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

We now live in a world in which Ukraine has invaded Russia. And we now live in a world in which Ukraine, as of the time of this writing, is occupying a slice of Russian territory roughly the size of New York City.

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

This is because the invasion and occupation of parts of Kursk Oblast marks the third major military humiliation the Kremlin leader has suffered since launching his full-scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022.

The first humiliation: February-September 2022

First, of course, there was the routing of Russian forces in the battle of Kyiv in the early phase of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The embarrassing withdrawal of Russian forces from near the Ukrainian capital in March 2022 was quickly followed by more military humiliations for the Kremlin, including Ukraine’s April 2022 sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

And if you thought it couldn’t get much worse for Russia than losing its flagship in a land war to a country without a navy, you would be wrong. In September and October 2022, Ukraine launched lightning counteroffensives to liberate large swaths of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.

The result of these first humiliations was, for lack of a better term, the shrinkage of Putin in the international arena. When Russia launched its invasion in the beginning of 2022, most analysts believed the war would be over in a matter of weeks. But by the end of 2022, Russia’s 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 dismal performance of the Russian Armed Forces in 2022 weakened Putin domestically and divided the Russian elite into hawks, who wanted nothing short of the complete conquest of Kyiv, and kleptocrats, who wanted to go back to the prewar status quo. Ukrainian forces prevented Russia’s complete conquest, while Putin continued to isolate and impoverish his country, and therefore 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 at the hands of Ukraine, but from within his own inner circle. The June 2023 mutiny of Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his Kremlin-connected mercenary army, the Wagner Group, exposed deep cracks in the Russian political elite as well as the hollowness and rot of the Russian Armed Forces.

The fact that Prigozhin, a Putin crony since the 1990s, would launch a rebellion against the Kremlin illustrated the perils of Putin’s “venture-capital foreign policy,” which outsources key military and security tasks to nominally private-sector 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 could effectively take control of the city of Rostov-on-Don—to a hero’s welcome, no less—and march his Wagner mercenaries north to the outskirts of Voronezh, roughly three hundred miles from Moscow, further punctured Putin’s aura of omnipotence.

Prigozhin, of course, paid a price for his mutiny. He died in a plane crash together with nine others, including Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, on August 23, 2023. The crash, to state the obvious, was not an accident. It was, according to sources in Western intelligence agencies, an assassination organized by longtime Putin aide Nikolai Patrushev.

Putin’s second humiliation did not just deepen the divisions in Russia’s ruling elite exposed by the invasion of Ukraine. It also exposed the fundamental weakness of the armed forces in performing their core mission: protecting the homeland. And this, in turn, set the stage for Putin’s most recent humiliation.

The third humiliation: August 2024

The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ invasion of Kursk Oblast—conceived, planned, and executed in strict secrecy—came as a shock and instantaneously transformed the narrative of the war. Instead of the steady drumbeat of news about incremental Russian gains in the Donbas, a headline in the New York Times said it all: “Deception and a Gamble: How Ukrainian Troops Invaded Russia.”

From the mass surrenders of unprepared and outmanned Russian troops, to the chaotic evacuation of civilians, to the steady advances of Ukrainian forces deeper into Russian territory, the Kursk operation exposed the weakness not just of the Russian Armed Forces, but of the Russian state itself.

Over his more than two-decade rule, the Putin regime’s social contract with Russian society has been based on restoring lost greatness and reestablishing the empire. But today, it seems to have failed at achieving the most fundamental responsibility of a state: protecting its territory and citizens from foreign invasion. And the fact that Putin is rumored to have tasked one of his former bodyguards, Aleksei Dyumin (whom some Russian Telegram channels have dubbed Russia’s “shadow defense minister”), 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 fallout of Ukraine’s bold invasion of Russia is still unclear. It may turn out to be, as former US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Daniel Fried suggested, a George Washington “crossing the Delaware moment.” In a smart post on Substack, retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan noted that as a result of the incursion, Ukraine has options: It can try to hold on to the territory it has seized, it can retreat to more defensible positions inside Russia, or it can withdraw to Ukraine after embarrassing the Kremlin. Putin, meanwhile, faces the difficult choice of whether to move troops from the front in eastern Ukraine to take back Russian territory in the Kursk region.

Regardless of how this plays out militarily, the political damage is done, and it is rooted in the nature of Russian politics. As I have written, under Putin, the Russian state has become, in essence, 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: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with security officials and regional governors to discuss the situation in the south of the country following an incursion of Ukrainian troops, via a video link at a residence outside Moscow, Russia August 12, 2024. Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via REUTERS