The Real Kursk Question: Why Aren’t Russians Demanding War to Drive Ukrainian Forces Out?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 11 – Aleksandr Morozov, head of the Free Russia Institute based in Vilnius, says that the Ukrainian advance into Russia’s Kursk Oblast has many interesting aspects but perhaps the most intriguing of these is that “it turned out that Putin can’t declare war (when enemy troops are already on Russian territory. That means he can't do it at all.”

            The Russian political scientist’s observation, of course, reflects the situation Putin has created for himself by calling his invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation” rather than the war of aggression it is (echofm.online/opinions/mnogo-interesnogo-po-itogam-chetyreh-dnej)..

            But the Kremlin leader’s failure to declare war when the troops of another country have advanced into Russian territory raises a larger and even more serious question: why aren’t Russians en masse demanding that he declare war and mobilize all the forces of the country to drive the foreign forces out?

            It is difficult to imagine the population of any other country suffering an invasion and not making such a demand; and indeed, it is impossible to identify any other event in Russian history where the population did not respond to an invasion with a wave of patriotic anger that helped the government mobilize to drive the invaders out.

            That Russians aren’t demanding such a war now may reflect just how much Putin has intimidated them by his repression. But at the very least, the failure of Russians to respond should be sparking discussions about what is wrong with Russians under Putin that has kept them quiet when others or themselves in a similar situation would have behaved differently.

            And it is likely that the answer to that question once it is discovered will play a larger role in the future of the Russian Federation than any Ukrainian advance into Russia, however deep it may go because this absence of a response suggests that under Putin, the Russian people have been stripped of one of the qualities that had made them so heroic in the past.