Ukraine’s Kursk offensive marks Putin’s third major humiliation in the war

We now live in a world where Ukraine has invaded Russia. And we now live in a world where Ukraine, as I write this, occupies a piece of Russian territory about the size of New York City.

We still don’t know the military significance of Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk Oblast, the first time foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since World War II. But judging by the Kremlin’s whiny initial response, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top officials condemned the offensive and downplayed it as a “terrorist attack” and an “armed provocation,” the political fallout promises to be enormous.

The invasion and occupation of parts of Kursk Oblast is the third major military humiliation the Kremlin leader has suffered since launching his large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022.

The First Humiliation: February-September 2022

First, of course, there was the defeat of Russian forces in the battle for Kiev in the early stages of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The humiliating withdrawal of Russian troops from the vicinity of the Ukrainian capital in March 2022 was quickly followed by more military humiliations for the Kremlin, including the demise of the Ukrainian Moscowthe flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

And if you thought things couldn’t get much worse for Russia than losing its flagship in a land war to a country with no navy, think again. In September and October 2022, Ukraine launched lightning-fast counteroffensives to liberate large swaths of Russian-held territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.

The result of these initial humiliations was, for lack of a better term, Putin’s shrinkage in the international arena. When Russia launched its invasion in early 2022, most analysts believed the war would be over within weeks. But by late 2022, the Russian war machine no longer looked invincible; instead, it looked quite fallible and beatable. And Putin no longer looked like a ten-foot-tall master strategist; instead, he looked small.

The Russian armed forces’ poor performance in 2022 weakened Putin domestically and divided the Russian elite into hawks, who wanted nothing less than the complete conquest of Kiev, and kleptocrats, who wanted a return to the pre-war status quo. Ukrainian forces prevented the complete conquest of Russia, while Putin continued to isolate and impoverish his country, and neither group was happy. Which set the stage for Putin’s next humiliation.

The Second Humiliation: June-August 2023

Putin’s second great military humiliation came not from Ukraine, but from within his own inner circle. The June 2023 mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Kremlin-allied mercenary army, the Wagner Group, exposed deep cracks in Russia’s political elite and the hollowness and rot of the Russian armed forces.

The fact that Prigozhin, a friend of Putin’s since the 1990s, would launch a rebellion against the Kremlin illustrated the dangers of Putin’s “venture capital foreign policy,” which outsources key military and security functions to so-called private actors. These informal patronage networks, in which Putin is the ultimate arbiter, only function well when the Russian leader is strong. When Putin is weak, it can lead to events like the Wagner Group mutiny.

And the fact that Prigozhin was able to effectively seize control of the city of Rostov-on-Don – and receive a hero’s welcome – and march his Wagnerian mercenaries north to the outskirts of Voronezh, some three hundred miles from Moscow, further undermined Putin’s aura of omnipotence.

Prigozhin, of course, paid a price for his mutiny. He died in a plane crash along with nine others, including Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, on August 23, 2023. The crash was, to state the obvious, no accident. It was, according to Western intelligence sources, an assassination attempt orchestrated by Putin’s longtime adviser Nikolai Patrushev.

Putin’s second humiliation not only deepened the divisions in Russia’s ruling elite that had been exposed by the invasion of Ukraine. It also exposed the fundamental weakness of the armed forces in carrying out their core mission: protecting the homeland. And this, in turn, set the stage for Putin’s latest humiliation.

The Third Humiliation: August 2024

The invasion of Ukrainian forces into Kursk Oblast, conceived, planned and executed in strict secrecy, came as a shock and immediately changed the narrative of the war. Instead of the constant drumbeat of news about growing Russian gains in the Donbas, there was a headline in the New York Times said it already: “Deception and a gamble: How Ukrainian troops invaded Russia.”

From the mass surrender of unprepared and outnumbered Russian forces, to the chaotic evacuation of civilians, and the steady advance of Ukrainian troops deeper into Russian territory, the Kursk operation exposed the weaknesses not only of the Russian armed forces, but of the Russian state itself.

Throughout its more than two decades in power, the Putin regime’s social contract with Russian society was based on restoring lost greatness and rebuilding the empire. But today, it appears to have failed to achieve the most fundamental responsibility of a state: protecting its territory and citizens from foreign invasion. And the fact that Putin has reportedly tasked one of his former bodyguards, Alexei Dyumin (who has been dubbed Russia’s “shadow defense minister” by some Russian Telegram channels), with ending Ukraine’s cross-border offensive suggests that panic is in the air and that recently appointed Defense Minister Andrei Belousov may not be up to the task.

The military implications of Russia’s audacious invasion of Ukraine are still unclear. It could prove to be, as former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Daniel Fried suggested, a George Washington “crossing the Delaware moment.” In a clever post on Substack, retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan noted that Ukraine has options as a result of the invasion: it can try to hold on to the territory it has captured, it can retreat to more defensible positions inside Russia, or it can retreat back to Ukraine after embarrassing the Kremlin. Putin, meanwhile, faces the difficult choice of whether to move troops from the front in eastern Ukraine to retake Russian territory in the Kursk region.

Regardless of how this plays out militarily, the political damage has been done and is rooted in the nature of Russian politics. As I have written, the Russian state under Putin has essentially become an organized crime syndicate. Its internal logic, processes, incentive structure, and behavior resemble those of a mafia family. And the most destabilizing moment for a crime syndicate is when the mafia boss looks weak.

Brian Whitmore is a nonresident senior fellow at the Eurasia Center, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and host of the Power Vertical Podcast.

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Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin leads a meeting with security officials and regional governors to discuss the situation in the south of the country after an incursion by Ukrainian troops, via video link at a residence outside Moscow, Russia, August 12, 2024. Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via REUTERS