Ukraine has launched occasional smash-and-grab raids on Russia over the last two and a half years, but this attack is on another scale entirely — it is a bona fide invasion. Ukrainians are justifiably cock-a-hoop. Putin’s three-day war to conquer their country has resulted in what many commentators have claimed is the first invasion of Russia since the Second World War. The mood in ruling Russian circles could, meanwhile, hardly be bleaker. Moscow is struggling with a spluttering economy and a growing military recruitment problem — despite offering increasingly large cash bonuses to recruits, the number of newcomers is still matched by the number of casualties. Ukraine’s “terrorist” attack on Kursk, as the Kremlin is labelling it, adds more fuel to these fires. It is the most serious issue that Vladimir Putin has faced since February 2022.

Putin has a knack of escaping dire situations with his reputation intact. If we cast our minds back to his first days in power, we are reminded that his Russia has been marched on before — and that the president responded mercilessly. Will he do the same this time?

Twenty-five years before Ukrainian troops crossed the border on 6 August, the militant Shamil Basayev led roughly 2,000 men from Chechnya — legally a part of Russia but de facto independent since Boris Yeltsin’s embarrassing failure to suppress the territory in a war that ended in 1996 — into Russia’s Dagestan region. The troops killed Russian border guards, captured several settlements and declared an independent state. Basayev’s men would remain in Dagestan for a month before Moscow’s armed forces finally dislodged them. After the humiliations of the Nineties, Russia’s superpower status had been replaced by bankruptcy, the loss of empire and now the inability to militarily control its own territory.

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Three days after Basayev’s attack on Dagestan, Putin was appointed Prime Minister of Russia. The attack was just what the new man in the Kremlin needed to underscore the difference between him and his impotent post-Soviet predecessors: a casus belli to win back Dagestan, re-invade Chechnya, make Russia whole again, and thus prove that a new leader would usher in an era of safety, stability and national pride.

Putin’s rhetoric in 1999 was, if not quite that of a firebrand, then certainly uncompromising. In September of that year, as the war in Dagestan turned into a war in Chechnya, and the war in Chechnya led to terrorist attacks on Moscow and other Russian cities, Putin declared: “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. You will forgive me, but if we catch them on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the outhouse.” Within five years, the Chechen capital, Grozny, had been obliterated and 50,000 Chechen civilians were dead. Putin’s forces had piloted the scorched earth form of warfare that they have recently reprised in Ukraine. When it came to Russia’s “stability”, any means justified the ends.

The Chechen insurgency took half a decade to finally subdue, but the war made Putin’s name as somebody who would keep Russia safe, no matter the cost. In the minds of Russians, the war was a vital part of kickstarting a decade of unprecedented wealth and success. National humiliation was replaced by national pride.

Can Putin, now an ageing incumbent, repeat the trick? Will the Kursk incursion be the “proof” that Russia needs to be “saved” from Ukraine — drawing international support? Threading such a fine-eyed needle will be tough for Putin. At the moment, Russian troops seem to be making no headway in responding to a well-equipped and trained Ukrainian army. The local population of Kursk are fleeing the invaders. Russians are expecting Putin to solve the problem, but few are leaping at the chance to help: only the promise of earning outlandish sums of money — between $1,600-$4,000 — for digging defensive trenches is drawing them in. Young conscripts, who are being deployed en masse for the first time in this war, seem more likely to surrender than to throw themselves into battle. But withdrawing experienced troops from occupied Ukraine to send to Kursk risks Putin’s gains after years of war.

Putin’s own behaviour this week stands in marked contrast to that of the arriviste of 1999. His response to the invasion — a mere “provocation” staged by a handful of “saboteurs” — has been conducted from the confines of the Kremlin. Publicly at least, it has been restricted to a single televised Security Council meeting. During this session with regional governors, Putin appeared either short tempered, cutting one politician short, or indifferent, as he listened to reports of evacuations and military preparations. His own words were limited to vague affirmations that something would be done: “We must assess the developments unfolding there, and we will offer our evaluation.” Unlike in 1999, Putin seems unwilling to associate himself with the invasion, and therefore unable to inspire the masses as he then did. Putin appears as impotent as Boris Yeltsin in 1999, when he meekly handed the baton over to his young successor.

Yet this apparent unwillingness to take the lead does not mean that Putin is helpless. In the early 2000s, the Chechen war was characterised by similar difficulties with conscription, bungling military failures and immense internal corruption. At times, the president was deluged with questions about his slowness to act. “Our army”, he explained, “is strong enough to “go all the way through [Chechnya] and back again. But that’s not the point. The point is to totally destroy the terrorists’ bases.” In the end, Putin waited for the moment to strike, then used every military means at his disposal to win. He might do the same again today. The question is: would Putin be willing to annihilate parts of Kursk to win back his territory? With his legacy at risk, he may yet restore his reputation as a man willing to sacrifice anything for victory.

Putin and his propaganda machine would seem to be carrying on as normal, referring in typical Moscow Newspeak to the advance as a “terrorist attack” or “provocation”, or even merely as “the events in Kursk”, and launching a media blitz to reassure Russians that they are in control. But it is obvious to everyone, including the Russian people themselves, that things are different this time — more threatening even than the short-lived Wagner mutiny, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, in July 2023. Ukraine has not only turned the tables on Moscow, but has fundamentally altered the rules of the game, extending the frontline to include the entire Russo-Ukrainian border — areas where Ukrainian forces can strike decisively at Russia’s soft underbelly. Now, Russia is being forced to defend its own sovereignty too.

Something else, however, is happening on the home front that may be even more dangerous. As the illusion of security and disconnect from the war in Ukraine disintegrates for those Russians living in Kursk, residents across the country’s southwestern border are feeling increasingly abandoned by the Russian state itself. Some are even holding Putin personally responsible. At the same time, dissatisfaction with Russia’s military brass, which in part fuelled Prigozhin’s insurrection last year, is continuing to escalate within the country’s nationalistic military blogosphere. Influential voices are furious not just with the military’s handling of the crisis in Kursk, but also with the state media’s ongoing obfuscation of the realities on the ground.

A growing realisation is setting in that these lies from the Russian establishment have led to a real and immediate threat to Russian national security. And for Putin to have allowed such a threat to continue unabated for over a week undermines the central guarantee he had made to the people about his war in Ukraine from the start: rebuilding Russia’s imperial sphere of influence and keeping Nato at bay would make the Russian heartland safer and more prosperous.

The Kursk incursion won’t convince Russians that the war in Ukraine was a bad idea — that ship has long sailed. But it may finally convince a growing number of Russians that the people running the show in Moscow are no longer up to the task of executing the national vision that Putin set in motion in 2022.

So far, it appears locals from Sudzha, the largest town captured by Ukraine in Kursk, have taken this red pill. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, tell your officials responsible for truthful information to show the real situation,” said a Sudzha resident in a video addressed to Putin and posted on Telegram before the town was fully captured by Ukraine. The residents complained about the wholesale downplaying of the realities in Kursk even as the town was on the brink of conquest by Ukraine. “These lies are causing civilians to die.”

Russia’s military bloggers echoed such sentiments.

“We knew that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would go to Kursk Oblast,” wrote Anastasia Kashevarova, an influential blogger with over 245,000 subscribers. “We knew everything as usual, the guys from the fields reported it, but the higher-ups did nothing.”

Another blogger writing under the pseudonym Philologist in Ambush went further, claiming that the Russian military’s concealment of the facts “shows a desire to cover up the reputational damage to the top military leadership… by all possible means”, calling out “the biased media propaganda, which continues to serve not the national interests of Russia”.

Explosive as such statements may seem, this is not the first time that pro-war bloggers have attacked the Russian Ministry of Defence and the country’s military leaders. But they do show that dissatisfaction with not just the army but also the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is reaching a boiling point. It may even be spreading beyond the usual cadre of online hyper-nationalists.

As far away as Russia’s Arctic Coast, ordinary people have started feeling the impact of Ukraine’s incursion; in Murmansk, parents of recently conscripted young men are petitioning Putin to stop their sons from being sent to fight in Kursk, claiming they were promised that such deployments wouldn’t take place. Meanwhile in Perm, on the edge of Siberia, a mother whose son had gone missing after being captured by Ukrainian forces complained on Facebook that military officials lied about his whereabouts.

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Russians are of course no strangers to being deceived and treated with contempt by their own government. But, when the safety of their own children is at stake, their veil of tolerance will inevitably begin to break down. This is especially the case given that the story they’ve been sold for years by Putin and his circle about Russia as the eternally victorious bulwark against foreign invasion has now been irrevocably tarnished. The legacy of the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia, forms the cornerstone of Putinism, and the war in Ukraine has always been presented as an extension of this legacy by the Kremlin.

The historical implications of Ukraine’s violation of Russian territorial integrity at Kursk — which, incidentally, is also where the largest tank battle in history was fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — hasn’t been lost on Russia’s domestic observers. This is the first time that foreign troops have occupied Russian territory since the Great Patriotic War, and high-profile figures like media personality Andrei Medvedev were quick to compare the incursion to the start of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in dodging blame for the failures of his state through a “good tsar, bad boyars” approach — he has been able to shift the blame for the war’s shortcomings to his generals, ministers, and other lower-level officials. But it is Putin who is ultimately the face of the Russia that has emerged since 2022, and it is he who declared the “special military operation”. Now, the war has come back to bite him where it hurts. There is a 1,000 square kilometre hole in his public image as the inheritor of Russia’s triumph in the Great Patriotic War, and his own credibility is on the line.

Putin may well survive to fight another day after this crisis as he did in the wake of the Wagner uprising, when he shuffled some chairs in the Ministry of Defence, eliminated Prigozhin, defanged the group, and moved on. But whereas Prigozhin’s insurrection was stopped in its tracks after 24 hours, the same isn’t the case in Kursk. Ukrainian forces have started digging in and building trenches, and, according to one Russian analyst, it could take Russia up to a year to win back control over the territory under Ukrainian occupation.

What Putin has tried to present as a mere inconvenience could balloon into the most significant challenge to his legacy. Russia’s militant nationalists may not forgive him this time around — and ordinary Russians may well follow suit.