The war’s most valuable territory is the space — or the moral vacuum — between Vladimir Putin’s ears. And by launching an offensive that has seized 500 square miles of Russian territory around Kursk, Ukraine has won a part of that psychological realm.
For dictators like Putin, there is no worse enemy than their own imaginations. It’s not what Ukraine can actually do. It’s what Putin fears Ukraine might do next.
Dictators and other authoritarians crave the certainty of absolute control. They like to boast that their form of government is more efficient than the cumbersome decision-making in democracies.
In reality, dictatorships are also more vulnerable to the fears and whims of their rulers. Even when the Third Reich was desperately short of manpower, Hitler insisted on keeping 300,000 troops in Norway because he was convinced the Allies planned to land there (they never did.) Stalin repeatedly misjudged German intentions and strategy in 1941-1942, and nearly destroyed his armies while making futile attacks against the advice of his generals. But woe to those who risk career — or life — to question tyrants who shield themselves reality.
By invading Russia, Ukraine is forcing Putin to face the unpleasant truth that he has failed to defeat — or even cripple — Ukraine. In that sense, the 20,000 Ukrainian troops at Kursk are a form of psychological warfare.
The irony is that for dictators like Putin, psychological warfare is the foundation of their rule. They wage it against their own populations to intimidate any potential political opposition. They wage it against other nations to convince rivals and potential victims that resistance is futile, and to corrode national debate. Putin has spent years trying to undermine Ukraine, including disinformation, grabbing Crimea at gunpoint, and terror bombing Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones.
And now the shoe is on the other foot. It is Putin who must react to Ukraine’s moves. It is Putin who has to wonder if he can trust his military to defend Russia’s borders. And it is Putin who has to explain to his people how the war that was supposed to forestall a mythical threat of NATO invasion ended up with foreign troops invading Russia.
What makes the failure to defeat Ukraine so striking is that in many ways, this has been an easy war for Putin. Russia has more troops and weapons than Ukraine, and it can draw on munitions and supplies from China, Iran, and North Korea.
The Kremlin has mostly controlled the initiative, determining where and when the most intense fighting will occur. Russia has also enjoyed the luxury of not having to substantially defend most of its 600-mile land border with Ukraine, allowing Russian troops to mass at will for offensives. Compare Russia’s strategic situation to that of Britain facing the Nazi empire in late 1940, or the Soviet Union reeling from German invasion in the summer of 1941. Conditions could hardly be more ideal for Putin’s War.
Many of those comforting certainties have now evaporated. Russia can no longer assume that its home territory is inviolate to ground invasion. Ukrainian drones hitting oil refineries inside Russia may damage the economy and embarrass the regime. But foreign boots on Russian soil undermine the most essential task of any government: protecting the sovereignty of the nation.
Critics of the Kursk operation point out that Putin has not redeployed troops from Eastern Ukraine, where Russians are continuing to advance slowly but steadily, village by village. They argue that Ukraine would have been better off using the assault troops at Kursk to reinforce its defenses in the east and south.
But that’s exactly what Putin wants: to keep Ukraine dancing to Moscow’s tune, wearing out its best troops and equipment responding to crisis after crisis. If Putin is certain that he can control the pace of the war, then he can assume that it is only a matter of time before Ukraine succumbs.
The Kursk operation allows Ukraine to inject uncertainty into the equation. Putin can continue to lightly defend the Russia-Ukraine border while concentrating his forces to advance inside Ukraine. But that option no longer provides certainty: it’s now a calculated risk that Ukraine won’t attack some other part of Russia.
And for all their bluster, dictators like Putin hate uncertainty more than anything else.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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.
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