CNN
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It’s another twist in a conflict marked by at least annual reminders of how weak Vladimir Putin’s Russia really is.
Two months ago, as Russian troops poured into the Kharkiv region, Kiev looked to its borders, worried about where else Russia might find vulnerabilities. However, instead, Ukraine appears to have looked at the map, decided that Russia was just as exposed, and upended Moscow’s game.
A week later, and whatever the final outcome of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia, Kiev’s initially confused, perhaps hasty, decision to send thousands of troops in the Kursk region and beyond is paying heavy dividends. For the second time in just over a year, the Kremlin has a hostile force marching to its south, and very little it can do about it. Last June, it was Wagner’s local rogue mercenaries who headed to Rostov and beyond to decapitate Russia’s top brass. Now, it’s Ukraine’s own military, carving out what they claim is 1,000 square kilometers border territory.
Some analyzes over the weekend put the figure at about a third of that. However, the ability of Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Syrskyi to make even that claim is a notable victory in the information war for Kiev, even as Moscow severely limits the information Russians are exposed to.
“Bold, flashy, beautiful,” is what veteran Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham called Ukraine’s cross-border operation during a visit to Kiev on Monday. Meanwhile, US Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal called it “historic” and a “seismic breakthrough”.
The events are strikingly similar in the way they expose the gulf between the veneer of impregnability the Kremlin tries to portray and the dead-end reality of its power. And while Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s run in Moscow collapsed when the former chef finally appeared to realize he was on his own – and had angered Putin, rather than winning his approval for tackling the failed top brass head-on – the Ukrainian forces appear to have little but their own supply lines and ambition are holding them back.
Ukraine’s lightning advance is another example of the skill and mobility of its forces in warfare, versus Moscow’s preference for slow, months-long attacks in the same place. It is deliberately unclear where exactly Ukrainian forces are located. Videos emerge from cities far away in Russia, but without context. One night he got out of Lgov, about 26 miles from the border, with a soldier saying he promised his mother he wouldn’t go far.
It is also unclear where Ukrainian forces are digging in and where exactly they are crossing. The lack of transparency in the Russian system – where mistakes and problems are hidden rather than confronted head-on – works in Kiev’s favor. It is unlikely that Moscow, or even the governor of Kursk, knows the full picture of the mess they are in.
And the news the Kremlin is getting is uncharacteristically tragic. When Kursk’s acting governor, Alexei Smirnov, told Putin on state television Monday that 28 settlements were under Ukrainian control, with 2,000 people unaccounted for and 121,000 residents evacuated, it’s possible the moment was staged and pre-recorded, as most of Putin’s televised meetings.
But to what? Putin turned the question to his military chiefs, whom he has slowly decimated in the 30 months of ebb and flow of this war. Apparently they don’t have the solution yet. But Putin is trying to play the role of tsar who judges between chaotic and failed divisions, despite being assured on Wednesday by his chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, that the Ukrainian advance had stopped. The last time this kind of invasion happened in Russia, Joseph Stalin was in charge, and he did something other than televise his failed leadership.
Two questions remain. The first concerns the ultimate fate of the invasion of Ukraine. Do they intend to try to hold even the smallest ground? Do they plan to continue rampaging through undefended spaces? And how much Western-provided firepower, manpower and valuable equipment is Ukraine willing to commit to this effort? The merits of the attack are less in doubt than a week ago, when it first began. Putin has a bloody nose. But the Ukrainian endgame must be planned as carefully as the invasion to capitalize on Kiev’s success.
The second is what impact does this have on Ukraine’s more difficult front line in the Donbass? Over the past week, successes in the Kursk region have been accompanied by worse news from Toretsk or near Pokrovsk as Russian forces continue their costly, bloody but relentless advance. No matter how small the village, Moscow continues to attack.
So far, Ukraine’s hope that the Kursk operation will lead to the withdrawal of better units from the Donbass to support Russia’s borders has yet to bear significant fruit. As images continue to flow of poorly trained Chechen troops being captured en masse by Ukrainians advancing on Kursk, it is clear that Russia has sent its least effective units into the fight. They may choose to change this approach. Putin has also entrusted the operation to the FSB, the internal security agency that also controls the border guard, which has launched an “anti-terrorist operation”. This had been used in the past to counter Islamist insurgencies, not columns of Ukrainian armored personnel carriers. Perhaps that too was too short-sighted.
But soon the crisis for Kiev appears. Where does this leave his powers a month from now? Was talk of a manpower crisis in recent months because they were secretly holding forces in reserve for this attack? Are they gaining a strategic advantage large enough from these advances to change Moscow’s view of them as a defeated adversary? Does the advance make their Western backers decide that support is really paying off?
Regardless of how effectively Ukraine answers these questions, Russia has for the second time in 15 months been rudely humiliated. First, it was done by Putin loyalists, who turned selfishly to corruption and mismanagement. This time it is Putin’s own FSB, unable to maintain border control, in Putin’s war of choice. This falling tree may not make a sound in the heavily managed forest of Russia’s political space. However, he probably hit others as he fell.
But one fact remains. Both Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Putin have referred to the invasion in terms of its role in the talks. Putin said Ukraine was trying to improve its position ahead of the talks – talks that still appear to lack an agenda, a date or any sense of trust between the parties.
For his part, Zelensky said on Monday: “How useful this is [incursion] it may be to bring peace closer.” He added: “Russia must be forced into peace if Putin wants to continue waging war so badly.” Kiev knows that it cannot enter talks with Russia without a strong hand, as the Kremlin’s wildly deceptive negotiating style has proven that they are simply stalling for time unless they urgently need something from their interlocutor.
Still, even if Syrskyi has only half of the 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) he claims, the season’s change in fall is no more than six weeks away, and with it the muddy slowing of battlefield movement. Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive last summer was overshadowed by the sudden success of this August invasion.
The dismal fortunes of last winter are not yet behind them, but they may approach the next one with a better hand, and at least the idea of the Kremlin’s invulnerability – first broken in its failed initial invasion – has been shattered for at least the third time in this war .
