Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Flips the Script on Putin

Families fleeing invading Ukrainian troops sought shelter from strangers. Russian parents feared that their children might be sent into battle for the first time.

And in a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do.

Ukraine’s surprise incursion into a sliver of Russia’s Kursk region last week has not shifted the overall course of the war, but it has already struck a blow well beyond the few hundred square miles of Russia that Ukraine now controls: It has thrust a Russian government and society that had largely adapted to war into a new phase of improvisation and uncertainty.

Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.

To opposition-minded politicians, including some of the few remaining inside Russia, Ukraine’s incursion has offered a rare chance to puncture the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is steadily heading toward victory — even if it was far from certain that Russians would blame Mr. Putin for their ills. One opposition figure, Lev Shlosberg, in the western city of Pskov, compared the state of Russian society to magma gathering beneath a volcano in which it was unclear when or how it would burst to the surface.

“Current events are, of course, intensifying the crisis,” Mr. Shlosberg said in a phone interview. “But we don’t know where and how this energy of dissatisfaction will go.”

In the city of Kursk, about 50 miles from the border where Ukraine invaded, the politician Yekaterina S. Duntsova described meeting people at a shelter who were so disoriented by having to flee that “they hope that this is all some kind of dream.”

Ms. Duntsova, in a phone interview, said one woman told her she had been at the shelter in a university dormitory since “the first day of the war.” It turned out she was referring to the start of Ukraine’s incursion last week.

“So what was happening before then?” Ms. Duntsova recalled replying. “Before then,” the woman told her, “we were living our lives.”

Ms. Duntsova, a journalist, tried to run against Mr. Putin in Russia’s presidential elections this year on an antiwar platform, but was barred from the ballot. Now, she is spearheading a volunteer effort to aid displaced Kursk residents while warning that the embarrassment of Ukraine’s incursion cannot be expected to lead to political change in Russia because few people would dare to speak out.

“Silence is salvation,” she said, shortly after an air raid siren wailed in the background. “We live according to Orwell.”

To Russians opposed to the war, helping people who are fleeing the fighting has become one way to feel as if they are taking action without risking arrest. Some posted on the social messaging app Telegram offering their homes to the displaced. In the city of Oryol, about 80 miles north of Kursk, a tailor named Anastasia, 36, said she had helped find housing for two families.

“When you live in a nightmare, it’s really important to see that there are also people around you who are helping,” said Anastasia, who asked that her last name be withheld for her safety. “It helps you not to go crazy.”

Still, there were signs of public jitters stemming from uncertainty over the involvement of young conscripts in the fighting. Since the start of the war, Mr. Putin has pledged that conscripts — Russian men as young as 18 are required to serve in the military for a year — would not be sent into the Ukraine war zone. But battles on Russian territory could be a different matter, and an exiled Russian investigative news outlet, Important Stories, reported on Wednesday that it had identified 22 conscripted soldiers who had gone missing in Kursk.

Conscripts in Kursk who had retreated from the border after Ukraine’s attack were now being “sent to the defense of Kursk again,” said Grigory Sverdlin, the head of an organization that helps Russians seeking to avoid military service. He said his group, Idite Lesom (Get Lost), had received more than 20 appeals for help from conscripts or their relatives.

The use of conscripts is especially sensitive for Mr. Putin because their families could form a potent antiwar force, as they did during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Russia’s war in Chechnya in the 1990s. In Ukraine, by contrast, Russia’s force has mainly been made up of well-paid contract soldiers whose families receive large payments if the men die, as well as prisoners who have been promised freedom if they survive.

Beyond the potential involvement of conscripts, analysts predicted that the effort to drive Ukrainian troops out of Kursk could eventually hinder Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine. Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the security research group CAST based in Moscow, said the need to shift some of Russia’s invasion force to Kursk could, in turn, threaten Russia’s strategy of a slow-moving advance across the front line in Ukraine.

“The first days of the Ukrainian operation in the Kursk region should be assessed as very successful, although its ultimate goals remain unclear,” Mr. Pukhov said. “In moral terms, the Russian Federation has taken a powerful blow.”

Russia retains an advantage in the war in terms of personnel and domestic resources, but Ukraine’s incursion underlined Kyiv’s ability to use its nimble forces and Western weaponry to steal some of Russia’s initiative. In the televised meeting on Monday, Mr. Putin blamed the West for “fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians,” repeating his frequent depiction of the war, which he started with a full-fledged invasion, as a proxy campaign against Russia by the West.

State television has continued to play down the crisis, treating it as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Russian forces are “driving the enemy out of our land,” the anchor on the prime-time newscast on Channel One intoned on Tuesday, adding that “the main task now is to help civilian victims.”

But on Telegram, popular pro-war bloggers have criticized Russian officials for hiding the scale of the problem. One noted dryly that despite the Russian Defense Ministry’s regular reports claiming hundreds of “destroyed” Ukrainian soldiers, “the enemy reported to be killed is, nevertheless, continuing to capture our territories.”

Amid the mixed messages from war supporters on television and online, analysts predicted that members of the Russian public could respond either by rallying around the flag over the shock of the incursion or by criticizing the state for failing to protect them.

Aleksei Minyailo, an opposition activist based in Moscow who studies Russian public opinion, said that previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s border regions had done more to harden pro-war opinions. But this time, he added, the sense of confusion in the wake of the Kursk incursion could cut into the Kremlin’s message that “everything is going well; we are winning.”

“This screw-up very much breaks this propaganda narrative,” said Mr. Minyailo, the co-founder of a research project, Chronicles, which has been polling Russians in recent months.

Mr. Putin has been mum on how he plans to respond, other than declaring in his meeting on Monday that re-establishing control of the Kursk region was a priority. Some in Russia said they expected Mr. Putin to strike back in some unexpected form of his own, further escalating the violence of the war.

“A red line that seemed to be untouchable has been erased,” Mr. Shlosberg, the opposition politician, said, referring to Ukraine’s foray into Russian territory. “Now Putin has a chance, a reason, to think about what line he should cross.”

Anatoly Kurmanaev, Milana Mazaeva and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.