Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, dressed in fatigues, visited a command post near the front in Kursk late Wednesday to cheer on his military’s ejection of Ukrainian forces from much of the territory they had been occupying in the Russian border region.

A Ukrainian serviceman patrols a street next to buildings damaged during fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in the Ukrainian-controlled town of Sudzha in Russia's Kursk region, August 16, 2024.

As a drone smashed into the side of her apartment block early on Tuesday, Russia's full-scale offensive on Ukraine literally came home to Svetlana in a suburb southeast of Moscow. In her town of Ramenskoye,