Adam Zivo: Reports of Ukraine's doom have been greatly exaggerated
As long as we don't lose our will, the Ukrainians won't lose their resolve.
By: Adam Zivo
Anyone who doubts the efficacy of western aid to Ukraine need only look at Kyiv's recent incursion into Russia’s Kursk province to see why our support matters. Earlier this year, international allies worried that the Ukrainians — starved of American arms shipments — were on the verge of collapse. Since access to American weapons was restored, Kyiv has quickly turned its fortunes around and upended prevailing narratives of the war.
Three weeks ago, thousands of Ukrainian troops broke through a lightly defended section of the Russian border and, to the world’s shock, occupied over 1,000 square kilometres of Kursk. Caught off-guard, hundreds of Russian soldiers were captured and at least 200,000 Russian civilians fled the surrounding border regions. Ukraine’s allies were not made aware of the operation beforehand.
Russian President Vladimir Putin quickly vowed to expel the Ukrainians but has, to date, been unsuccessful in this regard, despite redeploying troops from other frontline. The Ukrainians have entrenched themselves in Kursk, literally and figuratively, and are reportedly even making small territorial gains. Just a few days ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that a further two settlements had been taken.
Although Ukrainian forces have seized only about three per cent of Kursk province’s total area, the incursion’s symbolic value has been considerable. Both within and outside Russia, the violation of territorial integrity has been seen as catastrophic.
When Putin came into power in 1999, Russia had been freshly traumatized by almost a decade of post-Soviet chaos. He promised citizens that he would make their country strong again, and oversaw an explosion of wealth that coincided with the hollowing out of the nation’s already-tenuous state institutions. Since then, this Faustian bargain has been the foundation of his authority — so long as there is security and prosperity, especially for the urban elite, then the indignities of authoritarianism are tolerated.
While territorial losses, along with the relocation of hundreds of thousands of domestic refugees, would be challenging for any leader, for Putin the situation is particularly dangerous. It tarnishes his social contract with the Russian people, and his image as the nation’s great protector.
The crisis was made all the worse by the incompetence and corruption it exposed. Refugees told Russian media sources, such as the Moscow Times, that they had been abandoned my local administrators. Some even cast doubt upon the capabilities of the Russian military and claimed that official sources were lying about on-the-ground realities.
Similarly, several independent Russian news outlets reported that corruption had sabotaged attempts to fortify the Kursk border. For example, although $175 million had been invested into establishing three defence lines in the area, only two were completed and few structures actually built — mostly just simple dugouts, unreinforced by any concrete. The embezzlement issues were so severe that, in late 2023, the Kursk regional government reportedly initiated a $22 million lawsuit against the associated contractors. According to some Russian sources, the case was quickly swept under the rug.
“The question now is why there were so few fortifications, and most importantly, where the money allocated to these structures went,” said one Russian military expert, who spoke with Verstka Media on condition of anonymity.
Corruption has been an ongoing and controversial issue for Russia throughout the war. In the years preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, rampant theft hollowed out parts of the Russian military, leaving Putin with an inflated sense of his country’s capabilities. This likely saved the Ukrainians from a quick defeat in 2022. When Yevgeny Prigozhin, the now-deceased leader of the now-disbanded Wagner mercenary group, led his troops in a short-lived mutiny against Moscow last year, he claimed that opposition to corruption was his impetus — and a poll conducted by the Levada Centre shortly after suggested that half of Russians sympathized with him.
Considering this context, it’s apparent that the Kursk offensive, however marginal its territorial gains, poses a major threat to Putin’s legitimacy. This is something which Putin himself indirectly acknowledged two weeks ago, in a televised address about the crisis, where he stated: “One of the obvious goals of the enemy is to sow discord, strife, intimidate people, destroy the unity and cohesion of Russian society.”
Western allies, whose confidence has been fading since Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive last year and in the face of some ongoing Russian offensives, seem to have been reassured by the Kursk incursion — for the first time in a year, there is hope that Moscow can be outmaneuvered. Though the situation remains difficult, with Russia’s continued creeping gains in the Donetsk region, the balance of power is certainly more ambiguous than it was a few months ago. Better yet, the ongoing occupation of Kursk gives the Ukrainians a valuable bargaining chip should both sides decide to sue for peace.
Throughout the spring, Western allies worried that Ukraine was on the brink of collapse and that Russia could win the war by the late autumn. The situation became particularly dire in April, when Moscow destroyed half of the country’s power generating capacity and launched a renewed push to besiege and occupy Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. For many Ukrainians, the mood at the time was grim and pessimistic.
However, these struggles were largely the result of a six-month freeze on American aid that had been engineered by a clique of pro-Russian Republicans. Without foreign armaments, the Ukrainians found themselves out-gunned, vulnerable to missile strikes and on the retreat. But then Congress restarted the flow of weapon shipments in the beginning of May and the situation rapidly changed — Russia was repelled in the Kharkiv region and its advances in Donetsk slowed down considerably.
This result was predicted by many, but no one imagined that, in only three months, Kyiv would have had the capacity to seize Russian territory and alter the war’s overall dynamics. Although it was well-understood that foreign aid has been essential to Ukraine’s survival, it seems that many underestimated just how big of a difference could be made. If there is a lesson to be learned, here, it’s that it’s unwise to underestimate Ukrainian resolve. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it’s that underestimating the Ukrainians' resolve is unwise. They will fight, as long as we in the West continue to give them the tools to do so.
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It's a good thing Ukraine has allies more reliable than Canada!
Unfortunately, I've got a lot more faith in Ukrainian resolve than Western will.