One month of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region - World Socialist Web Site

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/07/xhzv-s07.html

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024.

One month into Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, Moscow has yet to repel Kiev’s forces. President Vladimir Putin, whose government failed to prevent the first seizure of Russian territory by an army since World War II, is attempting to manage the debacle.

Speaking on Thursday, the Kremlin leader insisted that “the enemy has not succeeded” in its goal to compel the redeployment of soldiers away from the Donbass. The Russian military has now “stabilized the situation” and “begun to gradually squeeze the enemy out of the border territories,” Putin stated. Invoking Russian nationalism and attempting to manage deep popular anger over the government’s failure, he declared the liberation of Kursk to be the country’s “sacred duty.”

On the ground, Ukraine’s advance appears to have been halted and possibly even slightly rolled back. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who rules with ever-more authoritarian methods over a country whose working population is increasingly opposed to the war, claims his forces currently control 1000 square kilometers of Russian territory. If true, this would be a decrease of 200 square kilometers from what Kiev said it initially seized when its troops and tanks pushed past Russia’s poorly defended borders on August 6.

The Kremlin has been silent about the amount of territory it has lost. Speaking to school students in Tuva, Siberia, this week, President Putin described Ukraine’s military as “thugs who made it in to Russia,” as if the elite forces armed by the Western powers and trained by the British were akin to a bunch of roving bandits attacking a wagon train. His government has sought to emphasize the successes of its intensifying assault in the Donbass, where, even according to pro-Ukrainian Western media accounts, Kiev’s army is struggling.

In an article on Thursday, the New York Times described Ukraine’s military situation as “increasingly difficult.” Russian forces have managed to create a “a large bulge that extends about 20 miles deep through the center of Ukraine’s defenses,” it noted. The Washington press outlet The Hill warned the same day that Kiev’s “gamble against Russia risks becoming a blunder.” A September 2 article in Foreign Affairs by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee likewise expressed concern over Zelensky’s “thinly-stretched lines” and ability to rotate troops out of the Donbass in order to hold onto Russian territory.

The Kremlin claims Ukraine has lost 10,000 troops in Kursk. If even 20 percent true, would be a large share of the 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers—largely drawn from elite forces—that Kofman and Lee estimate Kiev sent in.

President Zelensky is using its invasion of Kursk and the pressure building on its military—internally and at the front—to demand ever-more weapons from its Western backers and get authorization to launch attacks deeper into Russia. Ukraine’s seizure of Russian territory demonstrates, Zelensky stated in late August, that Putin’s “red lines” are an illusion not to be taken seriously.

The same point was made earlier this week by anti-Putin Russian oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky—one of a number of contenders for power should the current occupant of the Kremlin be overthrown. Braying for war, he criticized the Western powers from the right, that is, for not acting rapidly enough on the fact that the Kursk invasion shows that “any red lines are not where [they] imagine them to be.”

The Zelensky government is now receiving the go-ahead from NATO to escalate. On Thursday, Jens Stoltenberg, head of the alliance, welcomed the lessening of Western restrictions on Ukraine hitting targets in Russia and endorsed the country’s use of long-range missiles. The following day, at a meeting of the imperialist powers and Zelensky at Germany’s Ramstein air base, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced another $250 million military aid package for Kiev.

Whatever the short-term outcome for Ukraine on the battlefield, the imperialist powers see in Russia’s debacle in Kursk an immense opportunity to advance their goals to carve up the entire country. This was spelled out in an article by political scientist Mark Katz, a fellow at both the Wilson Center and the Atlantic Council, in the National Interest this week.

“By itself,” he writes, “the Ukrainian occupation of Russian territory in Kursk may not discomfit Putin for long. But if it leads other actors to conclude that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive shows that Putin is unable to respond effectively to whatever they are contemplating, then Putin and his generals could find themselves overwhelmed with crises.” Katz went on to question the Kremlin’s ability to hold Chechnya, all the Muslim republics in Russia’s North Caucasus, Belarus, and Transnistria, the Moscow-allied breakaway region of Moldova.

Domestically, the Russian government is working to downplay the crisis in Kursk. News coverage of the region would give one the impression that life is, more or less, moving along swimmingly and the situation for civilians is under control. Recent press articles have highlighted orchestra concerts, computer classes for kids, the opening of a photo exhibit of great moments in the country’s military history, and the visit this week by a deputy minister to the region’s main agricultural university. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin recently announced tax and insurance deferments for businesses in the area, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko just declared that the oblast is completely stocked with medicines, medical equipment, and blood supplies, and the government has reportedly already distributed 10,000-ruble payments ($110) to 120,000 evacuees. This is a paltry sum that only covers about two thirds of the over 180,000 people who had to flee the invasion.

Social media posts suggest that the reality, particularly for those caught behind the front lines, is appalling. A recent petition posted on the social media site Vkontakte appealed to the government to rescue people trapped in six villages who are, according to the appeal’s author, “without water, medicine, light and gas, and will soon be without food and the ability to heat their homes.” The petition, which was signed by 1,000 people within the first 24 hours that it was posted, reads, “This is a cry for help from your people to you! Do not abandon your people, who have made their choice in your favor! Please make your choice in favor of the people too!”

Hundreds, if not thousands, are missing. The search-and-rescue non-profit LizaAlert issued a statement this week indicating that of 918 reports it received of friends and relatives feared to be lost in Ukrainian-controlled territory, 698 were still unaccounted for and 5 were found dead. On Friday, RIA-Novosti carried a story of Kursk residents searching for their loved ones, with flyers of missing persons now being posted at bus stops. One man, who reported that his friend had not had contact with his parents since August 10, told the press outlet, “They said then that they were going to the farm to shelter from shelling, and that’s all.”

A video surfaced in mid-August documenting the abuse of a bewildered elderly man walking down the road in rags. He tells the Ukrainian soldiers, “I’m lost, I’ve been trying for five days now…” Wearing helmets of the Nazi SS, they taunt him and say, “Go drink vodka.” “Russian pig,” they declare in German. The family of the man, identified as 74-year-old Aleksandr Gusarov, saw the video, but reported that he was still missing at the time. The Ukrainian military is awash with far-right, pro-fascist, anti-Russian forces, who embrace the great crimes and collaborators of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union in which 27 million Soviet citizens were killed.

From a historical standpoint, the ruling class of Russia bears as much responsibility for what is happening in Kursk as the invading Ukrainian army and its NATO backers. In 1991, the ex-Soviet bureaucrats turned capitalists dissolved the Soviet Union and with it what remained of the conquests of the Russian revolution. This meant not just liquidating nationalized property and turning it into a huge well of profits for a new elite, but breaking apart the USSR, unleashing fratricidal nationalism, and transforming the entire region into an object of conquest for the imperialists.

The invasion of Kursk bears out the fact that, notwithstanding their combination of appeals to Russian chauvinism and threats of unleashing nuclear annihilation, the country’s ruling oligarchy is concerned primarily with the protection of its assets. Fearing nothing more than a mobilization of the working class, which would not only target the imperialist powers but also the capitalist system, it is both unwilling and unable to defend the working class against the onslaught of imperialism.

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The Ukrainian military’s offensive into two Russian border regions, Kursk and Belgorod, is entering its second week. Kiev claims to have captured 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), including at least 74 settlements and hundreds of prisoners of war. The troops carrying out the first invasion of Russia since the end of World War II were trained in the UK, and are using American and German battle tanks as well as American-supplied HIMARS rockets.

A destroyed Russian tank lies on a roadside near Sudzha, Kursk region, Russia, Friday, Aug. 16, 2024.

So far, Ukraine has blown up two bridges in the region and has interdicted a key rail line that the Russian army used to deliver supplies and troops to the front in Ukraine.

The destruction of the bridges has also disrupted ongoing efforts to evacuate residents from the combat zones in both Kursk and Belgorod. Over 180,000 people have already been evacuated, and the continuing evacuations indicate that the Kremlin is not anticipating a quick end to the fighting.

Nevertheless, according to Russian news reports, a significant number of civilians still remain in areas now occupied by Ukrainian forces. The Russian paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta cited Russian pro-Kremlin war journalist Aleksandr Kharchenko as saying, “A large number of our citizens are under the control of the Ukrainian forces.”

On Sunday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that the goal of the incursion was to create “a buffer zone.” He stated, “it is now our primary task in defensive operations overall: to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions.”

Russian authorities also claim that Kiev is preparing an attack on the nuclear power plants in the Russian region of Kursk and Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine, currently controlled by Russian forces. Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, is ongoing.

Underscoring both the involvement of the US in the operation and its predatory character, retired general David Petraeus, one of the greatest war criminals of the US invasion of Iraq, and later head of the CIA, praised the Ukrainian invasion on the BBC Global News Podcast. “This is not unlike when we did the invasion of Iraq, a great armored brigade did the thunder run through Baghdad and ends up on the airfield and they said, ‘Hey, let’s just gonna stay here’. Let’s develop the situation, let’s see what happens from here, how does the enemy respond. I think that’s where they are.”

Whatever the immediate military and political calculations behind the incursion, its underlying strategy and goals reveal the imperialist character of the war waged by the imperialist powers against Russia. NATO deliberately provoked the invasion by the Putin regime in order to use Ukraine as a staging ground for a much broader war whose ultimate goal is the carve-up of the entire region.

No one has been more open about these goals than Ukraine’s military leadership. Both the ex-head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the head of military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, have repeatedly been photographed with a map of a carved-up Russia, divided up between different powers. Based on this map, a substantial portion of what is now southeastern Russia, including the Kursk, Belgorod and Rostov regions, would fall to Ukraine in a modern-day version of the long-standing aim of the fascists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to establish a “Greater Ukraine”.

A map of a carved-up Russia. Both the former head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, have been photographed with this map in their offices since 2022.

This strategy includes not only military offensives into Russian territory but also terrorist attacks within Russia, such as the March Moscow Crocus City Hall attack, which killed over 140 people, and political assassinations. From the standpoint of the imperialist powers, the ultimate aim is to weaken the Putin regime militarily and politically, in order to create conditions for its overthrow by NATO-backed sections of the Russian oligarchy and state apparatus as part of an effort to bring the entire region under their direct control.

The Putin administration, which has emerged as a Bonapartist regime out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism, is, by its very class and political nature, extremely vulnerable to such pressures. As the WSWS has explained, its principal function consists of safeguarding the vast social privileges of the oligarchy. It has sought to do so by balancing, first, between different sections of the oligarchy, second, between the oligarchy and imperialism, and third, between the oligarchy and the working class. But the entire strategy of imperialism and its proxy in Ukraine, which consists of both ever more aggressive military offensives and systematic efforts to fuel tensions within the oligarchy, is undermining the Kremlin’s policies.

So far, the Putin regime’s response to the first imperialist-backed invasion of the country since the defeat of the Nazis by the Red Army in World War II has been markedly muted, itself one of many indicators that conflicts are indeed raging behind the scenes. The incursion came shortly after the Putin regime initiated a major purge of its army leadership. Moreover, just days before the incursion, the Kremlin had negotiated a prisoner swap with Washington, in which it released several of the most prominent representatives of the NATO-backed opposition, most notably Vladimir Kara-Murza and several members of the team of the late Alexei Navalny, long the central stooge of imperialism in the oligarchy.

A lengthy interview aired by Russia’s leading state TV channel, “Rossiia,” with the president of Belarus and one of the principal allies of Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, on Saturday, provided some insight into the considerations and heated discussions within the oligarchy. Lukashenko reiterated Putin’s warnings that NATO was preparing a direct entry into the war which would mean “World War III”. He stated that with the invasion of Kursk, Ukraine was trying to provoke Russia into a general mobilization to “destabilize society from within, we are not prepared to do this, we don’t want this.” Lukashenko also claimed that Ukraine had amassed 120,000 troops on its border with Belarus and that Minsk had responded by mobilizing a third of its military—some 65,000 men—to the already heavily mined border. He then spoke at length about Belarus’s preparations for a potential war with NATO member Poland and threatened that Ukraine’s Kursk invasion could end in its own “destruction.”

He insisted repeatedly, “We don’t want escalation. We don’t want this war against all of NATO. We don’t want it. But if they go for it, then we won’t have a choice.” Lukashenko then discussed the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia on Belarusian territory. When asked whether he was prepared to “press the red button,” he emphatically declared that he was, as soon as the borders of Belarus were violated. “If you don’t want this, then let’s sit down at the negotiating table and let’s end this little fight [i.e., the war in Ukraine].” He went on to claim that there are “no Nazis” in Ukraine anymore and that the Kremlin’s supposed goal of the “de-Nazification of Ukraine” had been effectively accomplished.

Of course, the Putin regime, which is itself steeped in Great Russian chauvinism and maintains extensive ties to the far-right, never wanted, nor could it undertake, a serious struggle against fascism. Nevertheless, these statements by Lukashenko, made on Russian state television as Ukrainian troops on Russian soil are using Nazi insignia on their uniforms, suggest that significant sections of the state and oligarchy are responding to the invasion by intensifying discussions on how to reach a negotiated settlement with imperialism as fast as possible.

At the same time, other sections in the oligarchy warn that the country must prepare for a protracted war and a potential second mobilization. One characteristic comment on the right-wing pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad.Ru evoked the memory of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens, and warned that “Victory will require a protracted war.”

The imperialist-backed incursion of Russia, the first such invasion since 1941, and the political disarray it has provoked within the oligarchy underscore above all the catastrophic outcome of the Stalinist betrayal of the 1917 October revolution, which culminated in the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. Whatever its bitter and violent infighting, the Russian oligarchy that emerged out of this counter-revolution is infinitely more concerned with preempting a movement within the working class than with the danger posed by imperialism.

The imminent threat of an imperialist carve-up of the region and nuclear war can only be countered, on a progressive basis, through the intervention of the working class, which must conduct its struggle independently from all sections of the oligarchy and the imperialist powers, based on the socialist and internationalist traditions that inspired the October Revolution.

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One month of Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region - World Socialist Web Site

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