Ukrainians humiliate Putin

Reports that Vladimir Putin feels “embarrassed and humiliated” by Ukraine’s deployment of elite troops and armour deep inside Russia’s Kursk region – the biggest military incursion inside Russia since World War II – are no surprise. He also should feel shame over the exclusion of Russian athletes from the Paris Olympics while Ukraine’s participants, embraced by the international sports community, delivered three gold, five silver and four bronze medals. Two-and-a-half years after Putin announced a “special military operation” that would take days or a few weeks at most to overrun and take control of sovereign Ukraine, the Kursk counter-invasion and Moscow’s exclusion from the Olympics are signs of the failure of the despot’s plans.

Countless times for 29 months Putin has claimed the “special military operation” is going “according to plan”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Heavy Russian casualties on the battlefield, the destruction of warships in the Black Sea, drone strikes deep inside Russia (even on the Kremlin), constant shelling of Russian border towns and villages, and the mutiny by disaffected Wagner mercenaries and their ill-fated march on Moscow tell a different story.

So does the thrust into Kursk by Kyiv’s forces, which caught the Kremlin’s political and military leadership flat-footed. With breathtaking hypocrisy given, Russia’s inhumane bombing of hundreds of Ukrainian apartment blocks, schools, hospitals and city centres, Putin has decried the Kursk invasion as an “act of terrorism” and “major provocation”. For Ukraine, the incursion makes good military sense as a way of relieving Russian pressure on Kharkiv and other frontline towns in Donetsk. It also has forced Moscow to rush in reinforcements and divert warplanes to try to oust the Ukrainians from Kursk.

Far from the war going according to plan, Moscow has been humiliated by the ease with which Ukraine’s forces advanced deep inside Kursk. At one stage, reportedly, four Ukrainian soldiers captured 40 of Putin’s bedraggled, dispirited conscripts. The Kursk attack is a reminder of how wrong the Biden administration was to stall before finally changing its policy in June and allowing some US weapons to be used to attack Russian territory. Doing so has added to Putin’s problems when, despite a vicious campaign by state media against them, the Olympics have reminded many Russians what a mess the dictator’s “special military operation” has become.