KYIV, Ukraine–To bastardize Faulkner, in Ukraine’s capital, the past isn’t past: it is a soldier in the battles of the present and the future. A brand-new exhibit in Kyiv’s World War II museum, housed in the base of the towering Mother Ukraine statue, already showcases the weeks-old incursion into Russia’s Kursk district.
Dubbed Edge, the exhibit first documents, “the history of Ukrainian colonization of the Kursk, Belgorod, and Voronezh territories since the second half of the seventeenth century when the Ukrainian settlements emerged in wild fields and on Tatar trails, with Cossacks being the driving force behind it.” Photos, videos, and a handful of artifacts (the shorn nose of a Lenin statue, a bullet-scarred border sign) then celebrate Ukraine’s biggest battlefield success in many months.
Beyond the museum’s parquet floors, sentiment on the offensive is similarly triumphal. Many feel that Kursk has been a boon to Ukrainian morale. A veteran of elite Ukrainian infantry units, now fighting for structural change at Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, told me that the operation is “kind of genius.” Soldiers from one of the offensive’s spearhead battalions who I interviewed last week, farther east, were quietly confident. Most wore unsuppressed smiles as they prepared for their next mission.
Kursk’s impact on foreign support for Ukraine is more muted. It is doubtful the offensive has had any meaningful effect on U.S. public opinion on Ukraine, at best a secondary issue for American voters in this chaotic presidential election year. One wonders whether Ukraine would have launched the operation had President Biden dropped out of the presidential race a few weeks earlier, potentially enabling Kamala Harris’ ascent to at least even electoral odds before August.
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