Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last month was a bold move that has shifted the narrative around Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s full-scale invasion, said the head of MI6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service.
Richard Moore made the comments at the FT Weekend Festival on Saturday during a rare joint public appearance with Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, which was streamed by the Financial Times.
“It’s typically audacious and bold on the part of the Ukrainians to try and change the game,” Moore responded to a question about whether Kyiv’s move was a good idea.
“I think they have, to a degree, changed the narrative around [the war with Russia],” he added.
On August 6, Kyiv began an operation that appeared to have taken Putin and Ukraine’s allies by surprise. NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance did not receive any warning of Ukraine’s intentions for the push—in which, Kyiv said, it captured about 500 square miles of Russian territory.
This illustrative image from August 14 shows a Ukrainian soldier crying on his comrade’s shoulder after returning from the Kursk region in the Sumy region of Ukraine. The head of MI6 has said the Kursk incursion has changed the narrative surrounding the war.
Kostiantyn Liberov/Getty Images
Moore said that during Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian leader has been “pushing forward, grinding forward, village by village, and just having a sort of mentality that ‘I’ll just hang on to what I grab. I’m not interested in negotiations.'”
“The Ukrainians, by going in and taking Kursk, have really brought the war home to ordinary Russians,” he continued.
While there is speculation about Kyiv’s objectives with the incursion—which has taken place as Russian forces made gains in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, where they are trying to capture the critical logistics hub of Pokrovsk—Burns described the Kursk offensive as “a significant tactical achievement” that has boosted Ukrainian morale and exposed some of Russia’s vulnerabilities.
He compared it to the march on Moscow in June 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, who questioned the reasons for the war and accused Russia’s military leadership of incompetence and corruption.
Burns described Putin’s narrative as “very cocky, very smug,” with the Russian leader believing that “it’s only a matter of time before the Ukrainians are going to be ground down and all of their supporters in the West are going to be worn down.”
He added, “What these events have done—the Kursk offensive most recently—is to put a dent in that narrative, and it does raise questions in the Russian elite about what is all this for?”
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment.
On Friday, the Institute for the Study of War said Russian forces have managed to regain some lost positions in the Kursk region amid continued fighting throughout the Ukrainian salient.
Update 9/7/24, 9:22 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
