Ukraine’s surprise incursion leaves Putin scrambling to save face — and his territory

Things seemed to be going so well for Vladimir Putin — at home and on the battlefield.

Now Russia is the battlefield, after Ukraine’s stunning assault across the border turned the tables on Putin’s war and left his army scrambling to retake its own land.

It’s a remarkable turn of events after a year of things largely going Putin’s way, from the short-lived mutiny he put down to his resilient economy and months of grinding gains on the front lines.

The Russian leader sounded almost irate as he vowed to “squeeze the enemy” out of his country’s territory at a crisis meeting with top officials Monday, warning that Kyiv will receive a “worthy” response to its Kursk offensive.

Russia remains united, he said. The country’s troops, he boasted, have even accelerated their advance in Ukraine’s east. And those forced to evacuate their homes in Russia’s border regions will be well taken care of.

Yet the rosy picture Putin was trying to paint did little to disguise the reality: The Russian leader now faces one of the most damaging moments of his long tenure, with the Kremlin reeling from a foreign power invading Russia for the first time since World War II.

“He is upset that something like this could have happened,” said Callum Fraser, a research fellow in Russian and Eurasian security at the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, a London-based think tank. “One of the justifications that he routinely uses for the invasion of Ukraine is the security of the Russian state. The fact that Ukraine has launched this incursion into Russian territory, I think, is absolutely humiliating for him,” Fraser told NBC News.

Putin’s rival in Kyiv offered his own taunting assessment, noting the symbolism of the region now at the center of the war.

“Twenty-four years ago, there was the Kursk disaster — the symbolic beginning of his rule,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in Instagram video message Monday, referring to the sinking of Russia’s Kursk submarine on Aug. 12, 2000, an accident that Putin was criticized for his detached handling of the crisis. “And now it is clear what is the end for him. And Kursk too. The disaster of his war.”