive information about the ongoing Ukrainian offensive, leaving them negligible time to act. He also had a broader criticism for the army, after local media reported that the Russian Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, was caught spreading positive, but false, information while reporting on the Kursk situation last week. According to western intelligence, Gerasimov was informed of Ukrainian troop movements on the border at least two weeks before the attack, but dismissed them as implausible. “Nobody likes the truth in our reports. We all want to hear that everything is fine”, said Gurulev.
For the Ukrainians, everything really was going “fine”, with videos posted on social media showing Ukrainian soldiers almost giddily displaying just how easily they has pushed over the border, brushing aside whatever Russian defences they encountered. Videos spread across the world showing a Ukrainian soldier in the Russian town of Sverdlikovo climbing onto the shoulders of another and breaking off a wooden post anchored to a town council building before throwing the Russian flag to the ground. In Daryino, a town five miles to the west, other soldiers also grabbed a Russian flag. “Just throw it away”, a Ukrainian soldier said, grinning into the camera as another laughingly flexed his muscles. For Russia, the scenes were nearly as shocking as those of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow fourteen months ago, when the much vaunted security state that Putin had built crumbled in the face of a surprise attack. The Ukrainian incursion is the most significant challenge to face Putin since June 2023 as it highlights one of Prigozhin’s central claims—the corruption and incompetence of Russia’s army commanders who did not foresee the attack.
As Kyiv’s forces pushed forward into Russian territory, the barrage of missiles and drones triggered a state of emergency across the whole region. Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said the situation was “extremely difficult” due to daily shelling in the region. “Houses are destroyed, civilians died and were injured”, he said. “We are making a decision to declare a regional emergency situation throughout the Belgorod region with a subsequent appeal to the government to declare a federal emergency situation”, he added. This is despite the Kremlin’s false claims that the fighting had stabilised. While Gladkov was speaking, Kyiv announced that it had taken more than 100 prisoners of war in Kursk who could be swapped for captured Ukrainian fighters, in what Zelenskyy has referred to as his “exchange fund”.
After days of silence, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy finally confirmed what the world already knew. “It’s all to restore justice”, he claimed, “and push the war into the aggressor’s territory”. But what does Ukraine really want to achieve? Although Ukrainian troops in Russia are now closer to Moscow than Russia’s occupying troops in Ukraine are to Kiev, the fact remains that Kiev has seized less than 0.005 percent of Russia, while Moscow controls some 20 percent of Ukraine. So was Zelenskyy’s plan to punish Russia for the 2,000 times he claims Russia has attacked Ukraine this summer, or was it to pre-empt a move by the Kremlin to extend its invasion of Ukraine further north into the Kursk region. There had been reports of such a move.
Many western commentators are speculating that Kiev’s bold move was to draw Russian troops away from the eastern Donbas region, where they have been grinding forward, even though experiencing some 30,000 casualties every month. On Tuesday, Dmytro Lykhovy, a Ukrainian army spokesman, said that Russia had relocated some of its units from Zaporizhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine’s south back into its own territory to try to fend off Ukraine’s escalating incursion. But as Russia significantly outnumbers and outguns Ukraine, it may not be necessary to dilute its attack forces currently in Ukraine in order to defend Russian territory. In any case, the Ukrainians do not have the manpower to sustain the push, and certainly not enough for a subsequent occupation—although Kyiv has repeatedly said it has no intention of remaining on Russian territory.
Perhaps the biggest impact of the events of the last twelve days will be psychological. After more than a year of bloody defence, Ukrainians have received an enormous morale boost. Kyiv’s allies have been inspired too. US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called on President Joe Biden to cancel all restrictions on the use of American weapons. “Bold, brilliant, beautiful. Keep it up”, he said. “Putin started this war. Kick his ass.”
In Russia the mood was sombre. Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy as a “great leader” was severely damaged in the opening weeks of his illegal invasion of Ukraine, when he expected Kyiv to fall into his hands within two weeks. Two and a half years later, in many respects the current incursion is worse because no Russian leader can afford to preside over the loss of Russian territory, even temporarily, and survive with his reputation intact.
Already the operation has served its primary end to embarrass the Kremlin and so dramatically alter the conventional narrative of the war. Kyiv’s move is a useful PR victory for Ukrainian backers in the west, and shows how catastrophically backward and incompetent is Russian strategic thinking—almost Soviet.
And here’s a thought. Will the word “Kursk” feature in Vladimir Putin’s obituary as a term of failure? Flash back to the year 2000 when Putin had been in power for just 6 months and the submarine “Kursk” sank in the icy waters of the Barents Sea, killing 118 Russian submariners. Ignoring the pleas of the families, Putin decided to remain on holiday at the seaside resort of Sochi for five days before authorising the Russian navy to accept British and Norwegian assistance. Taken earlier, this might have saved the submariners. But because of Putin’s indifference or indecision, nobody knows which, it came too late and the sailors slowly died. In those days Russian TV was not controlled by the Kremlin as it is nowadays and reporters were not afraid to slam their new president for his incompetency in handling the disaster. The heavy nationwide criticism following the “Kursk” incident almost brought about Putin’s demise. Fast forward to today and, by coincidence (or was it?) Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia marked the 24th anniversary of the “Kursk” catastrophe, and where in Russia did the Ukrainians attack? The “Kursk” region!
Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has a thing for symbolism!
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.