"Kursk: Why did Russian military intelligence not see the coming Ukrainian incursion?"
by Gilbert Doctorow, gilbertdoctorow.com (August 15, 2024)
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/08/15/kursk-why-did-russian-military-intelligence-not-see-the-coming-ukrainian-incursion/

Today’s session of ‘Judging Freedom’ with Judge Andrew Napolitano opened and closed with brief discussions of two leading personalities from my university alma maters, Columbia and Harvard, who have been in the news these past 24 hours.

With regard to Columbia, today’s newspapers reported the resignation of their president, Minouche Shafik, following a turbulent year on campus during which she made sworn enemies among the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli factions among students and faculty, and found herself at the center of media attention for bringing police on campus to arrest peaceful demonstrators. Shame on her. Shame on Columbia. Although, compared to the Harvard-related news below, Columbia does not look too bad: at least there are divided opinions on campus over the Palestinian question.

With respect to Harvard, it was my fellow student from the graduating class of 1967, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal (D), who was brought up in closing minutes of our chat by Judge Napolitano. Blumenthal was in the news for singing from the same anti-Russian songbook as Senator Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina and praising the Ukrainians to the skies for their (so-far) successful military incursion in the Kursk oblast of the Russian Federation.

Going back to the days when we both were students, the then Democratic Senator from Connecticut Abraham Ribicoff was a voice of reason in international affairs. Regrettably during all of his government service Blumenthal has been quite the opposite, a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior with little concern for where his hubristic aggressiveness vis-à-vis a nuclear superpower might take us. It is all the more regrettable that Blumenthal’s predilection for ideology over diplomacy and co-existence appears to be shared by the overwhelming majority of faculty and undergraduate students in Cambridge, Massachusetts today. They are all-in on the green agenda and combating climate change, but don’t care a bit if we stumble our way into a nuclear war that ends life on this planet. All of which makes me wonder about the value of a liberal arts education in the Ivy League when minds are closed to reality.

*****

Perhaps the most interesting moments in Judging Freedom today centered on how the Russian general staff seems to have missed entirely the coming incursion by Ukraine’s elite, best NATO trained and best NATO equipped troops into the RF province (oblast) of Kursk some nine days ago. Was this a gross failure of their military intelligence or is there some other explanation?

Among my peers in the alternative media there has been some extravagant speculation on this matter. In particular, I am informed that the British blogger Alexander Mercouris has suggested that the Russian general staff knew all about the coming attack but did not react, seeing in this an opportunity to spring a trap on the invaders and change the course of the war at one blow.

I was not persuaded by this argument. Had there been such a cynical plan by Russian generals to put up with civilian deaths and the capture of their own conscript soldiers for the sake of the bigger prize of setting up a ‘cauldron,’ then why is it that nine days out we see no trap being sprung? Why is it that to all appearances the Russians are scrambling to bring soldiers and heavy equipment from Central Russia down to Kursk to engage the enemy?

Indeed, a far more plausible explanation was published yesterday on the website of the premier Indian English language global broadcaster WION. This came at the end of a report lasting several minutes describing Vladimir Putin’s new appointee to coordinate the operation in Kursk to expel/annihilate the Ukrainian invaders, a certain Aleksei Dyumin. This appointment removed responsibility for Kursk from Russia’s overall top military commander, General Valery Gerasimov.

I had seen mention of Dyumin’s getting this assignment in other media, but those reports only spoke of his being a Putin loyalist who for more than eight years headed the presidential security team. To put it more colloquially, Dyumin was said to be Putin’s former bodyguard. Such a description in major media was, of course, meant to ridicule the appointee and his boss. It was like saying that the head of Russia’s first and only private company of mercenaries, Prigozhin, was just the former cook to Putin. Or like saying that Vladimir Putin is himself just a former low level KGB analyst who served in East Germany.

All of these comments are willfully derogatory and misleading. Like Progozhin, Dyumin clearly has extraordinary talent and has succeeded as a presidential aide serving in various temporary functions such as one year as acting governor of the Tula oblast.

To return to the key information that came at the end of the WION report: they tell us that the Russian senior commander general Valery Gerasimov had in fact been informed by Russian military intelligence that Ukraine was preparing an assault on Kursk, but he dismissed it and took no action. It was for this very reason that he has been relieved of responsibility for the military operation in Kursk. And Dyumin is not only a very capable administrator who is close to the President and outside the military command hierarchy which is self-serving in Russia, as it is everywhere else, but he also happens to hail from…Kursk.

As I mention in this interview, I believe that Gerasimov will not hold his current post for long. Let us recall that in the spring of this year when Mr. Prigozhin was publicly feuding with the regular army bosses in Moscow he denounced both Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Head of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, saying both were incompetent and harming the proper execution of the Special Military Operation. Shoigu has since been kicked upstairs, so to speak, and has become Vladimir Putin’s roving ambassador, as we saw from his visit to Teheran a little more than a week ago. Gerasimov’s turn to be kicked upstairs or just kicked out is sure to come.

*****

In this 25 minute chat with Judge Napolitano, we discussed a number of other topical issues from the Kursk operation. For that, I invite readers to watch the video.

*****

[note: this video will be reposted on youtube next week, when technical issues are resolved]

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Transcript below by a reader followed by translation into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Judge Andrew Napolitano: 0:42
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Thursday, August 15th, 2024. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, always a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we talk about, It’s an honor for me to be able to pick your brain and it’s very much appreciated, not only by me but by our audience as well. I really have been waiting almost all week to talk to you about the Ukrainian incursion into Russia, who’s behind it, who caused it, what’s going on.

But before we do, there is some breaking news this morning. I don’t know this outfit; maybe you do. Something called TF Global is reporting this morning that General Syrsky, the Ukrainian military chief of staff, is about to engineer a collective resignation of himself and his senior people in the military and encourage his troops to leave the battlefield. Have you heard this, and do you know if there’s any credibility to it?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:51
No, I don’t know the source, and I haven’t heard the news that you just passed along to me. It would be very interesting to see if there’s any substance to it. … It wouldn’t be very surprising considering the high-risk … expedition in Kursk … acknowledged as such by major western media, not just by those who are skeptical of U.S. and NATO policies. So it’s credible as a way out, but there’s no news to my knowledge to substantiate this.

Napolitano:
Who invaded Kursk?

Doctorow: 2:27
The invasion of Kursk is said to have been led by the elite troops. That is the best reserves of the Ukrainian armed forces. These were people who– now I’m telling you the Russian story, that in the very beginning, the remark of the 1,000 men who entered Kursk were elite. They were the reserves. They were the people who had been trained meticulously by NATO officers, and they were following marching orders that had been drawn up by NATO. Not by Mr. Syrsky, not by anybody in Kiev, but NATO.

3:12
And so all statements coming from Washington or from London or from Berlin that “We don’t know anything about this, Mr. Zelensky dreamed this up by himself, we wish him luck, we will support them, but we’re not part of this.” All such stories have a very specific motive; that is to exculpate the United States, not to allow the United States to be drawn in as a co-belligerent, while at the same time preparing the way for Mr. Zelensky’s removal because the possibility of things going wrong and ending even as the BBC acknowledged several days ago in a catastrophic manner, that possibility was recognized from the outset and would by itself be a credible reason for removing Mr. Zelensky.

Napoltano: 4:00
What is the catastrophic manner to which they alluded?

Doctorow:
They’d be entrapped. They’d be surrounded. They would go in too far.

Napolitano:
Are you talking about the troops in Kiev or are you talking about the city of Kiev?

Doctorow:
I’m talking– well, Kiev is a separate question. Mr. Medvedev raised that issue: shouldn’t we really storm Kiev now? But that is not what I’d like to talk about in the beginning. I’m talking about Kursk, and Kursk, this area that they have invaded, has very low population initially. All of that has been evacuated, and so the Russians prepared the possibility of total destruction of anything in the area that’s called the area of occupation, by the Ukrainians.

4:44
The most interesting thing about all of this– because there’s been tremendous speculation in both major media and in alternative media on what were Ukraine’s motives, what they hope to achieve, and how this will end up– the interesting question from the very beginning was how could it happen that this expeditionary force– initially of 1,000, now said to be 10,000 or 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers– how is it that they could cross the border and stage this raid, a raid which became an expedition, without being stopped, without encountering a Russian response? And we know from reports in the “Financial Times”, people who interviewed the soldiers who participated in day one of this incursion, that they encountered no one.

5:43
In fact, the “Financial Times” had a most curious feature of its article interviewing the soldiers, where the Ukrainian said, “Well, we crossed over, we were very surprised, we were not met by any resistance. We proceeded into a forest. There we encountered a group of Russian soldiers sitting around having coffee.” Remember, this incursion occurred very early in the morning. “They were unarmed, and we shot them all.” Well, it’s curious that the “Financial Times” thought it proper to put on its front page a narrative that is a war crime, but that’s a separate issue. Why is it that the Russians didn’t prepare for this?

6:22
And that is a subject that some of my peers, for example, Alexander Mercurius in England, have made extravagant statements about it, that the Russian general command knew this was coming, intentionally did nothing, so that they could entrap the Ukrainians, even if there would be civilian deaths and so forth as collateral damage on their own side. This reminds me of a speculation that Franklin Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor but did nothing because he wanted to get the United States into the war.

There are all kinds of speculations of this nature in a situation as dramatic as what we see in Kursk. I don’t believe this for a minute. If the Russians had foreseen this and prepared for this, they would have closed the trap already. They haven’t. The latest news that we have– if we have any news from the Russian side, who are very quiet– the latest news is that they’re scrambling to bring in men from the center of Russia, that is soldiers, and heavy equipment to annihilate the Ukrainians, if they can.

7:28
That does not jibe with a theory that the top command knew what it was doing. That leaves you with the question of what’s wrong with the Russian top command? What’s wrong with their military intelligence? And for this, I would like to refer you and the listeners to a news source that you probably don’t use regularly, but I do, since every couple of weeks or three weeks I’m invited as a guest commentator on it, and that is the Indian private English-language global broadcaster WION. If you tap WION and then the name of the gentleman who is the subject of their news report, Dyumin, D-Y-U-M-I-N, Alexander Dyumin, you find a very interesting news bulletin.

08:22
The essence of it is that Mr. Putin was very frustrated with his chief of staff, General Gerasimov, who was the general leader of all of the Russian efforts in the special military operation. Because Gerasimov had given him a report in front of the cabinet saying that things are under control, everything’s going fine in the effort to expel the invaders, whereas alternative information reaching Putin suggested that things were not at all under control. And he appointed this Alexander Dyumin to be the general coordinator or curator, as WION calls him, in the effort to expel or destroy the Ukrainian invaders of Kursk. And then I think it wasn’t only WION that caught this name. I think I’ve seen it elsewhere in mainstream, but taking it as an example of ridiculing Mr. Putin for the kind of strange appointments he makes.

09:27
After all, he appointed Mr. Prigozhin, who was his caterer, who was his restaurateur, to be an important military commander to be in charge of the mercenaries. And here he’s appointing a certain Mr. Dyumin to be the head of a very important military operation.

And who is Dyumin? Well, what they say, those who want to ridicule Putin, they say, Dyumin was just the head of Putin’s personal security, his bodyguard for maybe eight years. Well this is this is a real problem that we have with all Western approaches to Mr. Putin’s government or regime depending on which side of the fence you’re on. Mr. Putin to my estimation is one of the world’s best managers of human resources and he uses methods which go back to Peter the Great. The method is intuitive, gut and to work both within and without official hierarchies. Mister– we will have the hierarchy of the Russian general staff. Gerasimov is at the apex of it. He came up the usual way. Mr Dyumin, who’s now been given this enormous responsibility, is a side fellow, a person who’s–

Napolitano: 10:48
Probably perceived by President Putin as extraordinarily loyal, as personally loyal and utterly trustworthy. Agreed?

Doctorow:
Agreed, and add one further fact: gifted. Mr. Putin has surrounded himself with many people, some of whom are scoundrels, some of whom have cheated the state for millions, if not billions of dollars, but they all had something in common. They were extraordinary people with great gifts, mathematical gifts, whatever. And so they could be very effective in helping with the with the economy or doing other things of–

Napolitano:
Let me ask you about the actual invasion and the preparation for it. Could this possibly have been done without the aid of CIA and MI6?

Doctorow: 11:39
I won’t answer that question directly, but I’ll answer it indirectly.

Napolitano:
Okay.

Doctorow:
The Russians from the beginning were saying that this operation was meticulously planned by the United States and its NATO allies. All of the scenario, who does what when, the whole game plan, was NATO. The Ukrainians were simply carrying out NATO instructions, and this was just one more case where NATO has cynically used Ukraine, not just as a battering ram against Russia, but as a testing ground for new equipment and for new strategies.

12:21
The Russians said from the beginning that this elite brigade that moved into Kursk was equipped with the latest NATO equipment, that they were top-notch and that they had new tactics that NATO had not applied anywhere, because NATO had no experience for what, 40, 50 years, in a ground war with a peer. And that’s what they have in the case of the conflict with Russia.

Napolitano: 12:48
How embarrassing has this been politically and even amongst the military and cultural elites in Moscow for President Putin?

Doctorow:
You don’t feel that in the public arena. But I think you’re touching on a very important point, because the “Financial Times”, the “New York Times” and CNN, the first reaction they had was, “Wow, Mr. Putin has been humiliated.” The word came up in many different news reports. Well, as we say, “He laughs best who laughs last.” And that’s the case here. I think the humiliation is what awaits the United States and its allies. And yes, of course, it’s embarrassing, but then, let’s come back to the nature of the embarrassment and a bigger issue, which you’ve just touched on, and that is, why did this happen? How did this happen?

13:48
In that article of WION, which just expanded by giving the biography of Mr. Dyumin, so we know, understood better who this man is. But it also went on, and ended with a point which is very relevant to your last question. And that is, Gerasimov had received military intelligence that the Ukrainians were massing heavy armor to enter Kursk, and he dismissed it. My reading for this is that Mr. Gerasimov’s time in office is already is counting down. Let’s remember that when Mr. Prigozhin, the mercenary group leader, had his big spat with Moscow, with the military, there were two people whom he was denouncing as incompetent and needing removal. They were Sergei Shoigu and General Gerasimov. Shoigu was kicked upstairs, Gerasimov stayed in place, and I don’t think he’s going to stay in place very long.

Napolitano: 14:56
Colonel McGregor reports from sources that Russian surveillance was able to pick up voices from among the invaders, and it heard English speakers, and its linguists– I didn’t realize it gets this detailed in intel, you would know better than I– its linguists identified the English speakers as quote “having American accents”. Is it more likely than not that American personnel– whether CIA, whether contractors whether military out of uniform, whether some sort of technicians operating heavy equipment– were physically present and involved in this invasion?

Doctorow: 15:43
Well I think you put your finger on it that remark about operators of heavy equipment or sophisticated– it is … most likely that Americans or other nationals who represent the country of manufacture of any given very advanced NATO equipment that has just been given to Ukraine would be filling that role. Just as the delegation from South Carolina to Kiev, Lindsey Graham, was calling for American pilots to man the F-15s, F-16s, since there are only two or three qualified Ukrainian pilots.

So it is with the other heavy equipment. Surely we know that the Patriot air defense systems are manned by NATO officers, not by Ukrainians. It just takes too long to train them. And those who may have learned something were blown to bits on various Russian strikes on Patriot systems. So, yes, it’s very likely that there are Americans in this incursion in Kursk.

Napolitano: 17:03
How does the incursion in Kursk end, in your view, Professor Doctorow?

Doctorow:
Well, I’ve been pursuing one scenario, which I take from Russian history and I take from the present evacuation. The Russian news about the Kursk affair, on state television, has been extremely limited. The own virtually, I mean the– sorry, I backtrack. There has been a lot of coverage of what’s happening in Kursk, but only the humanitarian side of it. We see all of the food deliveries, the clothing deliveries, the blood supplies that are being shipped in from across Russia by various aid organizations, volunteer organizations, patriots, local patriots, and donors to assist the evacuees, of whom there are now approximately 140,000, of whom approximately half are living in tent cities that have been hastily built, probably in Kursk City or nearby, and half of whom have been sent by train and bus further inland to the Russian heartland, to Moscow Oblast or whatever.

18:12
These rescue efforts, humanitarian efforts, are widely publicized. The military activities that Russia has performed or is about to perform to expel or to exterminate the Ukrainian forces: nothing, nothing on their news. The evacuation to my way of thinking has been extreme. And I think I perceive in the extent of this evacuation a lesson from the past that’s being used in the present and future. It is remarked on Russian media that this is the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II. I’d like to take this thing back a bit to 1812, and Napoleon’s invasion reaching Moscow. The Russians then practiced something called scorched earth. And I think we can envision the Russian response to the incursion by the Ukrainians in terms of a likely scorched earth campaign.

19:28
That’s to say, they have taken all civilians out of this territory, which was never heavily populated by the way, but the Ukrainians have gone into. They’re all little settlements here and there, farming territory. There were no towns or cities. So, this territory is likely to be destroyed by the Russians themselves as they use very heavy weapons against anything on the ground.

Napolitano: 19:57
Here is– you mentioned the delegation to Moscow from South Carolina– here is the delegation from Connecticut and South Carolina. You have a liberal Democrat, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and the arch-conservative Senator Lindsey Graham, agreeing in about as pro-war as you can imagine. Watch the two of them. We’ll run them back-to-back, starting with Senator Blumenthal, Chris, and then following with Senator Graham– it’s not very long– addressing President Putin, excuse me, President Zelensky just two days ago

Blumenthal: 20:17
You’re fighting our fight, the independence and freedom of people around the world, including the United States, but we want the American people to appreciate the value of this alliance.

Graham:
So two and a half years later, you’re still standing and you’re in Russia. Remind me not to invade Ukraine. I’m so proud of you, your people, your military, your leadership, your country. You’re under siege, unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. They were predicting in Washington that Kiev would fall in four days, the whole country would fall in three weeks. Well, they were wrong.

Napolitano: 21:10
That appears to be typical of the uniparty in Congress, the pro-war party that can unite people on just this issue, people who disagree on just about everything else. Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham’s body language betrayed some sort of discomfort, but his face betrayed great joy.

Doctorow:
Yes. Well, you opened this program with reference to one of my two alma maters. That is Columbia. The other one is Harvard. And it’s an embarrassment to say that I’m a classmate of Richard Blumenthal. I’ve seen him from time to time at class reunions.

Napolitano:
I thought he was about 10 or 15 years older than you.

Doctorow: 22:05
Well, he’s a man of great experience, and there are very few successful politicians in my class. We didn’t produce any John F. Kennedys, but we produced Blumenthal, which I think is a disgrace, and it’s a sad commentary on Harvard. Because regrettably, the extreme positions that he is setting out in part of his visit, his time, time shared with Lindsey Graham, would be shared by a large part of the faculty and the student body at Harvard. That is very, very sad. And it calls into question the value of this very expensive higher education.

Napolitano: 22:55
Before we go, Professor Doctorow, how did the Special Military Operation, launched to recapture the language and cultural, Russian cultural and Russian language parts of Ukraine, morph into a full-blown war between Russia and NATO?

Doctorow:
Well, the Russians have been reactive throughout the whole course of this conflict. The active part has been the United States and its NATO allies. And so the change in nature of the conflict from a civil war in Ukraine– which Russia was participating on the side of its compatriots, we can call them, and that’s becoming an East-West war, a war between Russia and NATO– that has been the consequence of a whole series of escalatory steps by the United States and its allies.

24:04
So, at the same time, let’s take a step back before the beginning of the special military operation. Go back to December, November-December 2021. And the bigger issue going well outside and beyond the question of looking after fellow Russian speakers in Ukraine and looking strictly at defense issues, security issues, had brought Russia into a very brief contact with the United States and NATO allies over its proposal for restructuring European and global defense. Well, European defense was the subject.

24:47
So it started out as a Russia initiative to revise, to revisit the United States’ presence in the former Warsaw Pact states, every local expansion of NATO since the start of Clinton’s second term in office. And then it became of a specific saving, saving the Donbass from an impending Ukrainian attack, assault, which was heralded by intense, very intense artillery strikes across the border from the Ukrainian-held part of Donbass to the rebel part of Donbass, which was looking to Russia for cover.

25:42
That, as I said, as time went on, with each escalatory step introduced with new equipment. First of all, it was non-lethal and became lethal. Then it became of this limited range and then of a greater limited range. Well, step by step, we don’t have to go through it month by month here. But the United States led the way into what we now see, which is very, close to a war. Incidentally, the fact that Ukraine has entered Russia would normally be a causus belli for declaration of war, and if you want to pursue it further, it would be a declaration of war against the United States.

Napolitano: 26:27
Did the United States invade Russia?

Doctorow:
From the Russian standpoint, yes.

Napolitano:
Wow. Thank you, Professor Doctorow, much appreciated, very, very much appreciated. We look forward to seeing you next week, my friend, all the best.

Doctorow:
Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

Napolitano:
Of course, of course. It’s a pleasure and a treat to get to pick his brain once a week, and I deeply appreciate it. Coming up later today at 11 AM, Ambassador Charles Freeman, how long will Iran wait before retaliating against Israel? At 3 o’clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer, does the United States still consider itself the indispensable nation? And at 5 o’clock this afternoon, always worth waiting for, Max Blumenthal on the latest from Israel. And why is the Western press so pro-genocide?

27:30
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.