As Ukraine’s assault on Russia’s Kursk region continues, Moscow’s repeated insistence that everything is under control is wearing thin.
Images broadcast on Ukrainian TV on Wednesday, showing a reporter speaking from the town of Sudzha, with no obvious signs of ongoing fighting in the background, seemed to quash Russian claims on Tuesday that “the uncontrolled ride of the enemy has already been halted”, and that the Russian army had regained the initiative.
Ukraine claims it controls 74 settlements in the Kursk region – including Sudzha – and has been handing out humanitarian aid and pulling down Russian flags in the area, according to Ukrainian TV.
Kyiv’s long-term plans are unclear, but the longer the incursion lasts, the harder it is for president Vladimir Putin to brush it off as a hiccup in an otherwise successful war effort.
It is usually a sign that something is rattling the Kremlin when the elite start using all kinds of euphemisms to refer to it. The Kremlin’s full-scale assault on Ukraine was not, for a long time, a “war” or an “invasion”, but instead a “special military operation”.
Putin famously refused to utter the name of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny while he was alive, referring to him as “a certain personage” or “the citizen you mentioned”.
Now, as Ukrainian forces advance deep into Russian territory, there is a similar linguistic game at work. The FSB, Russia’s principal security agency, announced that “measures” were being taken against an “armed provocation”.
Putin and other officials have referred variously to a “situation”, a “terrorist attack” and “the events in Kursk region”. Notably absent are words like “invasion” or “Ukrainian control” of Russian territory.
On Monday, when the acting regional governor began listing the number of settlements taken over by the Ukrainian army while on a video link with a high-level meeting, an irritable Putin cut him off, telling him to leave such things for the military and focus instead on describing the humanitarian response.
The exchange was unintentionally revealing, said Olga Vlasova, a visiting scholar at the Russia Institute at King’s College London.
“You could hear the level of anxiety in the governor’s voice later in the meeting. It was quite clear that he wasn’t prepared for war to be fought on his territory,” she said.
“And when he tried to share the information that he had, Putin wouldn’t allow it. He wants to stop the communication of anything that will raise the level of anxiety in Russian society.”
The invasion of parts of Russia exacerbates a dilemma that the Kremlin has faced since the start of its full-scale invasion: whether to portray Russia’s war on Ukraine as an existential fight to the death with the west and a prelude to world war three, or whether to suggest it is a local conflict fully under control and nothing for anyone to worry about.
The state-controlled media has pushed both of these contradictory narratives at various times, but has favoured the latter story over the past week.
TV bulletins have focused on Russian forces repelling the incursion, and on people across the country sending humanitarian aid to the region in solidarity, rather than dwelling on the extraordinary sight of foreign troops occupying Russian territory for the first time since the second world war.
So far, that seems to be working. Ekaterina Schulmann, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said analysis of news consumption data among Russians shows peaks of public interest in the news at key moments, such as the initial invasion of Ukraine, the announcement of mobilisation, the coup launched by Yevgeny Prigozhin last year or the terrorist attacks in Moscow in March. Until now, there has been no such spike over the Kursk incursion.
“Overall, routinising the event seems to be working so far, because it unites the wishes of the elites and the people alike,” she said.
But Putin’s response has been far from convincing. He has not toured the affected areas or delivered stirring speeches demanding a spirited defence.
It fits a pattern throughout his rule, starting with the Kursk submarine crisis in 2000 shortly after he had become president, in which he is often slow to respond at moments of crisis.
By this point, the elite has become used to this, and to seeing Putin seize the initiative back over time.
“See Prigozhin: the reaction to the coup itself was pitiful, but who got the last laugh? A month later he exploded in flames,” said Schulmann, referencing the failed coup attempt last summer, in which Putin was notable by his absence as the events unfolded. Prigozhin later died in an explosion aboard his private jet.
Now, those in the elite will be watching to see if Putin can once again come out on top after an initial shaky response to events in Kursk. “What I suspect they are watching for is this: Is the power still strong? Does the old man still have it in him?”
Additional reporting by Archie Bland