Things seemed to be going well for President Vladimir Putin, both at home and on the battlefield.
Russia is now the battlefield, as a surprise cross-border attack by Ukrainian forces has turned the tide of Putin’s war and left Russian troops scrambling to retake territory from their own country.
It’s a remarkable development after a year in which things have largely gone Putin’s way, from a short-lived rebellion to a resilient economy to months of steady gains on the front lines.
The Russian leader sounded almost furious on Monday as he vowed to “keep the enemy out” of his country’s territory during a crisis meeting with senior officials and warned that Kiev would face “befitting” retaliation for the Kursk offensive.
Putin convened a meeting on Monday with border governors and top defense and security officials. Gabriel Grigorov/AP
He said Russia remained united, boasted that its forces were accelerating their advance into eastern Ukraine, and that people forced to flee their homes in Russia’s border areas would be given full protection.
But the rosy picture Putin tried to paint did little to mask the reality: The Russian leader is now facing one of the most damaging moments of his long tenure, with the Kremlin reeling from a foreign invasion of Russia for the first time since World War II.
“He’s outraged that something like this could have happened,” said Callum Fraser, a Russian and Eurasian security fellow at the London-based think tank Royal Institute for Integrated Security Studies (RUSI). “One of the reasons he always uses as justification for invading Ukraine is Russian national security. I think the fact that Ukraine has launched an invasion of Russian territory is absolutely humiliating for him,” Fraser told NBC News.
Putin’s rivals in Kiev offered their own provocative assessments, pointing to the symbolism of the region now at the heart of the war.
“24 years ago there was the Kursk disaster. It was the symbolic beginning of his rule,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an Instagram video message on Monday, a reference to the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk on Aug. 12, 2000, for which Putin was criticized for his calm response to the crisis. “And now it is clear what the end is for him. And Kursk too. The disaster of his war.”
