Despite Ukraine’s Kursk invasion gamble, Russia is closing in on a big victory

“But Russia keeps going,” said Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a military and security think tank in London. “The Russian mindset seems to be, ‘We took tens of millions of casualties in the Second World War and we can keep going’.” He sees Ukraine’s invasion of Russia as “either an act of genius or an act of desperation”, adding: “Rather than lose ground slowly in the east with nothing to show for it, Ukraine needed to change the narrative — to say ‘yes, we’ve lost ground in the east, but we can still manoeuvre and make things difficult for the enemy’.”