Vladimir Putin yesterday donned green camouflage and inspected a sandbagged Army command post in Kursk — seven months after Ukrainian soldiers occupied that western corner of Russia. Although the mini-invasion of August was the first time Russia had been invaded since World War II, it was the Russian president’s first visit to the Kursk front.
His visit sent two messages. After losing an estimated 50,000 soldiers killed and wounded in Kursk, Russia now is winning. Also, by posing in combat gear for a TASS cameraman 300 miles south of Moscow, Mr. Putin signals that he is in no hurry to talk peace with President Trump’s envoy to the Kremlin, Steve Witkoff. After Ukraine agreed Tuesday to a 30-day ceasefire, Mr. Trump said the ball now is in Russia’s court.
Yesterday morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia needed more details of the deal before making a comment. The text of the 282-word joint statement has been posted online since Tuesday. Later yesterday, Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service said that its director, Sergei Naryshkin, spoke by phone with his American counterpart, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe. The White House said that Mr. Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, talked yesterday with his Russian “counterpart,” possibly Nikolai Petrushev.
“Here’s what we’d like the world to look like in a few days: Neither side is shooting at each other, not rockets, not missiles, not bullets, nothing … and the talking starts,” Secretary Rubio told reporters yesterday en route to a Group of 7 meeting at Quebec. At Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz negotiated the cease-fire proposal with a Ukrainian team.
Lenin
A damaged monument to Lenin in a central square at Sudzha, Kursk region, Russia, August 16, 2024. AP
It is unclear when Mr. Witkoff, a friend of Mr. Trump for 40 years, will meet Mr. Putin. Last month, he flew in his private jet to Moscow. There, he said, he spent three-and-a-half hours with Mr. Putin, “developing a friendship” and negotiating the release of an imprisoned American teacher, Marc Fogel.
Expelling Ukrainian invaders from Kursk would allow Mr. Putin to portray Russia as having the upper hand in a war that largely has been a stalemate over the last year. A retired Australian Army major general, Mick Ryan, wrote Sunday on his Future Doctrina substack: “The future of the Kursk salient must be in doubt. Putin has probably highly incentivized his military leadership to take it back before any peace negotiations take place.”
In the main southeastern battlefront, the 600-mile front line, Russia last year suffered its highest casualties of the three-year war. Yet it did not score any major breakthrough of the Ukrainian lines. After making some progress last fall, Russian units were expelled last week from several positions. This morning, the Associated Press reports, the Kremlin announced it had seized the largest town in the region, Sudzha.
A burned car is seen in front of an apartment building damaged after shelling by the Ukrainian side in Kursk, Russia, August 11, 2024. AP
In Kursk, this week’s looming Russian victory seems to stem from three factors: human wave attacks by North Korean troops, a sophisticated Russian drone unit that controls drones through fiber optic threads, and a daring Russian raid through a 10-mile long stretch of a deactivated Russia-Europe gas pipeline. As a result, Ukrainian control of Russian territory dwindled this week to 10 percent of the 525 square miles they controlled last August.
“Despite the increased pressure of the Russian and North Korean army, we will hold the defense in Kursk region as long as it is appropriate and necessary,” Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said yesterday on Facebook. To save lives, Ukrainian units are manoeuvring to “more favorable positions if necessary,” he said. This seems to be military speak for retreating across the border.
Russian television videos of soldiers waving Russian flags have been geo-located in the center of Sudzha, the district capital that had been Ukraine’s command center since mid-August. The former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, crowed on Telegram: “The lid of the smoking cauldron is almost closed.”
At the Kursk command post, Mr. Putin was filmed poring over military maps while accompanied by Russia’s top military officer, General Valery V. Gerasimov. Addressing high ranking Army officers, the president called for “completely defeating the enemy that entrenched in the Kursk region as soon as possible.”
As broadcast on Rossiya 24 state TV, Mr. Putin said captured Ukrainian soldiers should be treated and prosecuted as terrorists under Russian law. General Gerasimov said that about 430 Ukrainian soldiers have been taken prisoner.
Last month, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine alleged that Russian units executed 79 Ukrainian soldiers in 24 incidents. Last month, the Wall Street Journal published the results of an investigation that claims that Russia carries out “widespread and systematic torture” of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
At the start of the invasion, President Zelensky said it had several goals: boost morale at home; create a bargaining chip for a land swap in future talks; build up a bank of Russian POWs who could be traded for Ukrainians; and relieve pressure on the southeast front.
In Kursk, the tides of war started to turn with the arrival last fall of about 12,000 soldiers from North Korea. Although Ukraine’s invasion displaced 200,000 civilians, Mr. Putin proved incapable of rallying enough outraged Russians to expel the Ukrainian invaders. Initially, the North Koreans suffered high casualties — about 40 percent killed or wounded. After pulling back, regrouping, and changing tactics to adapt to drone warfare, the North Koreans returned to the battlefield in January.
At the same time, one of Russia’s best drone units entered the fray. The Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Systems specializes in state of the art drones that defeat Ukrainian electronic warfare by automatically changing radio frequencies or by flying with fiber optic threads that carry commands from controllers. Two weeks ago, this drone group carried out saturation attacks on Ukraine’s main supply route, destroying dozens of vehicles, largely trucks.
A third factor was use of a main east-west gas line that had been deactivated on January 1, when Ukraine failed to renew a contract to transship gas from Russia to Central Europe. Sudzha, the Ukrainian headquarters in Kursk, had been the last pipeline metering station before the Russia-Ukraine border.
According to Russian military bloggers, several hundred Russian special forces soldiers crawled 10 miles through the 5-foot diameter pipeline. Photos show soldiers wearing gas masks. After between two and three days in the pipe, the men got out south of Sudzha. Surprising the Ukrainian defenders, the Russians managed to establish a second front in what had been a safe rear area.
With daytime temperatures in Kursk expected to hit 60 degrees today and tomorrow, the mud season has arrived. As the Nazis discovered in their invasion of the Soviet Union, the mud season, or rasputitsa, leaves the steppe impassable, forcing all wheeled vehicles onto asphalt. This factor may accelerate Ukraine’s retreat.
A Russian victory in Kursk would reinforce the belief of many Russian officials that they are winning the wider war. “Real agreements are still being written there, at the front,” the foreign affairs committee chairman of the Federation Council, Konstantin Kosachev, writes on Telegram. “They should understand in Washington, too.”