Wars end long before armistices are signed. A war’s end, after all, is a matter of will, of spirit—and popular will is only haltingly, grudgingly reflected in the political machinery of peace talks.
Though it may seem astonishingly premature to say so, my impression after returning from the Russian front is that the war in Ukraine is over and that the powers that be haven’t realized it yet. In the Kursk salient, at least, I can personally attest to the eerie, almost surreal inversion of spirits between the people of Ukraine and Russia. The moral scales have now firmly settled on the side of the Ukrainian defenders, and it is far likelier that Russia itself splinters into its constituent republics than that Ukraine falls to its erstwhile invaders.
I was in Irpin and Bucha nearly three years ago, while they were still smoldering from Russian occupation. The mood then, as we pulled burned bodies with bound hands from the tree lines, was a tragedy-enforced grim determination. Evidence of Ukrainian resistance was everywhere: crates of Molotov cocktails on street corners, invective-laced messages scrawled on storefronts, spent shell casings piled behind makeshift barriers against the intruders—all of it unequivocally pointing to a deep-seated resolve.
In Russia today, it is entirely different—it is a moral vacuum. Its citizens in Kursk fled the Ukrainian advance like smoke in the wind, leaving homes and possessions without so much as a whimper. I saw exactly one makeshift roadblock, consisting of a few chairs and a rake. Russian civil resistance is (or was) desultory at best. The comparison is stark: Despite Russia’s enormous advantages in mass and material, the will to fight is fundamentally absent.
Ukrainian morale, meanwhile, is topping the charts—bordering on euphoria even. A fervent passion for taking the fight to their enemies has infected the front and operations are conducted amid a general scrum of units desperate to be part of the action. A sense of Wild West–like possibility draws a cast of aggressive fighters, many eagerly engaging in their own semiprivate pirate operations in the free-for-all. This does not necessarily imply a lack of Ukrainian command and control, only that a willingness to take the fight into Russia is pervasive—the Ukrainian armed forces are like a spirited charger, barely reined in. The ambiance is almost party-like—battle-hardened and battle-hungry troops alike joke and banter at the last gas station before the Russian border, glad and relieved to be free of the grinding stalemate of the last months as they race toward the expanding front.
In Russia meanwhile, there is silence. Of the tiny handful of remaining civilians in the Kursk area, some eagerly interact with the occupiers while the rest furtively attend to their habitual routines. One woman we spoke to turned down an offer of Ukrainian cash (a gift from my daughter), asking bitterly, “And where would I spend that?” Dogs and cats wander the streets forlornly, while herds of sheep move in from the countryside to gorge on the town’s unharvested fruit trees.
Those Russians left behind engage in petty low-grade looting of their former neighbors’ homes. The overriding sense is one of poverty—physical as well as moral—a kind of community-wide bankruptcy. A faded plaque on a home proclaimed a “Veteran of the Great Patriotic War” once lived there, and my Ukrainian comrade noted how sadly decrepit his home was. “Russians are known for brutalizing their neighbors,” he said, “but it is the Russians themselves who are the most brutalized of all because they do it to themselves.”
Ukrainian occupiers, for their part, are too busy dashing into and through these small Russian towns to bother much with the spoils of war. Moreover, the comparatively wealthy Ukrainian forces laugh at the grimy and obsolete possessions of their neighbors—continually surprised at the degree of pervasive shortage. Ukrainian soldiers instead feed the abandoned dogs, then move quickly onward to press their advantage at the far fringes of the active front line.
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The action in Kursk is a reminder to Westerners that the Russian behemoth is far from a monolithic, integrated federation. It is instead a tentative, demoralized, loosely adhered tissue of a nation, held together primarily through fear and learned dependence on the state. Separatist sentiment, never fully extinguished, is rising rapidly in regions like Chechnya and Karelia and across some 85 other autonomous regions spanning 11 time zones, most of which have long traditions of independence.
Leo Tolstoy famously wrote of the Russian army: “This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland—words that have been so much misused!—nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.” Things have not appreciably improved since.
Russia’s incursion into Ukraine has simply run out of moral impetus. It has the resources, of course, to engage in a substantial amount of lingering mayhem. No doubt it will. But the Ukrainians I’ve met simply cannot envisage a scenario in which they lose. They are prepared to fight in the streets to the last man, and their commitment to freedom is overwhelming. In contrast to the current Russian mood, which seems largely to be one of confused apathy, Ukrainians have the decided advantage.
Wars are won in the heart of a people, not through the rational calculations of military planners. While there is momentum left in the Russian war machine, it is only a matter of time before reality sinks in that the Russian heart is not in this fight. Whether the war ends in the shattering of its fragile federation or in some half-hearted armistice measures to mitigate its appalling losses, Russia simply cannot go on. The Kursk offensive, for all its complexities and contradictions, has, if nothing else, opened a clear window into the popular wills of each side.
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