It is another coin-flip in a conflict punctuated with at least annual reminders of how frail Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia truly is. <\/p>\n
Two months ago, as Russian troops poured into Kharkiv region, Kyiv was eyeing its borders, concerned at where else Russia might find vulnerabilities. Yet instead, Ukraine appears to have looked at the map, decided Russia was equally exposed, and turned Moscow\u2019s gambit on its head. <\/p>\n
A week in, and whatever the final outcome of Ukraine\u2019s invasion of Russia, Kyiv\u2019s initially perplexing, perhaps even rash, decision to send thousands of troops into the Kursk region and beyond is paying stark dividends. For the second time in just over a year, the Kremlin has a hostile force marching in its south, and very little it can do about it. Last June, it was the homegrown rogue mercenaries of Wagner, headed to Rostov and on, to decapitate Russia\u2019s top brass. Now, it is Ukraine\u2019s own military, scything off what they claim is 1,000 square kilometers <\/strong>of border territory. <\/p>\n Some analysis at the weekend put the figure at about a third of that. Nevertheless, the ability of Ukraine\u2019s commander Oleksandr Syrskyi to even float this claim is a remarkable win in the information war for Kyiv, even if Moscow severely limits what information Russians are exposed to. <\/p>\n \u201cBold, brilliant, beautiful,\u201d was what veteran US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called Ukraine\u2019s cross-border operation during a visit to Kyiv Monday. Meanwhile, US Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal called it \u201chistoric\u201d and a \u201cseismic breakthrough.\u201d <\/p>\n The events are remarkably similar in how they expose the gulf between the veneer of impregnability the Kremlin tries to portray, and the ramshackle reality of its power. And while Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin\u2019s march on Moscow fell apart when the former chef finally seemed to realize he was on his own \u2013 and had enraged Putin, rather than gaining his approval for tackling the failing top brass head-on \u2013 Ukraine\u2019s forces seem to have little but their own supply lines and ambition holding them back. <\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s lightning advance is another example of their forces\u2019 dexterity and mobility in warfare, over Moscow\u2019s preference for slow, months-long grinding attacks on the same place. It is purposefully unclear exactly where Ukraine\u2019s forces are. Videos pop up from towns far inside Russia, but without context. One overnight emerged from Lgov, about 26 miles from the border, with a soldier saying he promised his mother he would not go far. <\/p>\n It is also unclear where Ukrainian forces are digging in and where they are just racing through. The lack of transparency in the Russian system \u2013 where mistakes and problems are hidden rather than addressed head-on \u2013 works in Kyiv\u2019s favor. It is unlikely Moscow, or even Kursk\u2019s governor, knows the full picture of the mess they are in. <\/p>\n And the news the Kremlin is getting is uncharacteristically dire. When Kursk acting governor Alexei Smirnov told Putin on state TV on Monday that 28 settlements were under Ukrainian control, with 2,000 people\u2019s fate unclear, and 121,000 residents evacuated, it\u2019s likely the moment was staged and pre-recorded, like most of Putin\u2019s televised meetings. <\/p>\n But to what avail? Putin turned the question towards his military chiefs, who he\u2019s slowly decimated over the 30 months of this war\u2019s ebb and flow. They clearly do not have the solution yet. But still Putin tries to play the role of the tsar adjudicating between chaotic and failing departments, despite on Wednesday being assured by his chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, that the Ukrainian advance had been halted. The last time this sort of invasion of Russia happened, Joseph Stalin was in charge, and he did something other than televise his failing leadership. <\/p>\n Two questions remain. The first regards the ultimate fate of Ukraine\u2019s incursion. Do they intend to try and hold even the smallest amount of terrain? Do they intend to keep raging across undefended spaces? And how much firepower, manpower, and precious Western-supplied equipment is Ukraine happy to indulge this effort with? The merits of the assault are less in doubt than a week ago when it was first launched. Putin has a bloody nose. But the Ukrainian endgame needs to be as carefully engineered as the invasion to capitalize on Kyiv\u2019s success. <\/p>\n The second is what impact does this have on Ukraine\u2019s more challenged frontline in Donbas? During the past week, the successes of Kursk region have been peppered with worse news from Toretsk, or near Pokrovsk, as Russian forces continue their costly, bloody, yet inexorable advance. No matter how small the village, Moscow just keeps attacking. <\/p>\n So far, Ukraine\u2019s hope the Kursk operation would lead better units to be withdrawn from Donbas to support Russia\u2019s borders has yet to bear major fruit. As images continue to pour in of poorly trained Chechen troops being taken prisoner en masse by advancing Ukrainians in Kursk, it is clear Russia has sent its less effective units into the fight. They may choose to change that approach. Putin has also entrusted the operation to the FSB, the internal security service that also controls the border guard, which has instituted a \u201ccounter-terror operation.\u201d This has previously been used to tackle Islamist insurgencies, not columns of Ukrainian armor. That, too, may have been very short-sighted. <\/p>\n But soon the crunch for Kyiv emerges. Where does this leave its forces a month from now? Has the talk of a manpower crunch over the past months been because they were secretly holding forces in reserve for this assault? Do they extract a strategic advantage great enough from these advances that Moscow\u2019s view of them as a defeated adversary changes? Does the advance make their Western supporters decide the support is truly paying off? <\/p>\n Regardless of how efficiently Ukraine answers these questions, Russia has for the second time in 15 months been rudely humiliated. Firstly it was by Putin\u2019s own loyalists, egotistically turning on corruption and mismanagement. This time it is Putin\u2019s own FSB, who couldn\u2019t keep control of the borders, in Putin\u2019s war of choice. This falling tree may not make a sound in the heavily managed forest of Russia\u2019s political space. Yet it probably hit others as it fell. <\/p>\n One fact endures however. Both Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia\u2019s Putin have referenced the incursion in terms of its role in talks. Putin said Ukraine was trying to improve its position ahead of talks \u2013 talks that still appear to lack an agenda, or a date, or any sense of trust between parties. <\/p>\n For his part, Zelensky said on Monday: \u201cHow useful this [incursion] can be for bringing peace closer.\u201d He added: \u201cRussia must be forced into peace if Putin wants to continue waging war so badly.\u201d Kyiv knows it cannot enter talks with Russia without a strong hand, as the wildly deceptive negotiating style of the Kremlin has proven they simply stall for time unless they urgently need something from their interlocutor. <\/p>\n Still, even if Syrskyi only has half of the 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) he claims, a change in season to fall is no more than six weeks away, and with it the sludgy slowing of motion on the battlefield. Ukraine\u2019s failed counteroffensive last summer has been eclipsed by the sudden success of this August incursion. <\/p>\n The dismal fortunes of last winter are not behind them yet, but they may approach the next with a better hand, and at the very least the idea of the Kremlin\u2019s invulnerability \u2013 first broken in their failed initial invasion \u2013 shattered for at least the third time in this war. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n It is another coin-flip in a conflict punctuated with at least annual reminders of how frail Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia truly is. Two months ago, as Russian troops poured into Kharkiv region, Kyiv was eyeing its borders, concerned at where else Russia might find vulnerabilities. Yet instead, Ukraine appears to have looked at the map, decided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Manpower crunch<\/h2>\n