The War Comes Home to Russia
How Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans are reacting to Ukraine’s Kursk incursion
ON MONDAY, NEARLY A WEEK after the incursion of Ukrainian troops into Russia’s Kursk region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the daring operation in his daily video address: Ukrainian forces, he said, had taken some 1,000 square kilometers (more than 500 square miles) of Russian territory.
On the same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a televised meeting with his top security officials to discuss the situation in Kursk and promised to “drive out and beat back the enemy from our territories and ensure reliable border protection.”
The contrast in demeanor and body language was striking. Zelensky looked grimly determined, calm and confident; Putin, reading from prepared notes, seemed edgy and ill at ease, his eyes shifting, his posture tense. While he insisted that all was going well, his scowl said otherwise.
It’s far too early to predict the outcome of the Kursk operation. One of Ukraine’s goals is apparently to force Russia to pull some of its troops from Ukrainian territory, especially the Donbas, where Ukrainian forces are under heavy pressure. So far, this gamble isn’t quite paying off. While some Russian units have been redeployed from Ukraine to the Kursk region, they are being moved primarily from Kharkiv and Kherson, not from the Donbas, where Russia is still pushing forward. In the Monday meeting, Putin even asserted that Russian troops in the Donetsk region had increased the pace of their advance by 50 percent since the Kursk incursion. While military analysts have challenged this claim and even argued that Russian advances have slowed down, Russian troops did intensify their assaults on Tuesday, seizing three villages and reaching the outskirts of Toretsk, a ruined industrial city that Russia had sought to capture.
Forcing Russians to fight on a new front is risky. Even if the strategy works, it also compels Ukraine to divert troops it could have used to halt or push back the Russians in Donbas. (The same risk applied to Russia’s May Kharkiv offensive designed to force the Ukrainians to pull away from Donbas.) It is also unclear how long the Ukrainians can hold on to the territories they have seized in Russia, or even how complete their control over some of those territories is.
Nonetheless, the longer Russia fails to dislodge Ukrainian troops from the region, the more likely it is that the Ukrainians will dig in and fortify positions they can defend. Part of the plan may be to have Russian territories to trade for Ukrainian land in potential peace negotiations.
ALREADY, THE KURSK OPERATION has succeeded in several other important ways. Ukraine has put Russia on the defensive for the first time since its failed counteroffensive a year ago. It has also thoroughly humiliated Putin, the Russian military, Russian intelligence, and the Federal Security Service (responsible for border protection), which failed to detect the impending incursion. The spectacle of Russian soldiers surrendering en masse—Ukraine has reportedly taken about 1,000 prisoners in five days—has been particularly embarrassing. (The captured soldiers are a mix of draftees, members of the supposedly elite Chechen “Akhmat battalions” who reportedly ran as soon as the Ukrainian offensive began, and FSB personnel—all of which constitute a large batch of POWs to trade for captured Ukrainians.)
There is a profound symbolism in the fact that Ukraine has taken the war to Russia—and even in the location where it did that. Kursk was the site of a pivotal 1943 Soviet WWII victory against Germany, as well as the name of the Russian submarine whose sinking in the year 2000 was the first crisis of Putin’s rule. It’s hard to say to what extent these historical associations figured into Ukraine’s decision to launch the cross-border operation; on Monday, Zelensky stressed the fact that the Russian territories seized by Ukrainian troops have been the launchpad for Russian attacks on Ukraine. But he also pointedly mentioned the Kursk symbolism:
Twenty-four years ago, the Kursk disaster was the symbolic start of [Putin’s] rule. We now see what its ending will be—and it’s also Kursk, the disaster of his war. This is always the case for those who show contempt for people and contempt for all rules. Russia has brought war to others. Now it’s coming home to them.
For Ukrainians, the psychological boost cannot be overstated—and some soldiers are clearly relishing the turnabout. In one video clip, a man in Ukrainian-occupied Sudzha describes asking a Ukrainian serviceman what local residents are to do. The soldier’s sarcastic response referenced Russia’s annexations in Ukraine: “Learn the Ukrainian anthem and start getting ready for a referendum.”
Proclaiming the end for Putin, or even the beginning of the end, is usually—and in this case certainly—premature. But the dictator is rattled.
After an August 7 meeting on the Kursk situation, in which he described the Ukrainian incursion as a mere “provocation” and his yes-men reported that everything was under control, Putin remained silent on the subject for five days, even as locals posted tearful pleas for help and videos showing the aftermath of a Ukrainian strike at a Russian convoy that may have killed as many as 400 soldiers.
When Putin finally addressed the situation again on August 12, he abruptly cut off acting Kursk governor Alexei Smirnov, who had started talking about the extent of the Ukrainian army’s penetration into the region, curtly telling him to let the military officials report on those details and stick to the social assistance.
Russian-American journalist and analyst Michael Nacke believes that the Kursk operation, like last summer’s mutiny by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been a serious blow to Putin, scrambling his plans and making him feel that events are slipping out of his grasp. Russian authorities are now admitting that they don’t know when the Ukrainian incursion will be over. Despite concerns that moving too deeply into Russian territory may stretch Ukrainian forces and their supply lines, Ukrainian troops are continuing to advance, at least for now —not only in the Kursk region but toward the Belgorod region, where a state of emergency was declared on Wednesday.
At the August 12 meeting, Putin made the startling admission that other border regions could also be in danger: “The enemy will make further attempts to destabilize the border zone with the goal of causing political turmoil in our country. So, just because today things are relatively calm in Bryansk, it doesn’t mean things will remain that way.”
Expatriate Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann also sees parallels between the Prigozhin mutiny and the Ukrainian incursion: She described both as moments of “authoritarian fragility,” exposing the inability of Russia’s top-down system to cope with a crisis. Both situations may also expose the fragility of Russian public support for the Putin regime. Just as no one rose to oppose Prigozhin and his men during their march on Moscow, no Russians in the Kursk region offered any resistance—even verbal—to the Ukrainian troops suddenly occupying their land. The Sudzha man who was told to learn the Ukrainian anthem even concluded his video clip by musing, “To be honest, I don’t even give a fuck under which flag to live, as long as we have peace. If our people can’t protect us, maybe the Ukrainians will.”
Several dozen Kursk residents appealed directly to Putin in a widely shared video, stressing that they had faithfully supported the “special military operation” in Ukraine. None seemed to recognize the irony in their complaints about being left homeless or their children being too frightened to sleep at night. (One woman voicing these complaints was wearing a T-shirt that said, in English, “I’m Not Sorry”; the symbolism was no doubt unintended.) But none seemed in a particularly patriotic mood: They lamented the inaction and indifference of the local authorities and fumed against the lies on television—about orderly evacuation of the locals and Russian successes in pushing back the Ukrainians. One man implored “esteemed Vladimir Vladimirovich” to tell his people “in charge of accurate information” to do something about the fake news. In another video, a distraught middle-aged woman from Sudzha shouted, “They lie on TV! They lie and lie and lie and lie and lie, the bastards!”
While most Putin watchers agree that he has absolute contempt for the Russian masses, these voices of discontent from the once-loyal—whether it’s ordinary citizens or the increasingly disgruntled hawkish “war bloggers”—may well be causing him some anxiety. Putin has good reasons to worry that the anger will spread beyond the immediate zone of the Ukrainian incursion and will open more eyes to the workings of the Kremlin propaganda machine. With more than 120,000 people evacuated from their homes in the new war zone and at least 60,000 more still to be evacuated, more Russians may realize that the war against Ukraine has gained them nothing—and is destroying the security that was at the heart of Putin’s promise to the people. As Putin throws more and more draftees at the Ukrainians in Kursk, he may remember that the use of draftees on the frontlines was a source of particular grievance during the war in Chechnya.
Expecting that the Putin regime’s latest savagery will finally be the breaking point for the Russian population’s learned passivity may look like the proverbial triumph of hope over experience. But authoritarian regimes often seem unshakeable, until they’re suddenly not. And maybe it won’t be a single breaking point so much as a growing realization that, as the exiled pundit Alexander Nevzorov put it, “The vampire has no clothes.”
THE KURSK OFFENSIVE IS, without a question, a message from Ukraine to the West. It punctures another hole in the myth of unbeatable Russia. It also exposes Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling as empty intimidation. Notably, while discussing the first foreign troops on Russian soil since World War II (except for a brief border conflict with China in 1969), Putin threatened a vague “worthy response” and complained, as usual, that the West was “making war on us with Ukraine’s hands,” but said nothing about the nuclear option. Remarkably, even Dmitry Medvedev, the former puppet president and current deputy chief of Russia’s security council, for whom social media threats of nuclear apocalypse are practically daily affirmations, is making no such noises on this occasion.
The Kursk operation appears intended to demonstrate to the Americans in particular that Ukraine can win. (If Donald Trump wins and Putin looks like a loser by Inauguration Day, Trump is far more likely to decide to continue aid to Ukraine.)
Americans are getting the message. On Monday, the bipartisan team of Sen. Lindsay Graham and Sen. Richard Blumenthal arrived in Kyiv to meet with Zelensky and pledge continued support. Their joint statement hailed the Kursk offensive as “bold and brilliant,” urged the Biden administration to “lift restrictions on weapons provided by the United States,” and promised to introduce bipartisan legislation to codify the U.S.-Ukraine bilateral agreement reached in July.
The senators also said they were “more hopeful than ever that the tide of war has turned against Putin and his cronies.” The sentiment may or may not prove justified, but that optimism is resonating in Ukraine, where even people who were recently advocating some form of negotiated end to the war are now striking a different note. The Kursk offensive moved one such tune-changer, former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, to issue a profanity-laced monologue to Russian aggressors in which he promised, “We can live in peace, but only after we’ve fucked you up so hard that you will finally fold and learn the lesson that you shouldn’t mess with Ukraine.”