EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — The latest bulletins from the Russia-Ukraine war sound like those written in the early days of the February 2022 invasion: Armed forces swarm across the border; swaths of territory are captured; and 180,000 people flee as the invading force advances.
Familiar language – but a totally different story. Now the invaders are Ukrainian, the evacuees are Russians in the southwestern Kursk region, and the Kremlin and its propaganda outlets are struggling to deal with the news and its consequences.
On Monday Russian President Vladimir Putin held an online meeting with Alexei Smirnov, the acting Governor of the Kursk region. Such meetings are typically highly choreographed by the Kremlin, but Smirnov appeared to go off script in an assessment of the crisis.
"The enemy has occupied 28 settlements,” Smirnov said. “Its penetration depth is 12 kilometers (7 miles), the width along the front is 40 kilometers (25 miles)" – at which point Putin interrupted the governor.
"The military will inform you about the width and length,” Putin said. “You better tell me about the social-economic situation in the region.”
The message seemed clear: Let’s not create too much hysteria.
But there was no overstating the gravity of the moment for Russia. What began as a small cross-border raid last Tuesday is now an invasion that has stunned the Russians – in the Kursk region and the halls of power in Moscow as well. While the scale hardly matches the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have occupied new settlements every day, and the Russian army has struggled to stop them. In his Monday remarks, with top commander Valery Gerasimov at his side, Putin insisted that "the enemy will certainly get the response he deserves."
Many analysts believe the strategic aim of the Ukrainian attacks is to use captured Russian territory as leverage for future negotiations with Moscow.
In his first comments about the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that Ukraine had moved into Russian territory to "restore justice" and pressure Moscow's forces.
Whatever the tactical explanations, the symbolism is powerful. The breakthrough at Kursk is not only the most important movement of Ukrainian forces since the war began; it’s also the first time since World War II that a regular army of a foreign state has invaded Russian territory.
From Kursk itself, a video has circulated showing dozens of people, mostly women, addressing Putin directly. Several say that they supported the Kremlin’s “special military operation” from the beginning, but they are seen complaining about their plight and asking Putin to protect them and their families from the Ukrainian army.
It’s a remarkable scene – and no doubt many ordinary Russians, in many parts of the country, have been blindsided by the news from Kursk.
In the spring of 2022, shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I reached out to a group of childhood friends in Russia for their views of the war (I had left Russia in 2019). Among other things, I asked whether they believed the war might come to Orel, the city in southwestern Russia where many of them still live.
“In theory, anything can happen,” Sasha, one of those friends, replied via WhatsApp. “But don’t be ridiculous: this can never happen in real life. Our army may have not been able to take Kyiv in three days, as some promised, but it will take a palace coup in Moscow to let the Ukrainians cross the border!”
A lot of things have happened “in real life” since then. The war has seesawed, fought largely over small patches of eastern Ukraine; thousands of Ukrainian drones have attacked Russian cities – Orel included; and small units of anti-Kremlin Russian forces have penetrated Southern Russia and conducted military operations in the Belgorod region. But until last week, nothing had happened to threaten Sasha’s prediction or do much damage to the Kremlin’s narrative of a successful “special military operation.”
Now there are Ukrainians fighting on Russian soil, some 150 miles from Sasha’s home in Orel. On Monday there were reports of fresh Ukrainian incursions into Belgorod province as well. Residents in the path of the fighting are in a state of panic, and many of the Kremlin’s go-to commentators appear to have lost their bluster.
Ukraine has flipped the script.
How it happened
On August 6, several Ukrainian brigades breached the Russian border into the Kursk region at various points near the Sudzha crossing. They captured the crossing itself the next day; dozens of Russian border guards surrendered. Multiple reports suggest that Ukrainian troops encountered only weak resistance from Russia’s “border cover regiments,” and Putin appeared to acknowledge as much Monday when he promised to "ensure the reliable protection of the state border." On the first day of the offensive, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were able to advance more than 10 miles into Russian territory.
The last state army to march into Russia was Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht, in 1941.
One week later, Russian forces have slowed the Ukrainians, but they are still holding Russian soil. According to Agentstvo Novosti, a popular independent Russian language Telegram channel, “By Sunday evening (August 11), the combat zone in the Kursk region had expanded. Reports from the Russian Defense Ministry, Russian military blogs, and NASA satellite data indicate that the total area of action on Sunday was up to 720 square kilometers (278 square miles), more than 70 square kilometers more than the day before.”
The Kremlin response
In the first days of the invasion, the messaging in Russian “patriotic” online forums and Telegram channels – platforms that have been the primary cheerleaders and public supporters of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine – could be described as confusion bordering on chaos. That confusion was almost as rare as the Ukrainian invasion itself, and suggested that Kremlin propagandists had received no clear instructions as to how to comment on what was happening. Clearly the attack hadn’t just surprised the Russian border forces; it had stunned the political elite as well.
24 hours after the first news of the Kursk invasion, Putin held a meeting with top advisers and called the attack "another large-scale provocation." He was quick to accuse Kyiv of attacking civilians, blaming the Ukrainians for “conducting indiscriminate shooting with various types of weapons, including missiles, at civilian buildings, residential buildings, and ambulances."
The charge mirrored repeated charges made by Ukrainians and foreign governments about Russian attacks on civilian targets, but Putin’s accusations came with little supporting evidence. Smirnov, the Kursk governor, said a Russian ambulance had been hit by a drone weapon; news agencies distributed one photograph, no video footage of the aftermath, and no testimony from victims or witnesses. No evidence of other attacks on civilians was provided.
Meanwhile, much as the Kremlin has called its own war on Ukraine a “special military operation,” its language about the Kursk fighting has been heavy with euphemism – Putin referred to the Ukrainian advance as “these circumstances," and "a situation." In his conversation with Smirnov, the Russian leader avoided using military language to describe the attacks.
Some pro-Kremlin analysts tried to calm Russian audiences, arguing that the villages captured by the Ukrainian Armed Forces "have no defensive significance."
Others were less sanguine.
Margarita Simonyan, head of the RT media empire and one of the Kremlin’s most notorious mouthpieces, wrote on her Telegram channel that she was praying for the people of Kursk, so that she could “wake up in the morning and find that everyone and everything is safe and sound.”
That was last Tuesday, the day of the Ukrainian incursion. She has not posted a comment about the Kursk "situation" since.
The former Russian president and current deputy head of Russia's Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, who has regularly threatened Ukraine and the West, pulled no punches, urging an unforgiving Russian military response.
“From this moment on, the special military operation must be of openly extraterritorial character,” Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel Thursday, using “nazis” and “reich” to describe the Ukrainian government. “It is no longer an operation to bring back our official territories and punish the nazis. It is possible and necessary to enter the lands of the still-existing Ukraine, and go to Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnepropetrovsk, and Nikolaev; to Kyiv, and further. There must be no limitations in terms of the Ukrainian reich’s borders recognized by some. And now it is possible and necessary to speak of this openly, without hesitation and diplomatic courtesies”.
One week later, the initial confusion from pro-Kremlin Telegram channels had given way to disinformation. Major platforms cheered the Russian army's success – with little evidence – in repelling the Ukrainian invaders.
From the Telegam channel “Operation Z” (1.5 million followers):
“The Russian army is epically burning enemy armored vehicles in the Kursk region…The enemy is trying to increase the number of armored vehicles involved in the invasion of the region. They are destroyed by the dozens a day from the air: by aviation and drone operators.”
And from the “Redovka” channel (2.7 million followers):
“In the city of Sudzha, the Ukrainian Armed Forces managed to gain a foothold, but only in the western part. However, the reinforcements of the Russian Armed Forces that arrived in time put an end to the Ukrainian ‘blitzkrieg.’”
Some platforms chose diversion – ignoring the Kursk disaster altogether and focusing on other fronts inside Ukraine. The channel “Povernutye na voine” – meaning “Obsessed with War” (770,000 followers) – said that Russian soldiers had “heroically repelled the naval attack” carried out by Ukrainians at the Kinburn Spit near the Black Sea, adding, “They still can't get around to celebrating their D-Day, they just keep killing themselves. And so it has been, is, and will be every time.”
The reality - and what comes next
But the truth has been difficult for Russians to ignore.
While Kremlin officials claimed to have stabilized the Ukrainian advance, Ukraine continued to hold that swath of the Kursk region, and officials in the neighboring Belgorod region said evacuations had begun there as well, due to "enemy activity on the border".
If Putin and others were downplaying the news, Lieutenant-General and State Duma deputy Andrey Gurulev, one of the most frequent guests on Russian political talk shows, was doing the opposite.
“There is no military system in place for guarding the state border, no reserves and no second lines of defense,” Gurulev wrote in a blistering post to his Telegram channel (80,000 followers). “If the Ukrainian Armed Forces spent two months preparing for this, how did we miss it?”
“We must take a sober look at the situation,” Gurulev said, adding that while “the goals and objectives” of the Ukrainian incursion were unclear, the facts were not. He said the attack had come as a “total surprise” to the Russian Defense Ministry. “Unfortunately, a certain territory of our country is currently occupied by the enemy. This is reality.”
Gurulev, who has previously called on the Kremlin to attack Poland and other NATO countries, also blamed the U.S., repeating a mantra of Putin and his propagandists – that Russia is not only fighting a war against Ukraine, but against the West and the U.S. in particular.
“It is obvious that the American Joint Chiefs of Staff is behind this strategy,” Gurulev said (U.S. officials have said the Ukrainian invasion surprised them as well). “The goal of this new strategy is to confront Russia with the prospect of an increasingly costly war and to force it to negotiate peace by November-December. For this purpose, the enemy (Ukraine) received from its Western curators a complete carte blanche to transfer actions to Russian territory and use all available weapons against it.”
On Saturday, in another acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation, Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee said that a counter-terrorist operation had been implemented in the Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, all of which border Ukraine. The committee said the decision was made in "an attempt to destabilize the situation in a number of Russian regions" by Kyiv and for the sake of "suppressing the threat of terrorist attacks."
The new measures allow for investigating local residents, wiretapping their telephone conversations, disconnecting the Internet and mobile communications, evicting residents, entering their homes and taking away their cars.
Kursk then, Kursk now
For Russians, the name “Kursk” holds powerful associations.
Many who grew up in the Soviet Union will remember the World War II Battle of Kursk, a vicious tank-led engagement that was a turning point in the Soviet Army’s war against the Wehrmacht. Indeed, pro-Kremlin bloggers are now drawing on that history – never mind that Russians then were defending themselves against a war begun by the Germans, while it was Russia that started the current war.
Roman Alekhin, who describes himself as a “military volunteer, social analyst and psychologist”, called the current fight the "Battle of Kursk 2.0", and like General Gurulev, he blamed the West.
“More and more, the foreign elite of the Ukrainian Armed Forces begin to fertilize Russian black soil, more and more burned foreign scrap metal is scattered along the roads and fields of Kursk province,” Alekhin wrote on his Telegram channel (170,000 followers). “This was the case 81 years ago, and this is what is happening now.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary response to the Ukrainian invasion has come not from Kursk or Moscow, but from the Russian Far East.
The political scientist and former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov visited online forums for residents of the Far East who had seen the video of Kursk residents pleading for Putin’s help. Gallyamov published their responses on his Telegram channel.
While the vast majority said they sympathized with the people of Kursk, many reproached them for their naivete in believing the war would remain far from their land, or that the Kremlin would come to their aid.
"As they say, any war sooner or later any war moves to the territory of the aggressor," said a woman named Ekaterina. Another woman - Oksana - warned that "he (Putin) doesn't give a shit about your requests, you are cannon fodder."
The other association with “Kursk” involves one of Putin’s lowest moments: the sinking of the Kursk submarine in 2000, in which 118 Russian servicemen were killed. It was Putin’s first year in power, and in the aftermath of the tragedy CNN’s Larry King asked the Russian leader, "What happened to the Kursk submarine?” Putin shrugged and gave a two-word answer: “It sank."
As it happens, this week marks the anniversary of the Kursk disaster. Many are now posting sarcastic reminders of Putin’s seemingly cavalier response, more than two decades ago. As one said, "What happened in the Kursk region? - It was captured."
Then there are those online commentators suggesting that Putin's rule began with the tragedy of the Kursk submarine and might now end with the tragedy in the Kursk region. Not surprisingly, most who are making that comparison are Russians in exile, writing from the safety of another country.
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