President Vladimir Putin ordered his armed forces to cleanse Russia of every single invading soldier no later than the end of September, but that didn’t happen and by some measures, the situation in Russia’s Kursk region is getting worse.
Multiple Ukrainian combat brigades were on Tuesday, as the timeline for that presidential decree ran out, still deployed in force in Russia, 45 days into Kyiv’s incursion into Russian territory, in two small enclaves and a single Luxembourg-sized salient.
Hard deadline huh?
Usually a hard deadline means something quite literally can’t go beyond that date. Like “hey guys, Kursk literally has all our food, if they don’t get it back by the end of September we’re probably going to all starve” or “Kursk has the only insulin stock in the whole country, we’re gonna have a lot of dead diabetics”, “take Kursk back or you are all fired and heading to the front” and in this scenario I’d even settle for “if you guys don’t take Kursk back, I’ll glass the area as a nuclear test site.”
Deadlines can’t be hard if there are no consequences.
Edit: I mean if it were me being a stupid strongman dictator I would totally nuke an enemy controlled region within my own borders after designating it a test site. If any of the nukes were still working of course.