‘The special military operation just got extended’ Russian elites expected Ukraine’s incursion to end within days. Now they’re starting to panic.
According to Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine now controls roughly 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Russia’s Kursk region — almost as much territory as Russian forces have captured in Ukraine since the beginning of this year. More than 120,000 people have been evacuated from Russia’s border areas, while hundreds of civilians and dozens of Russian conscripts are missing. Journalists from the independent outlet Verstka set out to learn how Russia’s political elites are feeling about Ukraine’s ongoing cross-border offensive. Meduza shares their findings in English.
Who’s to blame?
Russian politicians and officials are very alarmed by Ukraine’s cross-border incursion, according to Verstka’s sources. A source from the Moscow Mayor’s Office told journalists that panic is growing among his colleagues. He compared the situation to the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “That also seemed like it wouldn’t last long — but it turned out to be a long-term thing,” the source said. Initially, Moscow officials believed Russian forces could end the attack in “two or three days, or a week at most,” but this proved false; the incursion is now in its second week.
In the first few days of the offensive, the source said, the lives of the city’s political elite “didn’t change much” and the Kursk region wasn’t a major conversation topic. But on August 8 and 9, they said, “we got scared.” It was during that period that reports surfaced of a burned-out Russian military convoy being found near the town of Rylsk.
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In the days that followed, the Russian Defense Ministry and pro-war bloggers reported that Ukraine was advancing farther into Russian territory. The latest reports indicate that the AFU has reached the village of Kromskiye Byki, which is 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the region’s border. On August 12, Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov said that Ukrainian forces were in control of 28 Russian settlements and had pushed 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) into Russian territory along a 40-kilometer (25-mile) front.
After these reports, members of Russia’s political elite began closely following the news from Kursk, actively sending each other posts from pro-Kremlin “war correspondents,” a senator close to the Federation Council’s Defense Committee told Verstka. “The Defense Ministry says one thing, and we publicly relay that, but meanwhile we’re all reading the war correspondents who are tearing into [General Staff Chief Valery] Gerasimov and saying we weren’t even monitoring the situation in the [Kursk] region for the first two days,” he said. He continued:
It’s reached the point of absurdity: We don’t even know who destroyed whose convoy. By the looks of it, they destroyed ours [on August 8], and we destroyed theirs on August 11. But you can’t make heads or tails of it.
According to the senator, “the mood [among the authorities] has become very anxious.” At the same time, he said, the reported rise in the number of enlisting contract soldiers has been met with “cautious optimism” among his colleagues. In his view, the increase shows that “people want to defend the Motherland; they understand that the enemy is on their territory, and not only on the new territories.” (The increase is more likely due to the 1.9-million-ruble ($21,777) sign-up bonus the Defense Ministry began offering new contract soldiers in July.)
Another source with ties to the Russian parliament said that officials are alarmed because “Kursk is less than 500 kilometers from Moscow” (though this is an exaggeration; the cities are about 526 kilometers, or 327 miles, apart). “The fighting is very close — people are suffering and evacuating just a few hours’ drive from Moscow,” he said, calling the situation “more alarming than the one in the Belgorod region.”
What is to be done?
One of the Russian government’s takeaways from the Kursk incursion is the need to “prepare more stress-resistant governors,” according to a government official who attended the Kremlin’s “School of Governors” training program and the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. The official said that acting Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov is “coping fine” with the situation but that he “did get flustered with Putin” in the president’s televised security meeting on Monday. (Putin interrupted Smirnov when he began talking about the scale of Ukraine’s incursion.)
Additionally, Ukraine’s new offensive could eventually result in criminal cases against civilian officials and security and military officers for allowing the breach, two sources familiar with the situation told Verstka. On August 13, the Russian media reported that Alexander Shmatkov, the acting head of the Kursk regional administration, had resigned from his post.
Another consequence of the incursion could be an indefinite delay in the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, a source in the Russian parliament told Verstka. According to the source, relations between Russia and the West “seemed to have warmed” after the prisoner exchange earlier this month. “But now, of course, nothing will happen — not hypothetically and not in practice,” they said. “Putin said as much.”
A second source in Russia’s parliament refused even to speculate about when peace negotiations might happen. “If anything was possible before, it’s not anymore. Forget it — the ‘special military operation’ just got extended again,” said the source. Another parliamentary source told Verstka they’re “hoping to see Kyiv leveled to the ground” and wishing for “victory and peace.”
Reporting by Verstka. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.