There are great swaths of news coverage devoted to the implications of Ukraine’s lightning incursion in Russia’s Kursk region, and yet little has focused on perhaps the most important point so far.
Nothing since the Wagner mercenary uprising in June last year has put Russian soldiers and the radical patriots close to them so much at odds with the Ministry of Defense and General Headquarters. The atmosphere is rank, and worsening.
Radical patriots, primarily the so-called war correspondents, or milbloggers, are seething with discontent and for many of the same reasons as stoked previous outbreaks of dissent. They were incensed when official Ministry of Defense reports hid the truth about what was happening in the early days of the Kursk fighting. While official channels only periodicallymentioned “Ukrainian saboteurs” being routed by Russian forces (“provocations that had been stopped,” as the communiques put it), war correspondents openly discussed the seizure of the town of Sudzha by Ukrainian forces.
They also asked why Russia was so unprepared for the incursion, given that the army was apparently warned of it and yet did not act. Telegram channels said the head of the General Staff, General Valeriy Gerasimov, had instead accused his subordinates of spreading enemy disinformation.
Pro-war journalists have not held back. They reported problems in the organization of communications and command and control of troops, as well as the fact that conscripts “together with [FSB] Border Guard troops fought selflessly against superior enemy forces.” Many war correspondents wrote directly of Gerasimov’s personal responsibility for the failure of border defenses and predicted his imminent dismissal. Ukrainian journalists, too, noted the no-holds-barred attacks of Russian war correspondents against Gerasimov and the new Minister of Defense, Andrey Belousov.
Following the war correspondents’ lead, similar rhetoric was employed by radical-patriot websites. The ultra-conservative television channel Tsargrad admitted that there was “real unrest” in the Kursk region, and “the Russian people have been given the false hope that the problem can be solved in a few days.” Ignoring the official reports of the Ministry of Defense, Tsargrad and other radical-right websites have continued to publish “unofficial news from the front.”
Yevgeniy Prigozhin is now dead and buried, killed in a plane crash that most attribute to Russia’s despot, Vladimir Putin. But he would surely be laughing to hear his sentiments about regime corruption and incompetence so widely echoed.
The News.ru portal even called Prigozhin a “prophet,” who predicted a Ukrainian breakthrough into Russian territory. The journalists recalled that the head of the Wagner mercenary group was forbidden to train his troops in the Belgorod and Kursk regions, and noted that “Prigozhin was right” in all of his accusations. In short, Prigozhin’s ghost bestrides the informational Z-space. The Kremlin is being reminded that it’s one thing to kill a man and another to kill his ideas.
The authors of the Military Review website, which is close to the Kremlin, continued to deny facts even after the authorities officially admitted that as of August 12, some 28 Russian villages were under Ukrainian control (the number is now 80-plus.). One of its writers, Aleksandr Staver, declared that it was “offensive to read . . . unconfirmed reports about some new powerful Ukrainian formations that advance without encountering any resistance from our units.” He ended by calling the war correspondents “enemy agents” and questioned their sanity.
Other Military Review writers continue to predict a “rapid collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces” and threaten Kyiv with “retribution,” but their propaganda clichés are stale when compared to the detailed reporting from the war correspondents, which is another echo of last summer’s uprising. It seems that among those who support the war, a serious conflict is brewing between active fanatics and ordinary corrupt officials.
It is fully possible that in this situation, Vladimir Putin will decide to “sacrifice” Gerasimov just as he earlier sacrificed Sergey Shoigu, dismissing him as Minister of Defense (although moving him to another post.) But it is by now obvious that notwithstanding Prigozhin’s example, the war correspondents and radical patriots are a force to be reckoned with and cannot be frightened by the threat of criminal charges for “discrediting the army” and other repressive tactics. This force is capable of causing serious problems for Vladimir Putin.
Less seriously, at least so far, are signs of revolt among Russia’s ordinary people. There is no indication that they are ready for an uprising, but there are signals of discontent, as their barely trained 18 and 19-year-old sons seek to battle grizzled Ukrainian veterans equipped with Western weaponry. Human rights activists report that they are inundated with messages from the relatives of soldiers trying to find sons sent to the Kursk region. Sometimes, the servicemen themselves turn to them in the hope of being withdrawn.
There are also reports that conscripts are increasingly being forced to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense, so changing their military status to deployable combatant and threatening to send them to the Kursk region if they refuse.
Just as with the war correspondents, the regime has coercive tools at its disposal should things become difficult. Many will recall the fate of the movement of conscripts’ wives, who were eventually deemed “foreign agents,” the branding reserved for those soon-to-be damned.
Putin left for a state visit to Azerbaijan from August 18-20, demonstrating that this summer surprise does not compare with Prigozhin’s extraordinary antics last year. The regime is not threatened in the same way, and yet the cracks in the edifice exposed by 2023’s events are visible again in 2024. The façade merely masks the multiple weaknesses of Putin’s Russia.
Kseniya Kirillova is an analyst focused on Russian society, mentality, propaganda, and foreign policy. The author of numerous articles for CEPA and the Jamestown Foundation, she has also written for the Atlantic Council, Stratfor, and others.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War Without End
Russia’s Shadow Warfare
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA's flagship event.
