In this footage released by the Ukrainian armed forces on Sunday, Aug. 18, 2024, smoke billows in what is said to show the destruction of a key bridge in Russia’s Kursk region. (Ukrainian Armed Forces)
Faced with crisis, Vladimir Putin tends to freeze.
Moscow’s slow, fumbling military response to Ukraine’s surprise occupation of parts of the western Kursk region is the latest example of the Kremlin chief failing to respond with quick, decisive action to match his bellicose rhetoric.
The Kursk incursion is the fourth major blow to Putin’s authority since his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and highlights the weaknesses of a top-down autocracy that operates largely on fear and punishment.
In each case — after Russia’s failure to topple the Ukrainian government at the start of the invasion, after Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin led a rebellion against the regular Russia military command and after Islamist extremists struck the popular Crocus City Hall concert venue — the Kremlin’s response has been halting, with Putin waiting 24 hours or more to offer any public comment.
“It’s always the same style. Putin likes to keep everything secret. When he appears publicly, he doesn’t say much. He prefers not to be alarmist,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of France-based analytical group R. Politik.
Top officials, meanwhile, often dissemble to hide their failures rather than risk displeasing the president. Immediately after Ukraine’s attack on Kursk began earlier this month, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff, who personally wields operational command over the war in Ukraine, insisted — falsely — that the Ukrainian assault had been stopped.
During a televised meeting of security officials on Monday, Putin appeared more rattled than usual as he read remarks from a thick notepad of scrawled black handwriting. He also irritably cut off Kursk’s acting governor, Andrei Smirnov, when he dared to openly disclose the scale of the incursion: 28 villages captured and at least 2,000 Russians missing in territory taken by Ukraine.
“Even then, he did his usual thing of more or less saying, ‘Just sort it out,’ and not actually providing any meaningful leadership or strategy for how to do that,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russian security expert with the London-based Royal United Services Institute. “Once again, it shows Putin in classic form, hiding from a crisis.”
Putin ordered the officials to drive Ukrainian forces out — then reverted to scheduled meetings, including talks with regional governors and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the days that followed, without publicly mentioning the crisis. Putin held a regular meeting with his Security Council on Friday to “talk about new technical solutions” for the Ukraine war, before announcing plans to jet off to Azerbaijan as if there was nothing amiss at home.
“This is Putin expecting other people to do all the hard work, and he’ll claim the credit for anything that goes well, and likewise, he’ll blame people for anything that goes badly,” Galeotti said.
Four days after Putin tasked Russia’s military with driving out Ukrainian forces, it was clear that an attack initially seen as a short-term nuisance — a “provocation” in Putin’s words -— was increasingly likely to take Russian forces weeks or months to address.
“The Kursk offensive in the last two weeks exposed the Putin regime’s true nature: a system built on lies, indifference, and self-preservation at the expense of its citizens’ lives and safety,” said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian tycoon and opposition figure jailed by Putin for 10 years, in a post Friday on X.
Less than two weeks into the stunning cross-border operation, Kyiv claims to have occupied about 386 square miles, with more than 180,000 Russians ordered to evacuate from their homes. Ukraine has sought to expand the fighting into the adjacent Belgorod region, but progress slowed after Russia deployed reserves and stepped up its resistance.
Gerasimov and the commander of the Akhmat special forces in the region, Apti Alaudinov, have repeatedly asserted that the Ukrainian advance had been halted, and by Friday the Defense Ministry claimed to have wiped out more than 2,800 Ukrainian soldiers.
But Defense Ministry reports are dismissed as lies even on the Russian side, with nationalist military bloggers expressing outrage at ministry’s claims and publishing their own reports confirming Ukrainian advances. Defense ministry video of supposed Russian attacks on Ukrainians in Kursk turned out to be false, having been filmed in Ukraine earlier in the summer, The Insider discovered.
But the continued damage to Putin’s authority after a catastrophic war and repeated shocks does not translate to an internal threat to his power. Nor is there a risk his regime might collapse in the foreseeable future, according to analysts.
Stanovaya said that many Russians, particularly members of the elite, had come to expect the worst in the war but realized that there was no alternative to Putin in Russia’s repressive political system.
“They are so used to shocking events. They’re so used to living in a very unpredictable situation, so it’s very difficult to surprise them. And they are also used to the feeling that they don’t have the power to affect anything, and they are helpless,” she said.
The crisis, she continued, had certainly undermined Putin’s authority — without necessarily undermining his grip on power.
The Kursk incursion has humiliated Russia’s military and demonstrated Ukraine’s resilience, but has not altered the fundamental situation in a long, grinding war of attrition.
Ukraine is under increasing pressure to negotiate a deal potentially giving up land for peace, after last summer’s failed counteroffensive, problems with personnel, doubts about future Western weapons deliveries, and fears that if Donald Trump becomes president, he will force a peace deal favorable to Russia.
Russia has pounded eastern Ukraine with glide bombs weighing as much as three tons, while Kyiv struggles with deliveries of just enough advanced Western weapons to hang on but not to win. Meanwhile, it is barred from using Western weapons to strike military targets deep in Russia.
As some of Ukraine’s most battle-hardened forces gain ground in Kursk, Russia has advanced on the town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, with reports that Ukrainian forces could be forced to abandon the town soon to avoid encirclement.
Putin’s response to the Kursk crisis has been to rule out any new compromise, and he appeared at the meeting Monday to dismiss the prospect of peace talks with Ukraine.
He said Kyiv’s attack seemed designed to improve its position in negotiations, “But what kind of negotiations?” he scoffed. “How do we even talk with people who indiscriminately strike at civilians, at civilian infrastructure and try to create threats to nuclear energy? What can we even talk about with them?”
Stanovaya said Putin has not retreated from the maximalist position he staked out about possible peace talks in June, when he said Ukraine would have to surrender even more territory to Russia and give up joining NATO as a condition for peace.
“When he talked previously about a peace proposal by Russia, it was an ultimatum. It was not a real proposal, and the terms and conditions of these talks are absolutely unacceptable for Ukraine, and he knows it,” she said. Now, she continued, “it will become much harder for him to promote this idea of a peace ultimatum because in the current circumstances you can’t talk about peace.”
Polling by the Levada Center, an independent polling agency, in July indicates that even as Russian state media has trumpeted Russian gains in eastern Ukraine, 58% of Russians now support an end to the war, compared with only 34% who want to go on fighting.
Those in favor of continuing to fight fell by nine percentage points between June and July, from 43% to 34%.
“These are the lowest figures for support of the opinion on the need to continue military action over the entire observation period,” the Levada Center said in a statement about the poll. Women, young people, people who had barely enough money for food and residents of small cities and towns were more likely to support a move to peace talks — about two thirds of them in each case. But most Russians — 76% in the June Levada poll — oppose concessions to Ukraine for peace.
Some pro-Kremlin commentators on state media in recent days have bemoaned propaganda from officials and others claiming Russian supremacy over Ukraine, given the shocking incursion into Kursk.
“We could lose if such blunders continue,” said nationalist commentator Karen Shakhnazarov, a regular fixture on state television talk shows about the war, speaking on Rossiya 1 state television. “This isn’t defeatism. This isn’t scaremongering. It’s just an absolute understanding of the price that we and our motherland will have to pay.”
Russia needs a jolt, such as realizing that defeat is a real possibility, he said, “so that in our heads the situation forms as to what will happen if we lose and what will happen to us.”
