by Stefano Caprio

Rereading its long history, the conquest of the “thousand square kilometers” of the Kursk region by the Ukrainian army also has symbolic significance, even before the military or diplomatic gains that might result. It is a way of reaffirming Kiev's historic superiority over Moscow. Just as the Russians open a grand new complex in Sevastopol in Crimea.

As is well known, the term “Ukrainian” means “border,” and the surprising advance of Kiev troops into the Kursk region shifts this boundary eastward, once again redefining the relationship between the two souls of ancient Rus', Russia and contemporary Ukraine.

In fact, there is no real geographic boundary between these two parts of the Russian world, except for the Dnepr River, which from Kiev to Kherson expresses that transition that generated the very historical nature of the Russians, who through the rivers sought to connect with European kingdoms and break away from their Asian roots, bouncing back historically from both sides of Eurasia.

Kursk was an older principality than Moscow, dating back to the late 11th century, when in 1095 it was granted to Izjaslav, the son of the Grand Duke of Kiev Vladimir “the Monomachus,” who considered himself heir to the Byzantine emperors having married one of their daughters, and was the last monarch of Kievan Rus' to somehow hold together all the territories disputed by sons and grandsons.

Of the “second Vladimir,” to whom was dedicated the city that became the capital for a few decades, usurping the power of Kiev itself, we are reminded of a text called Poučenie, “Admonition,” which in the early twelfth century pleaded, with copious biblical quotations, all other princes to put an end to the infighting, in Old Russian i meždousobnja brani, which characterized the life of the ancient Russian state and is still remembered in the invocations of the Slavic-ecclesiastical liturgy as one of the main evils for which to ask God for mercy and forgiveness.

The struggle for Kursk is recorded in the ancient Chronicle of Nestor as the war between the Monomakhovy and the Mstislavoviči, the heirs of two branches of the ancient family of Kievan rulers, and turned between 1183 and 1185 into the campaign against enemies from across the Volga River, the Polovtsy later reabsorbed by the Tatar-Mongols.

Prince Vsevolod of Kursk joined the Prince of Novgorod, Igor Svyatoslavič, in a battle that could have united all the families fighting against the external enemy, but ended in tragic defeat.

This event was extolled by the poem of Igor's Song of the Host, the greatest masterpiece of Kievan Rus' literature, in which defeat is transformed into a promise of rebirth, calling nature, the ancient pagan gods, and the entire Russian people to unite to rediscover their souls, closing finally with the consecration of Rus' to the Mother of God, in the pagan and Christian “double faith” that characterized these legendary centuries to which Russia today seeks to rediscover itself, ending up clashing again with its own divisions and contradictions.

Kursk was one of the last bastions in the face of the Tatar advance, achieving a partial victory at the Battle of Kalka in 1223, only to be overwhelmed by the armies of Khan Batyj in 1239, just before the destruction of Kiev itself. I

ts territory continued to be called the “principality of Kursk,” although there was no longer any prince, remaining at the disposal of all adventurers from the Polish-Lithuanian West and East of the new capital that was being formed at those junctures by exploiting friendship with the Tatars, that Moscow founded in 1147 and 500 kilometers away from Kursk, which until 1300 had remained a mere post station of the northernmost trades, on the Moskva River.

Redemption came in the early 14th century, with singular historical analogy thanks to the dynasty known as Putivl, the title of a stronghold similar to the name of the current president of Russia, for whom Putin means “He who is on the road.” For three centuries the principality of Kursk remained part of the kingdom of Lithuania, only to be reabsorbed into the seventeenth-century Russia of the tsars along with Kiev.

The conquest of the “thousand square kilometers” of the Kursk region by the Ukrainian army thus takes on a clear symbolic significance, even before the military or diplomatic gains that might result, reaffirming Kiev's historic superiority over Moscow, reaffirmed in recent days at the celebration of the Baptism of Ancient Rus'.

It is a “moral victory” that drags the short blanket of the common lodge of territories toward Ukraine, now supported by Europe and America, as once by Lithuania and Poland, and by the way it is connected, again symbolically, to the tragedy of the K-141 Kursk submarine, which sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000 with 107 casualties of the entire crew, right at the beginning of the reign of Czar Putin.

As Ukrainian President Zelenskyj sarcastically commented, “for Putin everything begins and everything ends with Kursk.” As, moreover, several observers, such as polit-technologist Abbas Galljamov, Putin's former adviser now in exile, point out, it is not only a knockout move in “informational and psychological warfare,” but also has great practical significance, showing the whole “war-weary” world that exterminated Russia is at bottom a country with no real defense, today as in the days of the polovtsy, Tatars and infighting.

By concentrating on the Donbass, the Russians have left the borders of Kursk, Belgorod, Bryansk and other southern areas uncovered, changing the picture painted by Putinian propaganda that preaches perpetual and universal war, without taking into account its own endemic fragility, that of a territory too vast for a people though aggressive and proud, but in fact not as dominant as it would like to be in its imperial aspirations.

The Russians number just over 140 million (at least 30 of whom are of other ethnicity) on an expanse as vast as one-sixth of the landmass, four times larger than China and India, home to populations ten times larger, and in the West it must face half a billion Europeans, lined up to defend the 40 million Ukrainians, perhaps not enough to overpower Moscow's army, but more than enough to bring the conflict back to the ancient meždousobnja tracks.

Galljamov goes back even before the history of Rus', recalling “the wars of the Scythians,” the mythical peoples who for the ancient Romans summed up all threats from the East.

Back then, the Asiatic barbarians would lash out against one part or another of the empire, only to have to retreat and settle on limited areas, never managing to take control of the Caucasus or the Black Sea, where the battles of those times took place, and where those contradictions are repeated today.

The Ukrainians are fighting not so much to conquer territory, but to cut off the Russians in crucial areas, perhaps by taking control of power or nuclear plants, bridges and road junctions, considering the Donbass itself only a “corridor to Crimea and the Black Sea,” from where Putin would like to be able to assert his power to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the whole world.

The Ukrainian attack thus struck at the heart of Russia's entire war system, leaving the tsar himself stunned at the incompetence displayed by his generals, who had not even noticed the thousands of soldiers ready to burst onto his territory.

Propaganda tried in every way to denigrate and minimize the consequences of the “counter-invasion,” even spreading a new variant of the war anthem by the singer Šaman, who instead of proclaiming Ja russkij!, now shouts Ja kurskij!, “I am from Kursk!”, eventually slipping totally into ridicule, further emphasizing the effectiveness of Kiev's strategy.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, terrorized in recent months by Putin to make it the true center of Russia's military-spiritual power, keeps repeating that the army stopped the Ukrainian advance, as if they thought they could reach Moscow like the columns of Evgenij Prigožin's Wagner Company, without realizing the true effect of the surprise move, which symbolically pairs with the recapture of Kherson at the mouth of the Dnepr in November 2022, halting the Russian war on the two sides, the “two Ukrainians” of history.

The symbolic value of the “Kursk campaign” is further underscored by the temporal connection with the solemn opening in Sevastopol, the capital of Crimea, of the grandiose church-museum complex of the “New Chersoneso,” already dubbed the “Russian Mecca,” strongly desired by Putin himself and built under the direction of his “spiritual father,” the Orthodox Metropolitan of Crimea Tikhon (Ševkunov).

Ukrainians know how to seize the moments when to wound the pride of Russians in a particularly bloody way, ever since the Euromaidan popular uprising, which began in the winter of 2013-2014, right during the Winter Olympics in Soči that were meant to show the triumph of Putinism, which in recent days has instead gobbled up the bitterness of exclusion from the Paris Olympics.

Historians and archaeologists the world over are aghast at the havoc produced by the Russians, with the destruction in Sevastopol of the archaeological site of ancient Tauride, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, now covered with grotesque buildings for tourists and admirers, playing all kinds of music and inviting to the concerts of winning Russia.

It was a Greek colony, the oldest on the entire Black Sea coast, and on July 30 at the opening its streets covered with the lavish decorations were trampled by 250,000 people. Not even the Soviets had dared to touch the ruins of Chersoneso, now sacrificed to Orthodox-patriotic ecstasy, but the triumph of rewriting history is now overshadowed by the revision of another history, the one that opens again the chasms of Kursk's Russia.

"RUSSIAN WORLD" IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY ON YOUR E-MAIL? SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER AT THIS LINK

• Russia
• Ukraine
• Putin
• Kurks