Imagine: you’re struggling in a tough war, you’re not receiving aid, you strain to maintain morale. And the Russians have the initiative in the east, they have taken parts of the Kharkiv region, and they’re about to attack Sumy. You have to do something—something other than endlessly asking your partners for help. So what do you do? Do you tell your people, “Dear Ukrainians, in two weeks, eastern Ukraine will cease to exist”? Sure, you can do that, throw up your hands, but you can also try taking a bold step.
Of course, you’re right to wonder if this action will go down in history as a success or a failure. It’s too early to judge. But I am not preoccupied with historic successes. I’m focussed on the here and now. What we can say, however, is that it has already shown some results. It has slowed down the Russians and forced them to move some of their forces to Kursk, on the order of forty thousand troops. Already, our fighters in the east say that they are being battered less frequently.
I’m not saying it’s a resounding success, or will bring about the end of the war, or the end of Putin. What it has done is show our partners what we’re capable of. We have also shown the Global South that Putin, who claims to have everything under control, in fact does not. And we have shown a very important truth to the Russians. Unfortunately, many of them have their eyes closed, they don’t want to see or hear anything. But some Russian people could not help but notice how Putin did not run to defend his own land. No, instead he wants to first and foremost look after himself, and to finish off Ukraine. His people are not a priority for him.
It has been more than a month since the start of the Kursk operation. We continue to provide food and water to the people in territories we control. These people are free to leave: all the necessary corridors are open, and they could go elsewhere in Russia—but they do not. They don’t understand why Russia didn’t come to help, and left them to survive on their own. And people in Moscow and St. Petersburg—far from Kursk—saw that, if one day the Ukrainian Army showed up there, too, it’s far from certain they would be saved. That’s important. That’s also a part of this operation: long before the war gets to these places, or there’s some other crisis, Russian people should know who they have placed in power for a quarter century, with whom they have thrown in their lot.
This war is being fought not just over territory but over values. But during war, in the name of victory, it may not always be possible to maintain these values as one might in peacetime. Do you feel that there are occasions when these two interests—democratic values and the reality of wartime—can clash, or end up in conflict? The United News TV Marathon, for example, which has been on air since the beginning of the invasion, pulls together multiple television channels to broadcast news about the war and other events in a highly coördinated way.
The truth is that journalists came together because, in the early days of the war, when people feared a total occupation of the country, no one knew what to do. Some people took off in one direction, law enforcement in another. There were even stories about how the President had run off somewhere. It was chaos. The fact is that I was among those who stayed and put an end to that chaos, and I don’t think that has led to anything so terrible. Many would say it’s one of the factors that gave people the strength to fight for their country.
But the centralization of power has a downside.
