KYIV— The mood here is largely upbeat, as I discovered after two days in Kyiv to attend the twentieth anniversary convening of the Yalta Economic Summit (YES). The conference, founded by Ukrainian businessman Victor Pinchuk (a member of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board), brings together the country’s political elite with prominent European and US leaders, foreign policy thinkers, and journalists.
The YES conference convened thirty-eight days after the start of Ukraine’s daring thrust into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. On a previous trip to Kyiv in late August, all my Ukrainian interlocutors were encouraged by Ukraine’s rapid gains in Kursk but concerned that perhaps their troops would advance too far and fall into a Russian trap. Since then, Ukraine has made additional advances and fortified their gains south of the Seim River. According to Ukraine’s State Agency for Fisheries, this prompted Moscow to poison the river, which would be yet another war crime committed by the Kremlin in its aggression against Ukraine. (Environmental groups should be up in arms about this, along with Russian damage to the environment at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and elsewhere.)
As I was heading to Kyiv a week ago, Moscow launched a counterattack in Kursk. Russian troops advanced several miles on day one and picked up smaller gains in the following days. But by the end of the week, Ukrainian reserves, apparently anticipating the Russian move, broke though Russian lines in two places, captured scores of Russian troops, and are now threatening the Russian rear. The great enthusiasm among Russian war bloggers, who were predicting that Russian troops would certainly meet President Vladimir Putin’s deadline of October 1 to clear Ukrainian forces from Russia, quickly turned to gloom. Those same developments lifted spirits in Kyiv, even as the city endured Moscow’s ongoing major bombing campaign.
Voice of Ukraine 