The fall of Vladimir Putin is now only a matter of time

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk will have been intended to bring forward the end of the dictator’s rule

It has been the most efficient offensive of the entire war. Ukrainian intelligence identified the Russians’ weak points. Special forces crossed the frontier in advance to prepare the ground. And when the attack on the Kursk oblast came on 6 August, it was a textbook example of what strategists call an all-arms manoeuvre. 
Cyber-attacks were combined with armour, artillery, infantry and specialist engineering to dismantle enemy defences. Russian drones and sensors were blinded by electronic warfare. An air defence umbrella was thrown up, closing the skies to Putin’s planes.
At first, it looked like a limited cross-border raid. Preparations had been made in such secrecy that Ukraine’s allies seemed to be as much in the dark as her enemies. Volodymyr Zelensky had learned the lessons of the much-trailed 2023 counter-offensive, when Russia took advantage of the long notice period to build a three-mile-deep belt of landmines, barbed wire and gun emplacements.
This time, Ukraine caught the Russians off guard. Some 400 square miles have been seized, and an estimated 2,500 Russian conscripts captured, with perhaps 3,000 more now kettled south of the river Sejm. The Europeans and Americans have been every bit as blindsided by the speed of the advance as the Russians.
I would write that “no one saw this coming” but, throwing modesty to the winds, I did point out in this column just over a year ago that there was a short-cut available: “Ukraine could launch a massive left hook through Kursk, aiming to cut off the enemy’s forces”. What I had in mind was a flanking stroke that would sever Russian supply-lines, rather as the Israelis stopped the successful Egyptian advance in 1973 by launching a counter-offensive far in their rear, on the other side of the Suez Canal.
In retrospect, I was too optimistic. It is easier to advance across these sparse steppelands than to hold them. Russians and Ukrainians, who won the decisive battle of the Second World War at Kursk in 1943 – the largest armoured battle in history and, on most measures, the largest battle of any kind – understand that better than most.
Still, this is the most significant Ukrainian victory in two years. Russian infrastructure is being degraded, bridges thrown down, gas installations hit. More airfields, refineries and supply depots are now within range. The gas plant in Sudzha has had its rail links cut. The nuclear power station in Kursk is at risk. Around 130,000 Russian civilians have been displaced.
What is Ukraine’s strategic goal? As is often the case, the offensive had a chief objective and several secondary ones. The principal aim was to alter the calculus within Russia, making the war less attractive and turning key figures against the man determined to prosecute it at any cost, Vladimir Putin. But before we come to that, let us consider what else Ukraine hoped to achieve.
First, the Zelensky government needed a morale boost. The failure of last summer’s counter-offensive had wiped out the successes of the previous autumn’s Kharkiv and Kherson campaigns. Since then, the momentum has been with Russia, which has been grindingly widening its zone of control in the Donbas. As I write, Russia is advancing towards the railway town of Pokrovsk (which, until 2016, was called Krasnoarmeysk, one of numerous places in the old Soviet Union named after the Red Army). Now, at a stroke, Zelensky has reminded his people that they can still win.
Second, that same message has gone out to Ukraine’s allies in Europe and North America, some of whom were asking whether they should open-endedly support an apparently unwinnable war. It now seems clear that, if Ukraine’s Nato allies explicitly authorise the use of long-range missiles within Russia, Ukraine will continue to make gains.
Third, the attack is intended to draw Russian forces from Ukraine.
Fourth, Russian POWs are a valuable bargaining chip. Ukraine wants the return of its Azov volunteers and other troops. The mothers of those raw Russian conscripts are pressing for prisoner exchanges.
Fifth, Ukraine has significantly tilted the negotiating table in its favour in advance of any final settlement talks. As long as Russia occupied chunks of Ukrainian territory, Zelensky had little to bargain with. Now, he has opened the door to land swaps.
But all these are, as I say, subordinate objectives. Zelensky knows that the surest way to end the war is to topple Putin, who has a mystical longing to establish some kind of protectorate over Kyiv, which he sees as the birthplace of Russia. Yes, Putin is also motivated by hunger for the energy reserves under Donbas and in the waters off Crimea. But even if the annexation of his four Ukrainian oblasts were recognised, he would not rest until Kyiv acknowledged Russian suzerainty, at least in foreign policy.
Ukraine’s strategy, then, is to make the war unpopular with Russians. Everyone in the former USSR remembers the conscription riots that preceded the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. That war had claimed 15,000 Soviet lives in ten years. This one is estimated to have claimed ten times as many in a quarter of the time.
The mothers of those wretched conscripts, drawn disproportionately from east of the Urals, lack political clout. But Ukraine aims also to convince the generals and siloviki that the costs of war are excessive.
It began by destroying Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Then it attacked oil and gas installations within Russia, intending economic disruption. Then its drones hit Russian military targets as far afield as Moscow and Murmansk, where last month it struck an airfield 1,100 miles from the front line. Now it is using Western-supplied weapons on Russian soil.
What has been Putin’s response? To crack down further on the media, to deny that there is a problem and to issue bland assurances of victory. He has put his former chief bodyguard, Aleksey Dyumin (himself from Kursk) in charge of “Operation Revenge”. But, obsessed with the Donbas, he has not diverted significant numbers of troops. Western intelligence sources estimate that around 5,000 men have been sent from Crimea and Zaporizhia, but none from Donetsk, where Russia’s main offensive is taking place. And 5,000 is nowhere near adequate to the task of taking back territory.
In 2002, Putin made a big song and dance about creating the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, an alliance of six former Soviet republics intended as a response to Nato. Yet he has not triggered its Article Four, the mirror of Nato’s Article Five, which requires the other members to treat an attack on one as an attack on all.
Perhaps he senses that the others would refuse to help. More likely, he doesn’t want to admit the enormity of what has happened, namely that a special operation that was supposed to deliver Kyiv within days has instead led to the fighting being carried into Mother Russia.
The great temptation, in any war, is to fixate on front lines. It is a mistake. When the Armistice took effect in November 1918, Germany still held most of Belgium, a sliver of France, and the greater part of Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States. What determined the outcome of the First World War was not territory, but productive capacity. The sequence was that Germany ran out of money, troops began to mutiny, the Kaiser was forced to abdicate, and the new government capitulated.
Russia has not yet run out of money. But, outside the big cities, the problems of spiralling inflation, goods shortages and labour shortages, as emigration exacerbates the impact of conscription and of the diversion of manpower to wartime production, are becoming impossible to disguise, despite the central bank’s best attempts to present the world with optimistic figures.
Plenty of generals and oligarchs will see that Putin is isolating, disgracing and ruining their country in pursuit of what is little more than a personal obsession brought on by reading too much history during lockdown.
Prigozhin’s mutiny exposed Putin’s vulnerability. Sooner or later, someone else will act decisively where Prigozhin hesitated. Everything Ukraine is doing is intended to hasten that day.