Putin Overcomes the Humiliation of Kursk

Almost three months after the Ukrainian armed forces entered the Russian region of Kursk, the Kremlin’s response to the attack, after the initial shock, appears rather effective, despite the deeply humiliating and continuing presence of Ukrainian troops on Russian soil. 

The incursion will have had many aims, one of which may have been a hope that it would provoke the political unrest in Russia the Kremlin built. It hasn’t.

Since day one, the Kremlin has been treating the Kursk invasion as not only a military but also a political crisis. The military element, which aims to push back the Ukrainians and destroy their logistics in the Sumy region, has had some success — analysts say Russia has recaptured almost half the 1,000 square miles of land seized by Ukrainian units. Russian forces are massing for a bigger offensive and are expected to be supplemented for the first time by as many as 10,000 North Korean troops.

The Kremlin has also successfully addressed the political crisis.

Initially, the numerous security services active in Ukraine and on the Ukrainian-Russian border — the FSB, military intelligence, the National Guard’s intelligence branch — clearly failed the Kremlin.

Yet Putin chose not to publicly punish those responsible. He stuck to the strategy adopted in the first year of the war when he halted a purge against the FSB’s intelligence branch for providing bad information on the situation inside Ukraine.

A year later, he decided against punishing the FSB and the National Guard in the aftermath of the mercenary leader Prigozhin’s mutiny — another internal political crisis the Kremlin’s security services failed to prevent. Thus Putin has ensured the loyalty of his repressive agencies at the price of rewarding their failures.

The FSB has kept harassing the military, but so far, the arrests have targeted Ministry of Defense staff only, not the generals and officers who do the fighting.

Since the start of the Kursk debacle, the FSB’s major military targets were a former deputy minister of defense Pavel Popov, who had overseen the ministry’s department of information systems and the main military research center for robotics; and Valery Mumindzhanov, deputy commander of the Leningrad Military District for Logistics, accused of corruption in supplying uniforms to troops fighting in Ukraine. Thus, the main goal of the arrests is to improve the supply of ammunition and resources, not to punish the generals for errors on the battlefield. And the army, untouched by the purges, keeps fighting.

The military’s initial and visible outrage at the obvious failure to prevent the Ukrainian invasion died off in the first weeks due to a lack of platforms to discuss such a sensitive issue.

Two years ago, in September 2022, when the Ukrainians surprised the Russian army and retook Kherson, Telegram channels manned by z-bloggers and military veterans were the main platform for the debate of what went wrong and who was responsible. They trashed Gen. Valery Gerasimov, head of the General Staff, and Alexander Lapin, the commander of the Army Group Center. This time, the channels didn’t name any generals.

Some, the most extreme, dared to express outrage, but the rest remembered all too well what has happened to dissenting voices over the last two years — the most prominent critic of the Russian military leadership from ultra-imperialist positions, Igor Strelkov/Girkin, a former minister of defense of the Donetsk people’s republic, has been safely locked up in jail since July of last year.

Military censorship, strengthened by Shoigu’s successor Andrei Belousov, and enforced by the FSB, has survived the Kursk crisis and has been extremely efficient in silencing dissent in the rank and file.

Russian society also found a way to absorb the shock of the Kursk debacle. According to Levada Center polls, the incursion initially came as a shock for most Russians, two-thirds of whom had believed the official version that the war was going quite well.

But while the Ukrainian operation marked the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since World War II, anxiety levels were much lower than two years earlier when the Kremlin announced a widespread mobilization, as Levada Center noted. Rising prices and corruption still disturb Russians more than what has happened on the country’s westernmost fringes.

Such indifference in Russian society might look like a new low, but it is not. The majority of Russians did not sympathize with Chechens when the Russian army bombed their towns and villages in the 1990s, killing thousands of civilians.

And when terror attacks happened in the North Caucasus, it would never draw much attention in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Nor did it generate a lot of sympathy for the victims — most Russians always considered the North Caucasus as somehow foreign to mainland Russia given its very different traditions, religions, and languages.

Now, the same attitude manifests itself towards the Kursk region, even if it is very clearly and visibly Russian, its towns looking very much like any other provincial town.

So why do Russians seem so detached? A lack of empathy is accompanied by fear, instigated by the authorities. This plays a significant part in a decision to confine oneself to a small world of relatives, the workplace, and an apartment: thinking beyond that could be dangerous.

And the Kremlin is extremely skilled at playing on those fears, even if this causes absurdities.

Take the seemingly laughable draft legislation against supposed propaganda to support a childfree lifestyle. Part of the authorities’ desperate (and losing) battle with Russia’s plunging birth rates, the fallout indicates a profoundly intimidated society.

A popular motherhood discussion group on VK social media was closed down. Moderators of the Happiness of Motherhood group, with 150,000 women followers, explained they couldn’t censor every post from the past nine years in case the authorities deemed any comment to have infringed the yet-to-be-enacted law.

When the Kremlin shoots itself in the foot, society merely adapts, even if that means limping rather than marching to the official drumbeat.

Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.