Why Ukraine Invaded Russia – FPIF

Originally published in Hankyoreh.

Russia has more arms and more soldiers. It is spending more than twice as much as Ukraine on the military. It has managed to survive the world’s economic sanctions. It has plenty of energy, compared with Ukraine, which is facing a very cold winter as a result of Russian attacks on critical energy infrastructure. And Russian leader Vladimir Putin has an approval rating of about 85 percent.

Yet, with all of those advantages, Putin seems to be making one error after another. At some point, the Russian people must begin to ask themselves: is this guy really in control of the country?

The first disaster was, of course, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which immediately met with Ukrainian resistance and which quickly suffered from outdated equipment and lapses of judgment. What Putin thought would be a cakewalk turned into a series of embarrassing losses of soldiers and military hardware.

The second disaster came after Ukraine’s counteroffensive in autumn 2022, which pushed Russian troops out of a large swath of occupied territory.

Then came the military coup by the Wagner Group led by erstwhile Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin. The rebellion began in plain sight with Prigozhin making his dissatisfaction abundantly clear in public statements via Telegram. Yet Putin was slow to take the threat seriously up until the moment that Prigozhin’s forces seized some towns in southern Russia and began a march on Moscow.

In March 2024, Moscow suffered a major terrorist attack when Islamic State militants struck the Crocus concert venue, killing over 140 people. Such attacks are, by their nature, surprises—so, perhaps the Kremlin can’t be blamed for being unprepared. But in fact, Putin’s government had received very precise intelligence from both the United States and Iran about the likelihood of a terrorist incident on Russian soil.

And now, Russia has been invaded for the first time since World War II. In July, Ukraine launched an attack in the Kursk region of Russia. It had determined that the border was only lightly defended, that Russia hadn’t heavily mined the area or installed significant anti-tank barriers. In a matter of weeks, Ukraine occupied 500 square miles and 100 settlements. An astonishing 130,000 Russians have been evacuated from the region.

And yet, despite the historic nature of this intervention, the Kremlin’s response has been muted. Putin has tried to minimize the operation, calling it an act of terrorism. He has not redirected sufficient military force to beat back the Ukrainian invaders. He has continued to pound areas of Ukraine in order to fulfill his promise of controlling the entire Donbas region.

Obviously, given the sheer quantity of bombs that Russia is dropping on Ukrainian cities and the number of soldiers that it is throwing into battle in “meat-grinder” tactics, the Russian army is not a paper tiger. But it is also clear that all the money that Russia is spending on the military, on intelligence, and on securing the border is not reaching its intended recipients.

Putin has tried to rectify the situation by arresting top military officials for corruption. He even replaced the minister of defense with an economist, which speaks to the importance to the Kremlin of balancing the military books.

Putin is also very good at silencing his critics. Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane crash. Top dissident Alexei Navalny died under mysterious conditions in a Siberian prison. A Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine died earlier this year in Spain, shot to death in mysterious circumstances.

What Putin isn’t very good at is the big stuff—winning a war against a neighboring country, preventing corruption from hollowing out his army, making economic decisions that will make Russia a prosperous country in the future. Given his background in the intelligence services, Putin has demonstrated that he excels at “dirty tricks.” He’s good at intimidating people. In terms of making decisions that benefit the country in the long run, however, he’s not a good leader.

Ukraine knows that even with weapons supplied by the United States, European Union, and others, it will have difficulty dislodging Russian forces from the Donbas and Crimea. It will have a lot of difficulty holding onto the Russian land it has occupied near Kursk, once Putin decides to redeploy enough forces to overwhelm the Ukrainians. And even if the Ukrainian army manages to achieve a miracle by routing Russian forces and reestablishing Ukraine’s pre-2014 boundaries, a Russia controlled by Vladimir Putin will continue to pose a threat.

Putin is not young, at 70 years old, but he could control Russia for another decade. Ukraine can’t fight a war like this for another 10 years.

What it can do is somehow persuade the Russian populace that they have a lousy leader. That’s one of the reasons it invaded the Kursk region. It is why Ukrainian drones continue to strike at key military and energy installations inside Russia. It is why Kyiv has effectively neutralized Crimea militarily and made it less of a tourist destination for Russians eager to vacation on the Black Sea.

The Ukrainian military has a message for the Russian people: your leader is not protecting you.

It’s one thing to send a message. It’s another for the message to be received. It’s hard to know what Russians are really thinking or what they’re writing to each other on encrypted platforms. There is certainly a lot of anger in Russia—in outlying provinces over their disproportionate contribution of conscripts, by mothers over the loss of their sons, by average people over instances of gross corruption—but it hasn’t so far coalesced into a mass movement.

Still, this rising anger might just be enough to persuade a broad middle stratum of the Russian elite that Putin is no longer useful. This wavering class may be susceptible to the argument that Putin has lost Russia too much in the way of lives and money, and that he must be replaced by a more pragmatic leader.

That’s Ukraine’s game plan. It will continue to bring the war to Russia in the hopes that the next tactical error Putin makes will be his last.