Putin’s weak response to Ukraine’s advance on Russian soil appears to be rooted in a persistent fatal flaw

• Russia’s weak response in Kursk shows Putin’s leadership still has a major flaw
• Russia’s response was slow, allowing Ukraine to take territory, and it hasn’t put a general in charge.
• Putin doesn’t want a situation where “any general could claim credit for being the victor,” an expert told BI.

Russia’s weak response to Ukraine’s assault into Russian territory is partly due to a persistent flaw in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, a warfare expert told Business Insider.

Ukraine launched a surprise attack on Russia’s Kursk region in early August and, by late September, said it controlled more than 500 square miles. Russia has not taken any significant swathe of territory back.

Michael Bohnert, an analyst at RAND Corporation, told BI that with the way Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded, not even appointing a general to take charge of what is clearly a military situation rather than a domestic security matter, “there is, I think, an element of he doesn’t want to make anything where any general could claim credit for being the victor.”

Russia’s response to Ukraine’s attack has not been highly effective. Ukrainian troops said they were first able to cross into Kursk easily, and they then made rapid progress.

And while Ukraine’s progress has dramatically slowed as Russia has stiffened its resistance, Russia has only been able to take back some villages.

Russia’s response to Ukraine’s attack on Russian soil was decidedly slow. Putin initially froze as he has in other crises, but Moscow eventually put the FSB — Russia’s primary security and intelligence agency — in charge, leading a host of other groups. War experts told BI that it was a surprising move that showed Russia had not fixed long-standing issues with command and control. And, Bohnert said, those security forces are “subordinate to Putin.”

Putin in charge

The Russian president has played an unusually direct role in leading the war in Ukraine, at times giving orders himself. US intelligence said in 2022 that Putin was giving orders directly to his generals and that that was causing confusion for his military leadership. This isn’t how political leaders typically handle military operations.

Bohnert said Putin not wanting to give generals credit fit with his behavior throughout his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022. “Dictators don’t like anyone coming around that looks like the next strong man,” he said.

That logic could be seen in the start of Russia’s invasion when Russia failed to quickly seize all of Ukraine and instead was forced to fight in the east, Bohnert said.

He said that at the start of the invasion, there were multiple military officials in charge of different sectors “and there was no coordination other than Putin. What people don’t realize is that was by design. Because it’s very clear Putin never wanted to give any general credit for winning the war in Ukraine.”

US officials told The New York Times that at the start of the invasion, there was no central war commander on the ground in Ukraine, and decisions were instead made from Moscow.

Weeks after the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia put Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov in charge of operations in Ukraine. He was fired from the role weeks later, with the UK Ministry of Defense saying it was highly likely because of the military’s “poor performance.”

Multiple top Russian generals have been arrested during this war on various charges, including accepting bribes.

Putin’s motives for these arrests are unconfirmed. But The Moscow Times reported in May that the FSB was going after them with the Kremlin’s approval so that blame could be assigned for Russia’s invasion going badly and to take control of the Russian army’s huge budget.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, a historian and author on Russian history, wrote in Foreign Policy last year that “the failure to promote an effective general to fight the Ukraine war is one of Putin’s most egregious lapses. Indeed, one of the chief duties of the war leader is to select generals who can win victories and remove those who can’t.”

He added that “Putin has either never found that talented general, or more likely, so fears the threat of one that he has preferred stalemate to the peril of a victory won by someone else.”

A broken culture

Experts have said that Putin’s choices often do not make sense from a military perspective and instead seem focused on preserving his political power.

George Barros, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War think tank, told BI that “Putin at every junction now continues to do what is politically expedient and militarily stupid,” including not pursuing another full-scale mobilization of troops or declaring a move like martial law to deal with the Kursk response.

Experts in Russian politics have said that the firings of Russian officials are intended to send a message about the risks of consolidating too much power. Some told Newsweek in April that the arrest of the deputy defense minister earlier this year might have been meant as a warning to then-defense minister Sergei Shoigu about becoming too powerful.

The pattern can be seen in authoritarian regimes like Putin’s more generally, Bohnert said.

He said that for military officials, “that’s a fact of any sort of authoritarian or totalitarian regime, where you don’t want to look too capable. You always want to be mediocre if you’re not the dictator.” That culture, he said, “is a way of a dictator preventing someone from looking really, really capable.”

He said that in this environment, “you have plenty of people to blame, but no one to take credit.”