From Nezavisimaya gazeta, Aug. 8, 2024, p. 1. Condensed text:

On Aug. 7, President Vladimir Putin made a statement on the situation in Kursk Province. He called it the latest provocation by the Kiev regime. The supreme commander in chief did not immediately say what the response would be, but he did announce a meeting with law-enforcement and security officials. . . .

The president started the meeting with government officials, which had been scheduled for Aug. 7 before the incursion, with a statement about the events in Kursk Province. “As you know, the Kiev regime has launched yet another large-scale provocation and is indiscriminately firing various types of weapons, including missiles, at civilian buildings, residential buildings and ambulances,” he said. He stressed: “Immediately following our meeting, I will meet with the heads of law-enforcement and security agencies, the Defense Ministry, the General Staff, and the FSB – that is, the FSB Border Service.” According to Putin, he will hear “another report from his colleagues on what is happening in Kursk Province.”

In a separate statement, the president also emphasized that the Russian authorities are on standby in Kursk Province. He explained that following his conversation with acting governor Aleksei Smirnov, “instructions were given to a number of civilian agencies to provide the required assistance to residents of the province.” He added, “I will also ask the government to get to work on this without delay,” and appointed First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov to coordinate these activities. Putin did not say anything specific about the military situation or provide any assessments of the clashes.

However, a wave of nascent optimism was already noticeable in the media during the first half of the day. This was not true on the first day after Ukrainian units entered border villages in Kursk Province, when even the most loyal military bloggers either fell into a state of alarmism or ramped up the degree of fearmongering in their reports. The generally reassuring official statements from the Russian Defense Ministry seemed to contribute to this. By the way, the Russian propaganda troops were perplexed to note that their opponents were surprisingly reserved about their successes. One theory was that the Ukrainian media would trumpet their victory later, when they had actual reasons to do so.

After the Russian Defense Ministry began to adjust its press releases toward a greater degree of uncertainty, the Z-channels [the Roman letter Z signifies support for the Ukraine war – Trans.] began to suspect that the situation was not so simple. Even so, on July 7 [sic; Aug. – Trans.], there were no particular changes along the “Kursk front,” which is what the patriotic segment of the Internet calls the actions of Ukrainian troops in the border areas of this Russian region. At least this is indicated by official Russian Defense Ministry data, which do nevertheless confirm the fact that very serious clashes took place. However, according to less official information from military bloggers who are quite loyal to the authorities, the situation is changing – and not necessarily in the Russian Armed Forces’ favor.

However, the “fog of war” in the zone of direct combat will always be a good explanation for any surprises. And most importantly, due to the varying thickness of this fog, it is often difficult to understand if a given turn of events is caused by objective factors or subjective decisions.

This was also clearly confirmed by Putin’s meeting with law-enforcement and security officers, which, by the way, was also given the greatest possible sense of immediacy. For example, as the president introduced Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov to report via video from one of the operational control centers, he [Putin] noted that Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu would speak next about the results of his recent visits to Iran and Azerbaijan.

As for Gerasimov’s speech, it could probably be considered exemplary: “At 5:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, a UAF unit of 1,000 people launched an offensive to seize a section of Sudzha District in Kursk Province. The actions of the border protection units, border guards and reinforcement troops, along with air strikes, missile forces and artillery fire, halted the enemy’s advance into Kursk [Province].” The General Staff also had preliminary combat statistics: “The enemy’s losses amounted to 315, including at least 100 killed and 215 injured. Fifty-four armored vehicles, including seven tanks, were destroyed.” And the main thing in the report was, naturally, the following: “The operation ended in the enemy’s defeat and withdrawal to the state border.”

As if on command – or perhaps indeed on command – after Gerasimov’s report, official military bloggers, citing reliable sources in the person of former associates, began relaying messages in the spirit of “Hurrah! The Swedes, at last, are broken” [a reference to Pushkin’s poem “Poltava” – Trans.]. However, other networks of equally “establishment” bloggers continued to insist that the Kursk city of Sudzha was not just under threat, but under full-scale attacks by Ukraine. At the same time, at the end of the day on Aug. 7, Sudzha Mayor Vitaly Slashchev was officially responding to all media inquiries as follows: “Everything is fine, everything is in order, everything is ours.” Thus, he denied both assumptions and direct claims that the city had either already surrendered to the Ukrainians or that it was about to fall. Nevertheless, a number of authoritative Z-bloggers continued to insist on the latter.

In the evening, there were also comments from US officials who promised to ask Kiev what its plans were for Kursk Province. Meanwhile, the most insightful observers kept asking the same rhetorical question: What was going on with the gas metering station in Sudzha, which is apparently the only remaining active node in the last section of the gas pipeline that runs to Europe through Ukraine? Wouldn’t that be the main reason for the UAF to enter Kursk Province? But no explanations in this regard were forthcoming from the Russian authorities or even their authorized media activists.

At the same time, it was quite obvious that the situation along the “Kursk front” was being leveraged in an internal political struggle. Both the acting governor of Kursk Province and even Russian Federation Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov came under information attacks. The former was vociferously blamed for the alleged confusion about the civilian population’s emergency evacuation from the combat zone and its precautionary evacuation from more remote but no less dangerous areas. There were even accusations that the process of rescuing people had broken down completely, raising the question of how such a government could win elections. The same question was posed with regard to the chief Communist. People said that despite the difficult situation in Kursk Province and other border areas, he was just trying to get the supreme authorities to make decisions favoring his party, thus practically lending the Kiev regime a hand with its “latest provocation.”