When the Western powers take responsibility for the criminal aggression against Russia, only then will a viable peace be achieved.
The Kursk border region in Western Russia has finally been cleared of the NATO-backed Ukrainian invaders.
Last weekend, on April 26, the Chief of Russia's General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, announced that all enemy combatants had been defeated and the territory was now under the control of Russian forces.
Thus ends the Kursk gamble that the NATO-backed Kiev regime had foolishly played. It was a hopeless roll of the dice in the proverbial Last Chance Saloon. The incursion was supposed to give the NATO side bargaining leverage to trade for Russian-gained territories in former Eastern Ukraine. There is no trade-off. It's an outright defeat for the NATO strategists.
The losses in military personnel on the Ukrainian side have been estimated at over 76,000 men over the past eight months in fighting in the Kursk direction alone. (Total Ukrainian military losses amount to over one million in the more than three-year proxy war.) In Kursk, thousands of NATO's best weaponry pieces were destroyed by withering Russian firepower. Russia was also assisted by thousands of North Korean troops as per a bilateral security pact signed last year between the far-east neighboring countries. The West tried desperately to make a controversy out of what is a legal and legitimate military alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang. If NATO can deploy mercenaries from all over the world, why can't Russia avail itself of a legal military partner?
In any case, what has transpired is not merely a debacle from military defeat. The scorched-earth tactics of the NATO-sponsored Kiev regime are fully exposed for their appalling war crimes.
Russian investigators have documented hundreds of cases of war crimes. This is the same grotesque pattern found in the Donbass and other areas that have been liberated from Ukrainian occupiers and NATO mercenaries. The full horror in Kursk has yet to be assessed, given that it is the early stages of liberation from the occupiers. But already, there is extensive evidence and eyewitness testimonies from civilian survivors attesting to a campaign of terror and genocide.
The NATO-assisted incursion into Kursk was launched on August 6, 2024. There was much fanfare in the Western media about how the offensive was purportedly striking a blow against Russia and turning the tables in the Ukraine (proxy) war. There were even Western media news crews deployed to accompany Ukrainian forces as they entered Kursk, shooting up statues of V.I. Lenin and other Soviet symbols. American news channel CNN had its so-called war correspondent Nick Paton-Walsh riding on the invasion force's vehicles like a giddy schoolboy. The euphoric mood in the reporting was like something out of a Hollywood movie, and indicative that the military maneuver was planned by NATO commanders in Washington, London, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris. How else were the news crews primed to "report" the "breaking news"? Laughably, CNN and Co. packed their bags when Moscow reminded them that they were in Russian territory illegally. Oh, for the good old days when the Western powers could treat perceived lesser nations with absolute contempt!
It was not so much a "masterstroke invasion", as the Western governments and their media were hailing at the time, as a border infraction that bore the hallmarks of a terror campaign. The Ukrainian forces used their best units and NATO equipment to bomb civilian houses and infrastructure, followed by ground raids on homes to murder and torture innocent families.
No Western media have reported on these crimes. That's because the reality would expose their propaganda lies about the Kiev regime and the proxy war instigated by the U.S. and its Western allies.
Captured POWs told how they were following orders to kill without mercy. Ukrainian soldiers wore Nazi insignia and used Nazi methods of barbarism to inflict wanton suffering on the Russian populace.
All these crimes are now being recorded as Russian investigators take account of the months of occupation. Russia is calling for an international tribunal to prosecute the Kiev regime and its NATO sponsors for the litany of crimes.
Militarily, the incursion was a fiasco. At its deepest penetration during the surprise blitzkrieg last August, the Ukrainian forces advanced about 20 kilometers from the border into Russia. The occupiers held about 1,000 square kilometers, only 3 per cent of Kursk's total area.
Within a couple of months, by November, Russian forces had recovered half of that territory. The big prize captured by the Ukrainians was the border city of Sudzha. Ironically, that is the location of the main gas pipeline that, for decades since the late 1970s, has supplied Russian natural gas to Europe across Ukraine. The Kiev regime terminated the supply on January 1, 2025, in a move heralding "independence" for Europe from no longer having a supply of Russian energy. The more accurate word is "bankruptcy".
The redundant Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline (also known as the "Brotherhood Pipeline") was subsequently used by Russian forces to mount a daring raid to cut off Ukrainian defense lines. Up to 800 Russian soldiers crouched along 15 km of pipeline 1.4 m in diameter to spring a rearguard attack. That was in mid-March 2025. From then on, the Kursk invaders were doomed.
The victory in Kursk comes at a timely occasion for the Victory Day celebrations next week. On May 9, the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Red Army will be celebrated this year with greater poignancy and contemporary relevance.
Up to 27 million Soviet citizens gave their lives in the victory over Nazi fascism during the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it is known more commonly in Russia.
There were two momentous turning points in the defeat of the Nazi Wehrmacht. In 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad was followed by the Battle of Kursk in July and August of that year. The casualties were in the millions. But after Kursk, the Nazi enemy was doomed for eventual vanquish when the Red Army captured Berlin on May 2, 1945, days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. The final unconditional surrender was officiated on May 9.
Absurdly, American President Donald Trump this week claimed with sublime ignorance that the United States "did more than anyone else" to win the Second World War.
The liberation of Kursk territory this week by Russia against Nato-backed NeoNazis is a bitter reminder of the sacrifices that the Russian people endured 80 years ago for the liberation of Europe from fascism. Today, Western powers more than ever deny that truth. They are so imbued with arrogant ignorance, Russophobia and in some cases nostalgia for Nazi fascism that they have distorted the greatest military victory in history. Partly because the West had covertly colluded with Nazi Germany in the 1930s to subjugate the Soviet Union. Some European states openly collaborated with Nazi genocide.
The Soviet Red Army and people defeated Nazism, but fascism survived in the West and today is manifest in the Ukraine proxy war.
The horrific crimes committed against Russian civilians by the NATO-weaponized and directed Kiev regime are, of course, numerically smaller than those committed during the Great Patriotic War by the Nazis.
Nevertheless, there is the same qualitative barbarity. Russian investigators are finding young and elderly victims with bullets in their heads, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves. The bombing of homes and the torture of civilians was inflicted with the same Russophobic hatred that Nazi forebears of the Kiev regime possessed.
Shockingly, the same crimes are committed 80 years on by forces armed with German and other NATO weapons.
Shockingly, too, the Western media are ignoring the crimes committed by the Kiev regime and its NATO government supporters. The Western propaganda narrative of "democratic" Ukraine supported by "democratic" NATO nations against "Russian aggression" is exposed as an edifice of lies.
The Trump administration has talked big about peace diplomacy to end the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia that erupted on February 24, 2022. He bragged during his election campaign last year that he would get a peace deal in one day. This week marks 100 days in the White House, and there is still no peace deal.
For all the big American talk, there seems to be very little substance in understanding the significance of the Kursk battles, both recently and on a much larger scale, more than eight decades ago.
When the Western powers take responsibility for the criminal aggression against Russia, and the crimes in Kursk in particular, only then will a viable peace be achieved.