One week ago, Ukrainian troops stunned the world by pouring across the border into Kursk, part of the western Russian heartland. This wasn’t a raid like the Free Russia Legion incursion in the nearby Belgorod region of Russia last year. This was a real military operation designed to capture and hold Russian territory. What’s more, the Ukrainian troops went into Russia facing little initial resistance, like a hot knife through butter. 

The blitz recalled Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “March of Fairness” in June 2023, when his mercenary Wagner troops took over Rostov, the southern Russian city from which much of the war against Ukraine was being run, and made it halfway to Moscow without Russian government troops putting up much of a fight. (Prigozhin, you’ll remember, conveniently died in a plane crash last August, most likely after a bomb exploded on board.) So it was shocking to see, this time around, how little the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense seem to have learned from that caper, and how much arrogance seems to underlie some of the decisions to fortify—or not fortify—the Russia-Ukraine border.