By Tiko Okoye
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the authorities in Kyiv were feigning weakness and battle-weariness when they abruptly changed their stance from never holding any peace talks with Russia as long as Vladimir Putin remains in office to seizing any given opportunity to ‘actively’ signal they were open to peace talks with Moscow. Although the seeming change of heart elicited consternation among diehard Putin critics, it was very well received in many parts of the world, not the least of which are leaders of member-states of the NATO Alliance who have been providing Ukraine with considerable supplies of military equipment, intel, advisers and technicians.
Most of these Western leaders have been – and are still being – subjected to enormous pressure by resurgent iconoclastic far-right parties with sympathy for Putin, to cut-off military aid to Ukraine or watch their favourability ratings take a one-way nosedive southwards, or even risk not being re-elected in some cases. On the grounds that a bad peace is preferable to a just war, these beleaguered heads of government would just want the Russia/Ukraine face-off to end as quickly as possible.
As for the Kremlin, Putin and his men must’ve washed down mouthfuls of caviar with glassfuls of premium Vodka, celebrating the assumed capitulation of an irritatingly stubborn Nazi-ridden neighbour whose leaders had finally imbibed the harsh lesson, on bended knees, that Oga get master and khaki no be leather. And then, the world practically woke up one morning to hear the stranger-than-fiction news that elite troops had crossed the border from Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy region into Russia’s western Kursk region, seizing 23 towns within a perimeter of 400 square kilometres in the Kursk region, and grabbing hundreds of prisoners of war along the way in less than 24 hours!
Just a week later, the world was assailed with reports of thousands of prisoners of war and the seizure of about 1,000 square kilometres of Russian soil, involving as many as 74 settlements! There’s no gainsaying that that Russia was totally unprepared and blindsided by Ukraine’s rare cross-border attack on August 6, raising troubling questions about Russia’s military preparedness and intelligence gathering, which itself beggars belief as one would’ve thought the Kremlin would’ve learnt a thing or two from the Yevgeny Prigozhin-led Wagner Mercenary Group debacle.
Even Ukraine’s allies. Including the likes of the USA, the UK, France, Germany, were caught off-guard by the sheer daring and swiftness of the Ukrainian incursion. Still, while Western leaders may be very thrilled to see Putin suffer another military embarrassment, they can only giggle behind the scenes and be very circumspect with any triumphalist public rhetoric in order not to provoke Putin to the point where he would opt out of any ceasefire talks. But they no longer don’t have to engage in self-censorship, as Putin, while addressing members of the Russian National Security Council at an emergency meeting he summoned shortly after the Ukrainian incursion, declared that peace talks are dead on arrival – at least for a while.
It’s quite easy to tell that the primary condition for a permanent truce from Putin’s perspective is the ceding of the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine aka Donbas to Russia. The icing on the cake would be getting Ukraine to sign a treaty of conventional neutrality in foreign affairs. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has so far remained elusive on the exact purpose of rhe incursion, except to assert that his government isn’t out to annex any part of Russia as the Kremlin has done in Donbas and that “Russia must be forced into peace if Putin wants to continue waging war so badly.”
It has become very obvious that the effusive expressions of a willingness and readiness to engage in peace talks with Russian authorities was no more than a subterfuge; a drama full of lies and cruel deception that was very strategically acted out with the sole aim of lulling Putin into a false sense of victory and over-confidence. Here then are my well-considered five reasons why Ukraine struck.
The first – and the only reason Putin has understandably not mentioned – is to not only give Putin his comeuppance, but to equally teach him a very humbling lesson in over-confidence. And it must be doubly humiliating for Putin that to ensure the success of the planned incursion, the Ukrainians lifted a page right out of the military playbook of the USSR – the old Soviet empire that Putin’s greatest ambition and resolve is to rebuild at all costs. How do I mean? It is now crystal-clear that the Ukrainians adopted the renowned Soviet art of maskirova – meaning “deception in war.”
The incursion into Kursk, the first foreign incursion into Russia since WWII, will definitely hurt and infuriate Putin. The shame that has befallen the tough-talking Putin and the imperative of recouping reverence for the Russian Republic obviously mean that Putin must go for broke. Kyiv is betting that given a clear choice between allowing Ukrainians occupy a part of Mother Russia and enabling them, even if based on the Doctrine of Necessity, re-occupy parts of eastern Ukraine, Putin would opt for the latter. They called it right!
Calling the incursion a ”large-scale provocation” and a “terror” operation, Putin vowed in a televised address to Russians that “the Kyiv aggressors will receive a worthy response.” Moscow is already withdrawing large contingents of inexperienced raw recruits who had inexplicably manned Kursk and the adjacent Belgorod region, and has started deploying elite military squads as their replacement. And although it is still early days yet, it is certain that the Ukrainians would achieve their objective of halting, or at least significantly slowing down, Moscow’s advance along the sprawling over-700-kilometre-long front line in eastern Ukraine by way of a forced redeployment of Russian troops and equipment from Donbas to Kursk.
The second reason, therefore, is a ploy by Kyiv to eke out a temporary respite from the pummelling they are receiving in Donbas. But it remains to be seen whether Putin would be in any position to walk his talk. Too many of the “red lines” he drew in the sand in the recent past have been slowly but most assuredly breached by Ukrainians and their NATO allies without any of the apocalyptic fallouts he had threatened materialising. His braggadocio this time around might just be for the consumption of the domestic audience.
The third reason why the Ukrainians struck is to dramatically boost their position in future negotiations with Moscow. From the asymmetrical position where only Ukraine is expected to forfeit the Donbas seized by Russian troops, Kyiv has now craftily procured an invaluable bargaining chip in the form of a part of Russia for a more equitable quid-pro-quo exchange.
The fourth reason is to create discord and division within Russian society and undermine the unity and cohesion of the Russian people, and possibly effect a regime change! Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak is reported to have revealed during a TV interview that Ukraine’s advances on Russian territory and losses of territory, people and equipment will “scare everyday Russians” and “reset their attitude toward Vladimir Putin.”
The fifth reason is because Kursk symbolises a life-and-death struggle from a virtual state of siege. It was exactly in this very same region in the fourth year of WWII (1943) that the Soviet Red Army routed the retreating Nazi German troops in the biggest tank battle ever seen, involving about 6,000 tanks and two million troops. While the number of tanks and troops likely to engage in combat this time around would be a far cry from the 1943 figures, the fact remains that the stakes are similarly very high, and the next 30 days will be critical for both sides as the second “Battle of Kursk” takes on additional significance. The party that blinks first between a ruthless wannabe empire-builder and the leader of a nation of fiercely independent-minded folks would ultimately be forced to play second fiddle in any peace talks. That is exactly why the war in the Kursk Oblast promises to be a mother of all wars.
On second thoughts, the second ‘Battle of Kursk’ might just hold a glimmer of hope that this messy war might give Russia and Ukraine the opportunity to reset the course of their respective nations. The inevitable exchange of prisoners of war and a land-for-peace transaction between both parties – subject to the Ukrainians rebuffing all Russian attempts to retake Kursk – would enable Kyiv fully retain its territories without ceding any part to Moscow – except possibly granting some form of limited autonomy to the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas – and rebuild its economy and society with Western assistance.
But can and would Putin on his part – given his domestic branding as the infallible strongman – easily sell a cock-and-bull tale about why he is changing his initial goals in Ukraine to Russians weary of sanctions and being treated as outcasts by the international community? Only time will tell in both cases!
