Ukraine invades Russia – the political implications

Aerial view of wildfire on a field. Burning grass and huge clouds of smoke

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published 27 August 2024

Air defences shot down 11 Ukrainian drones targeting Moscow on Wednesday, one of the largest such strikes against the Russian capital, says The Guardian. The attack follows Ukraine’s invasion of Russian territory, which began on 6 August and has now reached 17 to 22 miles into the Kursk region. Russian president Vladimir Putin promised a “worthy response” and made an unannounced visit to inspect troops in Chechnya readying to fight Ukraine.

Ukraine had been on the back foot in the war for more than a year until its 6 August offensive took everyone by surprise, says Lawrence Freedman in the Financial Times. The initial response, even from some Ukrainian analysts, was that this was “more madness than genius”, “sacrificing precious troops for a showy but pointless operation instead of bolstering the hard-pressed defences in Donetsk”. But the mood changed as the operation in Kursk made rapid progress, taking territory and prisoners and overcoming Russian strongholds.

Ukraine now claims to have taken more territory in a matter of weeks than Russia has managed in eight months. To what end? The invasion has “clearly demonstrated significant weakness in Russia’s border defences, set off confusion in Moscow’s chain of command and proved Ukraine’s continued talent for surprising moves,” says Carl Bildt in Foreign Policy. “But wars are political as well as military, and it’s in the political arena where Ukraine’s incursion has fundamentally changed the course of the conflict.”

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Following the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, Putin has been seeking to convince the world of the inevitability of a Russian victory. The Kursk offensive is a “mortal blow to the narrative and political line he has carefully and at great cost been trying to build since last summer”, and he is “clearly rattled”. The invasion has shown that the war is still an open question and that there is “every reason for the West to intensify its support of Ukraine”. Continued Western support for the war remains politically contentious, however, and the German finance ministry has been accused of a “disguised retreat” from its support for Ukraine, says Oliver Moody in The Times.

Weapons deliveries have become a “bargaining chip in the power games within Germany’s governing coalition”, which is trying to close a €12 billion budget deficit. Much-needed military kit is at risk of being blocked. “War weariness and pacifist sentiment” are widespread in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg, where the mainstream parties are facing substantial losses to the radical fringes in elections next month, and the ruling coalition is under pressure from both its fiscally conservative right wing and its anti-militarist left. It doesn’t help that Germany was the victim of a “terror attack” from the very country it is seeking to help fight a war, says Owen Matthews in The Spectator. The Wall Street Journal published compelling evidence last week that it was Ukraine, not Russia, behind the attacks on Germany’s Nord Stream gas pipelines links to Russia.

A surprising intervention from Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko could be the key to ending the conflict, says Matthews. In an interview on Russian state TV, the country’s dictator and close Putin ally called for negotiations to end the conflict and questioned key parts of Putin’s war aims. He said that only the West wants the war to continue and that allowing it to do so only serves their interests. Sun Tzu recommended building your enemy a “golden bridge” across which he can retreat. That bridge could be built out of Lukashenko’s “useful falsehoods”.

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Stuart graduated from the University of Leeds with an honours degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, and from Bath Spa University College with a postgraduate diploma in creative writing.

He started his career in journalism working on newspapers and magazines for the medical profession before joining MoneyWeek shortly after its first issue appeared in November 2000. He has worked for the magazine ever since, and is now the comment editor.

He has long had an interest in political economy and philosophy and writes occasional think pieces on this theme for the magazine, as well as a weekly round up of the best blogs in finance.

His work has appeared in The Lancet and The Idler and in numerous other small-press and online publications.