US media: Putin seeks to know how and why he was deceived about Kursk | Politics

Two of the largest American magazines specializing in international affairs have focused on the repercussions of the Ukrainian army’s recent incursion deep into Russian territory, and have questioned the goals that Kiev seeks to achieve through this operation.

Newsweek reported, citing the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based military research organization, that the appointment of former Kremlin official Alexei Dyumin to oversee defense in the Kursk region suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to remove officers responsible for failing to stop the Ukrainian incursion.

It also quoted the institute's assessment as saying that Putin wants to know “how and why he was deceived” regarding Kiev's military plans and intentions.

The assessment said that many military bloggers “speculated” that Dyumin “would determine the fate of several high-ranking Russian officials and commanders.”

Reply coming

Newsweek reported that this assessment came after Nikolai Ivanov, a deputy in the Russian Duma for the Kursk border region, said that his sources had confirmed to him that Dyumin, Putin's former bodyguard, “was instructed to oversee the anti-terrorist operation” in Kursk, located in southwestern Russia.

“The main important task is to defeat the Ukrainian armed forces that invaded the territory of the Kursk region,” Ivanov told the private RTVI channel, referring to the cross-border incursion launched by Kyiv on August 6 that appeared to have caught Moscow by surprise.

Newsweek reported that Russia has not yet officially confirmed Dyumin's appointment, adding that it had contacted the Russian Defense Ministry via email.

The Institute for the Study of War noted that reports of Dyumin’s involvement have sparked widespread speculation among Russian bloggers and political commentators about President Putin’s disillusionment with his security services. It has also sparked speculation that the Russian president may be making a military and political shakeup, the institute said.

Recent reports cited by the American magazine indicate that Ukraine has seized more territory in the Kursk region in a matter of days than Russia has seized in Ukraine since the beginning of the year. The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, revealed that the area of ​​military operations in the Kursk region exceeded 1,000 square kilometers by Monday.

gains but

In another report on the same topic, Foreign Policy magazine confirmed that Ukraine is making territorial gains inside Russia, but added that it wondered whether this incursion would cost it more soldiers that would be difficult for it to replace.

She explained that the “running” incursion stunned officials in the West and the Kremlin alike, noting that the cross-border attack raised morale in Ukraine, especially since Ukrainian forces faced little resistance.

Despite the passage of more than a week since the surprise attack, according to a Foreign Policy report, Kiev is still silent about its goals behind it. In fact, it has kept the attack secret, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky only confirmed its occurrence last Sunday, saying that his forces were fighting in Russia.

In the face of this secrecy, analysts gathered what information they could about the operation using open source images on social media and scrutinizing claims by Russian military bloggers.

Implications

Putin said the incursion was aimed at thwarting Russian advances on key battlefields in Ukraine.

“Ukraine likely believes that this operation will, at the very least, force the Russian military to deploy a much larger force to counter its offensive, thereby weakening its operations in the Donetsk region,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russia and Eurasia Program.

His colleague on the program, Dara Massicot, believes that the Ukrainians knew what they wanted, which was to look for a “weak point” on the Russian side, explaining that the presence of different elements of the Russian security services operating in the region may have hindered coordination between them.

“It is not clear to me yet whether the Russians failed to detect Ukrainian forces at close range, or whether they detected them but their war machines did not work for whatever reason,” she said.

According to Foreign Policy, the lack of clarity about Kyiv’s objectives for its operation in Kursk, which is one of the “most sophisticated” military moves Ukraine has made in the war so far, has made current and former American officials and experts concerned that Ukraine could expose itself to the risk of a Russian counterstrike.