President Zelensky for the first time has acknowledged that his troops invaded Russia. He said the operation is designed “to restore justice.”

“Ukraine is proving that it can indeed restore justice and is ensuring the exact kind of pressure that is needed — pressure on the aggressor,” he said in an address to the nation Saturday night. This summer, Kursk, the Russian region under Ukrainian attack, launched 2,000 cross-border attacks against Ukraine. He said: “Artillery, mortars, drones. We also record missile strikes —  and each such strike deserves a fair response.”

As the Ukrainian assault completes its first week today, it is clear that the operation is far larger than original hazy reports. Involved are five brigades, making for a total of 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers inside Russia and supporting from Ukraine’s neighboring Sumy region. Ukrainian armor and foot soldiers broke through two defensive lines constructed over two years for $170 million, reports a Russian investigative site, Agentstvo.

Moving quickly, the Ukrainians captured as many as 1,000 Russian soldiers and now control about 400 square miles of Russian territory. This is about the size of Westchester County, NY.

Again and again, the Ukrainians proved to be adept at small unit warfare. In contrast, the Russian Army showed feet of clay. On two occasions, Russian generals repeated a mistake they made two and a half years ago in their assaults on Kyiv: moving in columns. In two attacks since Friday, Ukrainian artillery took out two Russian reinforcement columns, one of T-80 tanks on trailer trucks, the other of over a dozen trucks filled with soldiers.

In the latter attack, outside the district capital of Rylsk, videos show destroyed trucks filled with hundreds of dead Russian soldiers. Using a Lord of the Rings term popular in Ukraine, the Khorne drone group of Ukraine’s 116th Mechanized Brigade, reports the toll as “490 killed Orcs.” This massacre enraged Russia’s military  bloggers. One said that the officer who gave the order for troops to move in exposed columns in a war zone should be “shot.”

Ukraine’s goal for its cross-border incursion remains unclear. However, it is clear they plan to stay. Photo analysis shows that both sides are using industrial excavators to dig trenches. “Every day the Russians don’t counterattack is a day the Ukrainians dig in deeper,” David Axe, co-founder of the news site War is Boring, wrote yesterday for his column in Forbes.

“The worst thing that can happen is a transition of trench warfare in the Kursk Region,” Russian military blogger Aleksandr Kharchenko posted  yesterday. “Once the enemy picks up shovels, in two days it will be just as difficult to take the forest stands as it was near Avdiivka,” he wrote. In February, the Russian Army won that battle, but only after six months of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties.

A member of the Russian Duma, Andrei Gurulyov, a retired Army officer, warned Russians over the weekend not to expect a quick victory over Ukrainian forces in Kursk. Acknowledging that Ukraine invested major planning and resources for the offensive, he predicted that it would take a prolonged effort to force them back across the border. He asked on Telegram:  “If the Ukrainian Armed Forces spent two months preparing for this, how did we miss it?”

Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said yesterday that the incursion  made “no sense from a military point of view.” She said it had the “sole purpose of intimidating the civilian population of Russia.”

Beyond the military challenge, the Ukrainian invasion presents President Putin with the biggest political challenge since Yevgeny Prigozhin took up arms in a failed mutiny one year ago. In that rebellion, Prigozhin’s Wagner troops took over a major city, Rostov, and drove halfway to Moscow without encountering resistance.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, civilians protested against Russian troops, often calling them ‘Orcs’ to their faces. In Kursk, the protests have been by civilians complaining that local authorities did not charter buses to evacuate them fast enough. Russia’s state news agency, TASS, reported yesterday that 84,000 Russians were evacuated ahead of the Ukrainian army’s advance. Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko says 69 civilians have been injured and hospitalized due to Ukraine’s attacks in Kursk region.

There are no reports of civilians demonstrating in favor of the Putin government. Instead Russians are subjected to a series of selfies by Ukrainian soldiers, images that pop the illusion that Putin can protect his people. There are two videos of Ukrainian soldiers taking down Russian flags and replacing them with Ukrainian flags. In one, a soldier wipes the mud off his boot with a Russian flag.

In other videos, Ukrainians pose in front highly recognizable Russian icons — a Russian Post office, a Gazprom office, a Russian supermarket, and a car with Russian license plates. Online, there are at least six videos of groups of blindfolded Russian POWs, apparently taken in Kursk. In one video, a Ukrainian soldier torches a Communist-era red flag. This is a reminder that Russia and Belarus never went through the decommunization process of the other 13 republics of the Soviet Union. 

In another, a bearded, sandy-haired Ukrainian soldier cheerfully walks through a wheat field, and sends a message home: “We are already in Russia — walking.”

Last week, Russia slowed downloading speeds for YouTube and imposed curbs on the Signal messaging service. However, some damaging images from Kursk are expected to reach the Russian population.

Over the weekend, a Ukrainian security official in Kyiv cited political destabilization as one goal of the operation. He told AFP: “We are on the offensive. The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses, and to destabilize the situation in Russia as they are unable to protect their own border.”

From London, Kremlin critic Bill Browder tells Times Radio of Ukraine’s occupation of Russian land: “This is a dramatic development, and something which both symbolically and militarily really has huge implications. Symbolically, this makes Putin look weak.”

“This is the war he started, which has now bitten off a piece of Russia. And, depending on how this plays out, how long [Ukraine] can hold the territory, can they get more territory, it’s even more humiliating for Putin,” said Mr. Browder, who once was the largest foreign investor in Russia.From Berlin, Marcus Faber, who took over Thursday as head of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee, posted on X: “The advance shows the Russian population that their dictator has nothing under control and that the military leadership is overwhelmed. A good basis for peace negotiations with Putin’s successor. And negotiations with Putin before the International Criminal Court.”