The Clever Use of “Kursk”
The Ukrainian choice for its incursion trolls and triggers Putin
This month Ukraine invaded Russia.
To the casual observer in the West the action sounded rash and foolhardy — a desperate suicide mission. But analyze the semiotics of where the Ukrainians chose to invade and you’ll see that the incursion was a troll and a trigger, meant to both enrage Vladimir Putin and to remind the Russians who have so far supported him in his Ukrainian adventure, that their “strong” leader has a resume littered with weaknesses, poor choices and a pathological callousness to the suffering of his subjects.
“Kursk” has many echoes in the post-Soviet mind but by far the most resonant is the Battle of Kursk — to this day the largest military engagement in human history. Oddly, not that many outside the former Soviet Union have even heard of Kursk. In the West we tend to think of Stalingrad as the battle of battles, the great struggle that ultimately turned the tide of the war. But to Soviets, Stalingrad was part of a larger campaign — a lining up of the German body on the block so that the axe might decisively decapitate it. That axe fell at Kursk. Twice as many Soviet bombs were dropped on German forces at Kursk as on Stalingrad. The Wehrmacht lost close to half a million men. As German General Heinz Guderian lamented, after…
