Russia has shown its ineptitude – the West must help Ukraine finish the job

Editorial: The shambolic invasion has proved how poorly organised, badly equipped, technologically backwards and hopelessly chaotic the supposed superpower really is

Ukraine has been given more freedom in its defence; it is now allowed to take the war to Russia (AP)

Exactly how serious President Zelensky is about his audacious counteroffensive into Russia isn’t entirely clear, and the same may be said for many of the details of the operation. However, a few salient facts are emerging from the fog of war.

The first is that it is a much more ambitious and well-resourced incursion into genuinely Russian sovereign territory than Ukraine has ever attempted before. Past raids into Russia itself have been chiefly for the purposes of mischief and propaganda. This time, the seizure of a surprising amount of Russian territory around Kursk – the advance is said to go 10km deep – is a much more significant move and goes way beyond its undoubted equal and opposite effects on Russian and Ukrainian morale, respectively.

If the Ukrainians manage to dig in and hang on to at least some of these gains, then Mr Zelensky will have in his pocket a highly valuable territorial bargaining chip in any peace talks that commence later this year or in 2025.

Even if the Russians manage to regroup and drive the Ukrainians back, the episode is a massive embarrassment to Vladimir Putin personally, in the eyes of his people and those around him in the Kremlin. He is losing face. After all, the original invasion 18 months ago, the so-called “special military operation”, was supposed to have boosted Mr Putin’s popularity, and been over in weeks.

By now, Ukraine and its resources “should” be fully under the control of the Kremlin, in true imperial style, and Mr Zelensky living in exile in America. It was not supposed to end up with the Russians losing swathes of their own lands to a Ukrainian counterattack.

The tide of war has turned, if only temporarily, in the most miserable fashion so far as the Russian armed forces are concerned. Footage of the smouldering wreckage of a large Russian military convoy has been uploaded to the internet, and a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian air force base, again in the Kursk region, has reportedly destroyed several dozen Russian fighter planes, helicopters and munitions.

Even if Mr Zelensky’s forces do eventually have to retreat, they will have made a powerful point and set an important precedent, one that will be noted in Western capitals fretting about whether to continue to send expensive armaments to the plucky but outnumbered Ukrainians.

Hitherto, with minor and rare exceptions, Ukrainian military activity has always had to stop dead on the Russian border, due to the sensitivities of Western governments about “escalation” with Moscow. That gave the Russians a huge strategic advantage.

But in the past few months, some Western governments, including the US and the UK, have allowed their equipment to be used on and over Russian soil; and it is inconceivable that this major ground counteroffensive would have taken place without the knowledge of the White House and Nato commanders.

Ukraine has been given more freedom in its defence; it is now allowed to take the war to Russia and pile the pressure onto Mr Putin. Mr Zelensky is making excellent use of it.

So far from Mr Putin being the reincarnation of Peter the Great or Josef Stalin, he is presiding over a long, fruitless war of attrition with a supposedly puny, upstart neighbour, with his war economy running short of labour, high on inflation and starved of technology. He is overly reliant on military assistance from Iran and North Korea – hardly a sign of strength – and on Chinese financial support, with strings attached.

Where once he frightened some in the West with his chilling threats to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for Nato’s support of Ukraine, now his bluff has been called. He is now faced with the deployment of F-16 fighters to complete Ukraine’s technological edge. The prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – and with it an early and advantageous peace settlement for Russia – is also fast receding into the distance because we may be sure that Kamala Harris will be just as determined as President Biden to win this war.

Russia’s response to the surprise Ukrainian attack has been depressingly predictable – it’s bombed a supermarket, killing 11 civilians. It does rather feel that mass bombardment of civilians is all that this supposed superpower has in the way of strategic gambits.

Virtually everything that has happened since the original attack in February 2022 has proved that the Russian armed forces, and particularly the navy, are badly led and organised, poorly equipped, technologically backwards, and hopelessly chaotic when it comes to fighting actual soldiers with a will to defend their homeland.

At the start of this year, the experts were wondering whether the sheer force of Russian troop numbers would overcome their other weaknesses and eventually crack Ukraine’s resistance. The last few days have proved there is still much for Ukraine to fight for, and every reason for the West to give Mr Zelensky the tools to finish the job.