DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: A blow to the delight of Kremlin’s Botoxed gremlin

It’s something I’ve seen before. The whirling melee of khaki and camouflage, of blue and yellow flags. The bovine growl of armoured vehicles. The elephantine rumble of tanks. And above, the drones buzzing like insistent wasps.

Ukrainians surging into action have become a feature of my professional life and now they have thrust into Russia.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces charged more than 20 miles across the border into Russia’s Kursk Oblast, a region in the south-west of the country.

The counter-attack involved more than 1,000 troops, 11 tanks and – critically – US-made Stryker armoured combat vehicles.

The Ukrainians attacked in two directions and the only opposition they faced were Russian border troops and small units of conscripts, neither of which posed any problems.

Apart from seizing some 11 settlements in Kursk and capturing around 40 Russian soldiers, they took control of Kursk’s Sudzha district checkpoint and fuel distribution station.

Photos posted on social media show the burnt-out shells of Russian lorries and armoured vehicles, flames billowing from buildings and scenes of general confusion.

Ukrainian state media also reported that the country’s armed forces used drones to down a Russian Mi-28 helicopter.

Dramatic reports of a missile strike on a column of Russian troops suggest hundreds of casualties. A drone attack on an airfield caused an inferno, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of nearby residents and leaving behind an apocalyptic landscape scarred by charred and twisted metal,

And the Russians? Well, they don’t like it up ’em.

After ten years of occupying Ukrainian land and murdering its people, the Kremlin’s Botoxed gremlin Vladimir Putin is outraged. On Wednesday, he accused Kyiv of a ‘large-scale provocation’. State sources have, laughably, described the counter-attack as ‘a terrorist attack’.

The acting head of Kursk Oblast, Alexey Smirnov, contented himself with the dry retort that the situation is ‘under [Putin’s] personal control’.

Putting aside the entertainment value of the Kremlin’s hysteria and Putin’s hypocrisy, the Ukrainian operation is interesting for several reasons.

Sudzha sits on one of the region’s most important train lines, the Belgorod–Lgov railway. Belgorod, a Russian city just 25 miles from the Ukrainian border, is host to a logistics hub that supplies Russian troops attacking the north-west of Ukraine. Though it cannot be considered a turning point in this protracted war, it has a clear strategic value for Kyiv.

Beyond that, this move is as much psychological as practical for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Wars are won and lost not just in the field but in the mind, through the morale of soldiers who fight and the civilians who support them – and things have been tough.

Kyiv has been taking heavy losses as Moscow gained ground in eastern Donetsk in recent weeks. The Black Bird Group – an open source military research group based in Finland – has claimed that since early May, Russia has captured nearly double the territory that Ukraine won back during its own, ultimately failed, summer offensive last year.

From June to September 2023, Ukrainian forces reconquered a total of 321 square kilometres, which works out at around 24 square kilometres a week. Conversely, from May 3 to August 2 this year, Russian forces seized 592 square kilometres of territory, at a rate of roughly 45 square kilometres a week.

Indeed, it has been a year of repeated disappointments for Ukrainians – of military setbacks, of manpower shortages, of delayed shipments of US weapons, of Russian boasts of imminent victory.

When I go to Ukraine, I increasingly hear what was once considered anathema: talk of negotiations and compromise. This comes not from fear, but an understanding that some of the conquered territories are probably never coming back; and a desire that no more young lives should be lost in a war with ever-lessening prospects of victory.

The counter-offensive is a way of seizing back the initiative. As Zelensky said yesterday, Russia ‘brought the war to Ukraine’ and must ‘feel what it has done’.

How long the Ukrainians will stay in Russian territory is another story. Russia is far larger and richer than Ukraine. With a population of 144 million, against Ukraine’s 38 million, it can afford to keep ordering troops into the Ukrainian meat-grinder, particularly as it has a political system that views them as fundamentally disposable.

In responding to the incursion, Russia can also call upon the Federal Security Service (FSB) border guards and Rosgvardia (national guard) members it has in the region. It can deploy, too, the approximately 35,000 strong Northern Grouping of Forces operating in the Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod oblasts.

This, though, would leave them exposed elsewhere. There are reports that Moscow is already having to redeploy troops from the front lines in eastern Ukraine, a move that is upsetting their attempts to steal yet more Ukrainian territory there. 

Sources on the ground tell me that the counter-offensive involves small, armoured groups that quickly engage Russian forces and then withdraw, rather than seek to hold any ground they take.

It would probably be unrealistic for them to capture a target like Kursk city or its nuclear power plant, given their relatively small size and the scale of Russia’s reserves.

The Ukrainians are likely to have to withdraw at some point soon to re-supply more important strategic posts along the front line.

Either way, the incursion has embarrassed the Kremlin. It will have to respond. Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev threw yet another tantrum on social media – almost certainly a drunken one as usual.

‘We can and we should take more land of the Ukraine that still exists,’ he wrote. ‘[We should go to] Odessa, to Kharkiv, to Dnipro, Mykolaiv. To Kyiv and onwards.’

More seriously, Russian military bloggers, some of whom have influence on the public mood and therefore the authorities, are furious. One prominent blogger said: ‘The price of mistakes these days will be calculated in the lives of soldiers and civilians’, adding that ‘lies killed more fighters than drones’.

Another has criticised new defence minister Andrei Belousov for failing to ‘audit’ competent commanders and demanded action.

This is the point. The Kursk incursion is many things but above all it is a statement, which Zelensky spelled out in a TV evening address to his nation.

‘The more pressure is exerted on the aggressor that brought the war to Ukraine,’ he said, ‘the closer peace will be. Just peace through just force.’

When I was last in Ukraine, I spoke to a smiling, wizened sapper there, who told me that what now existed on the ground was the biggest landmine operation in history; explosive objects of various types now cover around 156,000 square kilometres, or 25 per cent of the country’s territory. Some say it could take over 750 years to clear them.

The minefields map the contours of the front and to me they are an immovable fact on the ground. To my mind, they have become a de facto border between Russia and Ukraine.

Zelensky can never, of course, publicly countenance giving away Ukrainian lands stolen by a homicidal neighbour. But this reality is clear to all.

For now, though, he and every Ukrainian soldier can make sure that Russia pays as great a price as possible for every Ukrainian life sacrificed on the altar of Putin’s bloodthirsty ambition.

This is the desire that drives the Kursk counter-offensive and Ukraine’s continued resistance, and it is based on a simple principle: dictators can never be appeased, they must always be opposed.

Ukraine is doing that for all of us. Long may they continue, and long may we give them all the help we can.