To calm Russians worried about the first invasion of their nation since World War II, President Putin reassured on state TV: “Our armed forces are moving forward along the entire line of contact.”

One Kremlin cheerleader, the commander of the Chechen Akhmat special forces, Major General Apti Alaudinov, told Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper: “The uncontrolled ride of the enemy has already been halted. The enemy is already aware that the blitzkrieg that it planned did not work out.”

However, numbers coming from Russia’s Kursk region undermine these claims. In the week after Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia, Russia says it has evacuated 200,000 civilians. 

President Zelensky posted yesterday on X that Ukraine has captured 74 settlements. Directly contradicting his Russian counterpart, Mr. Zelensky said in his own broadcast to Ukrainians: “Our forces continue to advance in the Kursk region.”

In Ukraine’s fastest battlefield gains in almost two years, Ukrainian troops increased their occupied territory in one week to 400 square miles. For this land grab,  Ukrainian casualties are  believed to be less than 1,000.

By contrast, since the start of this year, Russia has conquered 453 square miles of Ukrainian territory. The price has been appallingly high — 233,150 dead and severely wounded Russian soldiers, according to the running tally of Ukraine’s General Staff. Since January 1, Russia has lost three times as many men as the Soviets lost during a decade in Afghanistan. And the Soviet Union had a population twice as large as Russia’s today.

With morale low in Russian ranks, the Ukrainians say they have taken 1,300 Russian soldiers prisoner over the last week in Kursk. Eyeing the potential for freeing Ukrainian POWs, Mr. Zelensky tweeted: “Our state’s ‘exchange fund’ is growing.”

In a sign of frustration, Mr. Putin yesterday called on his former bodyguard to coordinate the defense of Kursk. A former intelligence agent who once defended Putin from a bear on a wilderness trip, Aleksey Dyumin, now has the job of coordinating a bureaucratic jumble of forces in Kursk: border troops, army units, air force units, Rosgvardia national guard troops, Chechen troops loyal to Caucasus chieftain Ramzan Kadyrov, and anti-terrorist squads from the FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. 

This patchwork of forces has prevented Russia from presenting a unified response to the invasion. As for civilians, Kursk residents show no sign of  risking their lives to defend the Putin government.

One goal of the cross-border invasion is to draw Russian troops away from Ukraine’s southeast where they are making incremental advances against Ukrainian defenders. Now, some units appear to be moving north to Kursk, The Wall Street Journal reported last night. Russian units also have been spotted leaving Kaliningrad, Russia’s exclave on the Baltic, reports Lithuanian Defense Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas. 

Just as Russia does not have a bottomless supply of men willing to fight, the nation does not have a bottomless supply of armor. News site BelNovosti reported yesterday hat Moscow has asked Belarus to draw tanks and armored personnel carriers from combat units and send them to Kursk. At the start of the war, this Russian satellite nation drew from warehouse stocks its donations of armor to Russia’s war effort. 

In 30 months of war, Ukraine’s Armed Forces General Staff says that Russia has lost 8,455 tanks and 16,385 armored personnel carriers. That is 57 times more tanks and 12 times more armored personnel carriers than the Soviets lost during their Afghan decade.

Ukraine faces its own challenges. If supply lines stretch more than 25 miles, logistics will get tougher. Reporters on the Russia-Ukraine border say they see industrial excavators and trucks loaded with logs crossing into Russia. This indicates that Ukraine intends to dig and build bomb-resistant bunkers — on Russian land. 

Reports also indicate that Ukraine has already moved some logistical support facilities across the border — fuel dumps, food warehouses, field hospitals and basic repair bases. An exiled former Russian Duma member, Ilya Ponomarev, says that Kyiv has not approved his proposal to set up inside the “liberated zone” a government of “democratic Russia.”

Beyond humiliating Russia’s president and boosting morale at home, Ukraine’s goal may be to create a defensible, 10-mile wide buffer zone. This would help  protect Ukraine’s border regions from Russian mortar and artillery. Immediately after the cross-border incursion started, Ukraine evacuated 20,000 residents from the Sumy region’s border districts.

“The purpose of the operation is to save the lives of our people and protect the territory of Ukraine from Russian attacks,” a Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman, Heorhiy Tykhi, told reporters at Kyiv yesterday. Since last spring, he said, Russia had launched from the Kursk region more than 2,000 strikes — anti-aircraft missiles, artillery, mortars, drones, 255 glide bombs and more than 100 missiles. “Unlike Russia, Ukraine does not need other people’s property. Ukraine is not interested in taking the territory of the Kursk region.” 

Last spring, Russia tried to create a similar buffer zone, about 125 miles south of Kursk, on Ukrainian territory near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Ukraine fought back hard, Russia’s attempt largely ended in failure.

Yesterday at the United Nations, Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, told an informal Security Council gathering: “We haven’t heard a word of condemnation of these actions from the Western sponsors of the Kyiv regime who continue to cover up the abhorrent crimes of their puppet.” 

In response, diplomats from America, Britain, and France spoke in defense of Ukraine. 

Separately, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said yesterday: “Ukraine has every right to wage war in such a way as to paralyze Russia in its aggressive intentions as effectively as possible.”.

Although the invasion apparently required two months of preparation, Western leaders say they were just as blindsided by the move as the Russians were. President Biden told reporters yesterday that for the last week he has been briefed every four or five on the cross-border attack. He said: “It’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.”

On a visit to Kyiv Monday, Senator Graham was blunter. “What do I think about Kursk?” he asked reporters. “Bold, brilliant, beautiful. Keep it up. Putin started this.”