Putin finally made his first public comments on the issue a day and a half after Ukrainian troops assaulted a Russian border crossing and marched, practically unhindered, over the great green plains of the southern Kursk area. After denouncing the incursion as a “massive provocation” and accusing Ukraine of firing on civilians without cause, he hurriedly addressed other official matters, including as how to observe Russia’s “Construction Worker’s Day.”
Before he pledged a military response, another five days would pass and nearly thirty towns would be lost. Martial law was not declared, nor was there a trip to the area to greet the tens of thousands of evacuees. In March, after the terror attack at the Crocus City concert hall in Moscow, Russia’s deadliest in decades, it took Putin more than 24 hours to address the nation. Despite a claim of responsibility from ISIS-K, he continued to insist that Ukraine, and the West had played a role. The US had in fact warned Russia an attack could be imminent. Putin never visited the site of the attack, or survivors in hospital.
When Evgeny Prigozhin, then the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched his aborted mutiny last June, the Russian leader’s response was marked by inconsistency. After initially slamming the incident as “treachery,” Putin left it two days before speaking publicly again, at which point he thanked the Wagner troops involved for standing down, and offered them military contracts. Then he invited Prigozhin to tea at the Kremlin. Two months later Prigozhin was killed in a mysterious plane crash in Russia. Experts say Russia’s military response in Kursk has somewhat mirrored the fumbling reactions of its president.
“The initial response when they got over the shock of what was happening would have been who have we got in the cupboard left to defend,” retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan, the author of a new book “The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire,” told CNN. “Whether it’s conscripts, whether it’s understrength battalions from the Ukrainian theater, or strategic reserves.”
Battlefield accounts have backed up the sense that a motley selection of Russian troops were rushed in, as Moscow grappled with the dilemma of how to balance defending its own soil with keeping up the slow momentum on the eastern front. Ukrainian officials said some troops were redeployed from Kharkiv region and the southern front. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov claimed early on that his special forces unit, the Akhmat brigade, had been deployed. Naval infantry officers from the Black Sea fleet in Crimea are also involved.
The diverse groupings complicated Russian efforts to coordinate its resistance, with one pro-Russian military blogger even noting on August 14 that Ukraine was deliberately creating disruptions and then retreating, “taking advantage of the fact that our diverse forces, who don’t always have good communications with each other, were activated to repel this invasion.”
Russia’s bureaucratic response to the incursion has been equally unwieldy. Defense Minister Andrei Belousov set up a coordinating council to handle security in the border regions and this week announced he was dividing up responsibilities between no fewer than five different officials. This, according to the Institute for the Study of War, “will likely create additional confusion within the Russian MoD and friction among the Russian MoD, FSB, and Rosgvardia [Russia’s national guard], all of which are attempting to operate in Kursk Oblast,” and could jeopardize Russia’s ability to mount an effective counterattack. Experts agree the Kursk incursion has not fundamentally changed Putin’s overarching strategy of attrition – to exhaust Ukraine, and try to outlast its allies. And yet, Ukraine’s surprise move has emboldened those who had previously questioned the West’s policy of limiting certain types of military aid, and their use inside Russia.
And that may well have been part of Ukraine’s strategy. On August 19, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky allowed his closely held veil of gratitude towards his Western allies to lift momentarily.
“The entire naïve, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some of our partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha,” he told a gathering of Ukrainian diplomats, referring to a Russian town that Ukrainian troops had occupied.
Source: Here