Throughout its war against Ukraine, the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to inseparably bind the identities of ordinary Russians to the conflict while also insulating them from its immediate effects. It was always a difficult balancing act, but Ukraine’s invasion of Kurk has now made this all but impossible. The rapid advance across nearly 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory has eliminated whatever remained of the Russian public’s security bubble.
Putin and his propaganda machine would seem to be carrying on as normal, referring in typical Moscow Newspeak to the advance as a “terrorist attack” or “provocation”, or even merely as “the events in Kursk”, and launching a media blitz to reassure Russians that they are in control. But it is obvious to everyone, including the Russian people themselves, that things are different this time — more threatening even than the short-lived Wagner mutiny, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, in July 2023. Ukraine has not only turned the tables on Moscow, but has fundamentally altered the rules of the game, extending the frontline to include the entire Russo-Ukrainian border — areas where Ukrainian forces can strike decisively at Russia’s soft underbelly. Now, Russia is being forced to defend its own sovereignty too.
Something else, however, is happening on the home front that may be even more dangerous. As the illusion of security and disconnect from the war in Ukraine disintegrates for those Russians living in Kursk, residents across the country’s southwestern border are feeling increasingly abandoned by the Russian state itself. Some are even holding Putin personally responsible. At the same time, dissatisfaction with Russia’s military brass, which in part fuelled Prigozhin’s insurrection last year, is continuing to escalate within the country’s nationalistic military blogosphere. Influential voices are furious not just with the military’s handling of the crisis in Kursk, but also with the state media’s ongoing obfuscation of the realities on the ground.
A growing realisation is setting in that these lies from the Russian establishment have led to a real and immediate threat to Russian national security. And for Putin to have allowed such a threat to continue unabated for over a week undermines the central guarantee he had made to the people about his war in Ukraine from the start: rebuilding Russia’s imperial sphere of influence and keeping Nato at bay would make the Russian heartland safer and more prosperous.
The Kursk incursion won’t convince Russians that the war in Ukraine was a bad idea — that ship has long sailed. But it may finally convince a growing number of Russians that the people running the show in Moscow are no longer up to the task of executing the national vision that Putin set in motion in 2022.
So far, it appears locals from Sudzha, the largest town captured by Ukraine in Kursk, have taken this red pill. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, tell your officials responsible for truthful information to show the real situation,” said a Sudzha resident in a video addressed to Putin and posted on Telegram before the town was fully captured by Ukraine. The residents complained about the wholesale downplaying of the realities in Kursk even as the town was on the brink of conquest by Ukraine. “These lies are causing civilians to die.”
Russia’s military bloggers echoed such sentiments.
“We knew that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would go to Kursk Oblast,” wrote Anastasia Kashevarova, an influential blogger with over 245,000 subscribers. “We knew everything as usual, the guys from the fields reported it, but the higher-ups did nothing.”
Another blogger writing under the pseudonym Philologist in Ambush went further, claiming that the Russian military’s concealment of the facts “shows a desire to cover up the reputational damage to the top military leadership… by all possible means”, calling out “the biased media propaganda, which continues to serve not the national interests of Russia”.
Explosive as such statements may seem, this is not the first time that pro-war bloggers have attacked the Russian Ministry of Defence and the country’s military leaders. But they do show that dissatisfaction with not just the army but also the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is reaching a boiling point. It may even be spreading beyond the usual cadre of online hyper-nationalists.
As far away as Russia’s Arctic Coast, ordinary people have started feeling the impact of Ukraine’s incursion; in Murmansk, parents of recently conscripted young men are petitioning Putin to stop their sons from being sent to fight in Kursk, claiming they were promised that such deployments wouldn’t take place. Meanwhile in Perm, on the edge of Siberia, a mother whose son had gone missing after being captured by Ukrainian forces complained on Facebook that military officials lied about his whereabouts.
Russians are of course no strangers to being deceived and treated with contempt by their own government. But, when the safety of their own children is at stake, their veil of tolerance will inevitably begin to break down. This is especially the case given that the story they’ve been sold for years by Putin and his circle about Russia as the eternally victorious bulwark against foreign invasion has now been irrevocably tarnished. The legacy of the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia, forms the cornerstone of Putinism, and the war in Ukraine has always been presented as an extension of this legacy by the Kremlin.
The historical implications of Ukraine’s violation of Russian territorial integrity at Kursk — which, incidentally, is also where the largest tank battle in history was fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — hasn’t been lost on Russia’s domestic observers. This is the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since the Great Patriotic War, and high-profile figures like media personality Andrei Medvedev were quick to compare the incursion to the start of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.
Throughout the war in Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in dodging blame for the failures of his state through a “good tsar, bad boyars” approach — he has been able to shift the blame for the war’s shortcomings to his generals, ministers, and other lower-level officials. But it is Putin who is ultimately the face of the Russia that has emerged since 2022, and it is he who declared the “special military operation”. Now, the war has come back to bite him where it hurts. There is a 1,000 square kilometre hole in his public image as the inheritor of Russia’s triumph in the Great Patriotic War, and his own credibility is on the line.
Putin may well survive to fight another day after this crisis as he did in the wake of the Wagner uprising, when he shuffled some chairs in the Ministry of Defence, eliminated Prigozhin, defanged the group, and moved on. But whereas Prigozhin’s insurrection was stopped in its tracks after 24 hours, the same isn’t the case in Kursk. Ukrainian forces have started digging in and building trenches, and, according to one Russian analyst, it could take Russia up to a year to win back control over the territory under Ukrainian occupation.
What Putin has tried to present as a mere inconvenience could balloon into the most significant challenge to his legacy. Russia’s militant nationalists may not forgive him this time around — and ordinary Russians may well follow suit.
Disclaimer
Some of the posts we share are controversial and we do not necessarily agree with them in the whole extend. Sometimes we agree with the content or part of it but we do not agree with the narration or language. Nevertheless we find them somehow interesting, valuable and/or informative or we share them, because we strongly believe in freedom of speech, free press and journalism. We strongly encourage you to have a critical approach to all the content, do your own research and analysis to build your own opinion.
We would be glad to have your feedback.
Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/