Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.

Ukraine’s Kursk incursion “proved the Russians are bluffing,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defense official, now an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It shuts down all of the voices of the pseudo experts … the anti-escalation guys.” The attack was “risky,” he continued, “but it sent a very powerful signal and helped us change the narrative about Ukraine — that it is not able to win — and on the Russian red lines. Both narratives have been destroyed.”