Putin’s slow response to the Kursk attack could test the patience of some of his backers in Russia

Associated Press

A year ago this week, President Vladmir Putin strode onto a stage in the Kursk region to commemorate the 80th anniversary of one of the Soviet army’s proudest moments in World War II.

Addressing a rapt audience that included soldiers fresh from fighting in Ukraine, Putin called the decisive victory in the Battle of Kursk “one of the great feats of our people.”

Now, as Russia prepares to celebrate the 81st anniversary of that 1943 battle on Friday, Kursk is again in the news — but for a very different reason.

On Aug. 6, Ukrainian forces made a lightning push into the region, seizing villages, taking hundreds of prisoners and forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians. Russia was caught unprepared by the offensive and reportedly is drafting conscripts to repel some of Ukraine’s most battle-hardened units.

Putin has a history of responding slowly to various crises in his tenure, and he has so far played down the attack. But 2 1/2 years after launching a war in Ukraine to remove what he called a threat to Russia, it is his own country that seems more turbulent.

He appeared uneasy at an Aug. 12 televised meeting of his security staff about Kursk, cutting off the acting regional governor who had started listing the settlements seized by Ukraine. The president and his officials referred to “the events in the Kursk region” as a “situation,” or “provocation.”

State media fell into line, showing evacuees queueing for aid or donating blood, as if the events in Kursk were a humanitarian disaster and not the largest attack on Russia since World War II.

In his 24 years in power, Putin has portrayed himself as the only person who can guarantee Russia’s security and stability, but that image has suffered since the war began.

Russian cities have come under drone attacks and shelling from Kyiv’s forces. Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a brief uprising last year to try to oust his military leaders. Gunmen stormed a Moscow concert hall and killed 145 people in March.

The Kremlin has given tacit approval to a wide-ranging purge of Defense Ministry officials, with many facing corruption charges. Lower-level officers also are being arrested on fraud charges, including Lt. Col. Konstantin Frolov, a decorated airborne brigade commander. “I would rather be in Kursk … than here,” he said while being marched in handcuffs into a Moscow police station.

In another reminder that fortunes in Russia can change quickly, authorities started criminal cases against other officials and are seeking to confiscate land from some of the country’s wealthiest people in a posh area outside Moscow near a Putin residence.

While state TV drives the still-strong support for Putin despite setbacks like the Kursk incursion, it’s harder to gauge the opinions of his key constituency — Russia’s elites.

Putin is dependent on their acquiescence, said Ekaterina Schulmann, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

“The calculation that’s going on in their heads 24/7 is whether the status quo is to their advantage or not,” she said.

Since the war began, life for those elites — Putin’s inner circle, top bureaucrats, security and military officials, and business leaders — has gotten worse, not better. While many have been enriched by the war, they have fewer places to spend their money because of Western sanctions.

The question they are asking themselves about Putin, Schulmann said, “is whether the old man is still an asset or already a liability.”

Russia’s elites could be described as being in a state of “unhappy compliance,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. They are discontented with the status quo, he said, but fearful about who would win if there were to be a leadership struggle.

They could be hoping, the analysts said, that Putin’s reaction to the events in Kursk fits a pattern in which he is initially slow to respond to a crisis before eventually managing to prevail.

It’s something seen since his earliest days in power — starting with the sinking 24 years ago of a nuclear submarine that was named for the Battle of Kursk.

On Aug. 19, 2000, less than a year after Putin became president, the Kursk sank in the Barents Sea after one of its torpedoes exploded, killing all 118 sailors aboard. Putin stayed on vacation early in the crisis — setting off widespread criticism — and waited five days before accepting Western offers of help that might have saved some sailors who initially survived the explosion.

Putin also appeared sluggish in responding to the June 2023 uprising by Wagner chief Prigozhin in what became the most serious challenge to his authority yet.

After the mutiny fizzled, Prigozhin initially was allowed to remain free, but Schulmann said Putin eventually “got the last laugh” when the mercenary leader was killed a month later in a still-mysterious crash on his private plane.

As the Ukrainian offensive enters its third week, Putin sought to keep to his schedule and even embarked on a two-day trip to Azerbaijan, without mentioning the crisis. On Tuesday he briefly referred to it, promising “to fight those who commit crimes in the Kursk region.”

With domestic dissent stifled and with the media firmly under his control, Putin can afford to make the “absolutely cynical” decision to ignore what is happening in the Kursk region, Schulmann said.

Still, Putin’s hold on power “is unlikely to be weakened as a result of this humiliation,” wrote Eugene Rumer, senior fellow and the director of the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Program, in a commentary. “The entire Russian political and military establishment is complicit in his war and responsible for this disaster.”

The longer the Ukrainian offensive goes on, however, the more military and political challenges it presents.

Russia appears to be struggling to find suitable forces to repel the Ukrainian assault. Despite promising that conscripts wouldn’t be sent to the front, Russia is deploying them to the Kursk region with not enough training, according to a human rights group that helps draftees.

Analysts say reserves also are being called up, so that Russia can avoid pulling troops from Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Moscow’s forces are making slow progress.

The manpower shortage has seen authorities trying to entice Russians to serve by offering large salaries, drafting convicted criminals from prisons and recruiting foreigners inside the country.

As Ukraine presses its offensive, it could become difficult for the Kremlin to ignore the many consequences of the war. A key question, Gould-Davies said, is what happens if Russia’s elites conclude that the conflict is “unwinnable or if … it will never end while Putin is in power.”

In Sudzha, a Russian town in the Kursk region now controlled by Ukrainian troops, the suffering of residents was clear. AP reporters on a Ukrainian government-organized trip last week saw shelled buildings, a damaged natural gas pumping station, and elderly residents huddled in basements with their belongings and food — images similar to what’s been seen in Ukraine for the past 29 months.

It’s unclear for now whether the second battle of Kursk, like the first one, will become a turning point in the war that Putin launched.

But, Schulmann said, as one of a “series of unfortunate events, it adds up to the impression that things are not going well.”