Russia’s President Vladimir Putin likes to project himself as a strongman. But his track record of handling recent crises in Russia reveals a different side of his presidential persona: one of paralysis and indecision.

A day and a half after Ukrainian troops stormed a Russian border crossing and continued, almost unimpeded, across the wide green fields of the southern Kursk region, Putin finally made his first public remarks on the matter. He called the incursion a “massive provocation”, accused Ukraine of indiscriminately firing on civilians, and then moved on quickly to other government business, including how to mark Russia’s “Construction Worker’s Day.”

It would take another five days, and the loss of nearly 30 settlements, before he promised a military response.  There was no visit to the region to meet the tens of thousands of evacuees, no declaration of martial law.

In March, after the terror attack at the Crocus City concert hall in Moscow, Russia’s deadliest in decades, it took Putin more than 24 hours to address the nation. Despite a claim of responsibility from ISIS-K, he continued to insist that Ukraine, and the West had played a role. The US had in fact warned Russia an attack could be imminent. Putin never visited the site of the attack, or survivors in hospital.

When Evgeny Prigozhin, then the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched his aborted mutiny last June, the Russian leader’s response was marked by inconsistency. After initially slamming the incident as “treachery,” Putin left it two days before speaking publicly again, at which point he thanked the Wagner troops involved for standing down, and offered them military contracts. Then he invited Prigozhin to tea at the Kremlin. Two months later Prigozhin was killed in a mysterious plane crash in Russia.

More distant parallels are also easy to find, and Putin chose this week to highlight one himself.  For the first time in 16 years he visited School No.1 in Beslan, more than a week before the 20^th anniversary of the terror attack on the school that killed more than 300 people, many of them children.  In 2017 the European Court of Human Rights found that not only had the Russian authorities failed to act on prior knowledge of an imminent attack, but that the security operation was “disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership.”

Shock offensive left Kremlin reeling

Experts say Russia’s military response in Kursk has somewhat mirrored the fumbling reactions of its president.

Battlefield accounts have backed up the sense that a motley selection of Russian troops were rushed in, as Moscow grappled with the dilemma of how to balance defending its own soil with keeping up the slow momentum on the eastern front. Ukrainian officials said some troops were redeployed from Kharkiv region and the southern front. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov claimed early on that his special forces unit, the Akhmat brigade, had been deployed. Naval infantry officers from the Black Sea fleet in Crimea are also involved.

The diverse groupings complicated Russian efforts to coordinate its resistance, with one pro-Russian military blogger even noting on August 14 that Ukraine was deliberately creating disruptions and then retreating, “taking advantage of the fact that our diverse forces, who don’t always have good communications with each other, were activated to repel this invasion.”

Russia’s bureaucratic response to the incursion has been equally unwieldy.  Defense Minister Andrei Belousov set up a coordinating council to handle security in the border regions and this week announced he was dividing up responsibilities between no fewer than five different officials.

This, according to the Institute for the Study of War, “will likely create additional confusion within the Russian MoD and friction among the Russian MoD, FSB, and Rosgvardia [Russia’s national guard], all of which are attempting to operate in Kursk Oblast,” and could jeopardize Russia’s ability to mount an effective counterattack.

Ryan, the Australian retired general, agrees Russia is moving beyond the initial knee-jerk response phase, and it should start to look more organized in the days and weeks ahead. But, he believes the past two weeks have also laid bare Putin’s priorities and his own people are not currently top of the list.

“The decision will be Putin’s: What is the most dangerous to him?  Ukrainians in Kursk or not succeeding in the Donbas.  I think at the moment he’s decided that it’s more dangerous to not make this progress in the Donbas than to throw everything at Kursk.”

Experts agree the Kursk incursion has not fundamentally changed Putin’s overarching strategy of attrition – to exhaust Ukraine, and try to outlast its allies. And yet, Ukraine’s surprise move has emboldened those who had previously questioned the West’s policy of limiting certain types of military aid, and their use inside Russia.

And that may well have been part of Ukraine’s strategy.  On August 19, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky allowed his closely held veil of gratitude towards his Western allies to lift momentarily.

“The entire naïve, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some of our partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha,” he told a gathering of Ukrainian diplomats, referring to a Russian town that Ukrainian troops had occupied.

His point is that Western fears that Russia may interpret the use of American or British long-range missiles on its soil as a conventional threat worthy of a nuclear response – Russian nuclear doctrine does allow for this – are now more remote than ever, given its lack of a coherent military response to its first foreign occupation since World War II.

“The current NATO strategy for helping Ukraine is a strategy for defeat. It is just a strategy for perpetuating war and allowing Russia to wait us all out,” said Ryan. “We need a fundamental reassessment.”

Former Russian diplomat Bondarev argues Putin’s own reaction serves as further proof that the West needs to formulate a more robust response to Putin’s aggression.

“And that’s why he should not be feared so much.”

An Indonesian court ordered two local companies to pay up to 60 million rupiah ($3,850) to each family whose children died of an acute kidney injury or were seriously injured after consuming toxic cough syrup.

More than 200 children in Indonesia died of the injury and about 120 more survived, some of whom lived with disabilities which led to financial hardships for their parents.

Indonesian courts have cited lax oversight by pharmaceutical companies, including local drugmakers and some suppliers, as well as the country’s food and drugs agency (BPOM), in hearings into the poisonings.

In late 2022, more than 20 families launched a civil suit against the agency, the health ministry, and several companies.

Judges at the Central Jakarta court found a drugmaker and a supplier, Afi Farma and CV Samudera Chemical, at fault in the poisonings, according to a ruling released late on Thursday.

The health ministry and the BPOM were cleared of wrongdoing.

The court ordered the companies to pay the parents who brought the suit compensation of 50 million rupiah for children who died and 60 million rupiah for children who were injured.

Parents had asked for 3.4 billion rupiah for each child that died, and 2.2 billion rupiah for survivors. Indonesia’s 2023 gross domestic product per capita was nearly $5,000, data from the country’s Statistics Bureau shows.

Siti Habiba, the lawyer for the parents, said the families were disappointed by the ruling, as the money was given “as though we were beggars.”

“This breaks a lot of the victims’ hearts,” she said, adding the court ignored the parents’ government oversight concerns by not finding the health ministry and the BPOM at fault.

The court document, posted on its website, did not include reasons for the decision.

Afi Farma’s lawyer Reza Wendra Prayogo told Reuters on Friday the firm was “disappointed” with the civil case ruling and the company was still considering its next legal step.

Last year, a criminal court found East Java-based drugmaker Afi Farma guilty of negligence and jailed officials for not testing the ingredients sent by its supplier.

The syrups contained ethylene glycol (EG), a commonly used chemical in products such as brake fluid and antifreeze. A court document from that criminal case said the EG concentration in the syrups reached as high as 99%, where international standards say only 0.1% of EG is safe for consumption.

The company has repeatedly denied negligence.

Reuters could not immediately contact CV Samudera Chemical, an Indonesian soapmaker, whose toxic ingredient made its way to Afi Farma, according to the court document of the Afi Farma criminal case in 2023.

The World Health Organization said the contaminated medicines had also killed children in Gambia and Uzbekistan in 2022.

Four officers at a maximum security prison in Russia were killed after inmates who identified themselves as affiliated to ISIS took several staff hostage, Russian state media reported.

Russian special forces said the alleged hostage takers were all “eliminated” in an operation that saw some hostages freed, at the penal colony in the town of Surovikino.

The National Guard of Russia, also known as the Rosgvardia, wrote on Telegram: “Snipers from the special forces of the Russian National Guard in the Volgograd Region neutralized four prisoners who had taken prisoner employees hostage with four precise shots; the hostages were freed.”

Graphic footage circulating on social media showed three uniformed prison staff members lying motionless in pools of blood, one with his throat slashed. A fourth staff member is seen on his knees in a doorway.

In another video the apparent hostage takers can be seen waving ISIS flags.

Inmates captured the correctional facility staff at a disciplinary commission meeting, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia earlier told state media outlet TASS.

“At a meeting of the disciplinary commission (where cases of malicious violators are considered, among other things) of the colony, several prisoners seized employees,” the penitentiary service said, according to TASS.

Eight prison officers and four inmates were taken hostage, according to RIA Novosti.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service reported to him about the situation in the Volgograd colony.

The incident follows another hostage situation in Russia in June, when two employees of a pre-trial detention center in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don were rescued after being held hostage for several hours by six detainees.

The detainees had links to ISIS and were killed in the operation.

This story has been updated with additional information.

The attacker is on the run and police are treating the incident as a terror attack, said a German police spokesperson.

Police services are utilizing all available resources, including personnel and vehicles, and a large-scale manhunt is underway, the spokesperson added.

The attack occurred at a “Festival of Diversity” being held in the city, which is a three-day event marking the 650th anniversary of the city’s founding.

Images and footage from the scene showed several ambulances and police officers at the scene, as well as a helicopter flying overhead.

“This evening, all of us in Solingen are experiencing shock, horror, and great sadness,” The city’s mayor, Tim Kurzbach, wrote on Solingen’s Facebook page.

“We all wanted to celebrate our city’s anniversary together and now we have to mourn the dead and injured.”

The mayor sent his prayers to the victims fighting for their lives and thanked the rescue and security personnel for their help. “I ask you, if you believe, pray with me and, if not, then hope with me,” he said.

According to the festival’s website, Friday was the start of the three-day “Festival of Diversity,” which would include music, food, performances, and family-friendly entertainment.

Bergisch Symphony Orchestra, the shared orchestra for the cities of Solingen and Remscheid, was scheduled to play on the main stage on Friday.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Khin Mar Cho worries for her 4-year-old son as she struggles to scrape together enough food to feed him in a makeshift displacement camp at a crowded monastery in western Myanmar.

Soldiers had stormed their village of Byine Phyu, Rakhine state, and forced her and other family members out of their homes. They detained all the men and shot her brother and other neighbors, she said.

Survivors like Khin Mar Cho fled to the monastery just outside the regional capital Sittwe. There, a lone monk is struggling to feed about 300 people who have sought refuge inside the camp as a three-year civil war intensifies around them, waged by Myanmar’s military junta against an armed resistance.

“There are days that we have no food, even though we are hungry,” Khin Mar Cho said. “I cannot feed my kid anything more than meals donated by people because I don’t have a job or income, and all the male family members have been taken away.”

Disturbing accounts from multiple aid workers suggest hunger is being used as a weapon of war in Rakhine state.

Rakhine has become a focal point of the conflict, where a powerful ethnic minority armed rebel group, the Arakan Army (AA) — which is accused of human rights abuses — has seized control of at least 10 of the state’s townships since a year-long ceasefire with the military collapsed in November.

The aid officials said the junta is trying to “starve” civilians in AA-held territory, using tactics that have repeatedly been described as war crimes and crimes against humanity by UN officials and rights groups.

“The Myanmar government is committed to the equality of all citizens,” the statement said. “Every citizen has the right to travel freely without any restrictions.”

Risk of starvation

Aid workers say they don’t know the full extent of the suffering due to telecoms and internet blocks coupled with restrictions on access to affected areas.

But they say the crisis is acute.

The situation unfolding across the country is desperate, but in Rakhine — which is almost entirely dependent on food aid — the UN says that fewer than a quarter of the 873,000 people who need food assistance have received it.

“There is a very real possibility that the most vulnerable… may die if they do not receive support,” a UN report warned in June. It is now August, and the situation has deteriorated.

Prices for basic staples, like rice, fuel and cooking oil, have skyrocketed partly due to shortages created by the junta’s control of supply routes north from Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, aid officials said. Requests to transport goods, including food, into the region are being refused, they added.

Meanwhile, food production in the state has plummeted, with farmers predicting a 50% drop in this year’s rice harvest, independent Myanmar news outlet The Irrawaddy reported.

Mohammed, a 43-year-old father of three, has lived in a displacement camp with his family in Sittwe since 2012, when anti-Muslim violence forced tens of thousands of people from their homes.

The latest fighting has not yet reached Sittwe, which the junta still controls. But since the collapse of the ceasefire deal between the AA and the military in November opened a major new front in Myanmar’s civil war, the camp has been all but cut off and conditions have drastically deteriorated, he said.

Mohammed’s children attend a small, makeshift school within the camp, but he says it’s difficult to nurture their dreams when he can only feed them half a bowl of rice.

“My children would cry and ask, ‘Are we not eating tonight?’ In those moments, feeling desperate, I would go to a neighbor and ask for some food to feed our children,” Mohammed told Partners Relief and Development, an aid NGO.

Yet his neighbors are hungry too, and they have little to spare.

Access denied

“As the conflict has spread around Rakhine, we’ve also seen the destruction of roadways and bridges,” she said. “The result is, basically, no one has access to these places.”

Aid groups, including UN agencies, must get “travel authorizations” from the state government, which reports to the ruling military council, before they can access territory that the junta considers “travel-restricted areas,” according to aid officials.

In February, the junta stopped issuing nearly all travel authorizations to contested or rebel-controlled territory in the state, most of which are in northern Rakhine, according to seven aid officials with direct knowledge of the matter, all of whom requested anonymity.

Without the travel authorizations, it’s impossible to pass through the junta’s road and waterway blockades, they said.

One senior aid official said, “it is difficult to negotiate because the SAC does not want assistance to go to non-SAC controlled areas,” referring to the State Administration Council, the official name of the junta government.

In May, some aid agencies received travel authorizations for Sittwe when the junta allowed them to begin transporting supplies from Yangon. Two cargo vessels carrying rice and basic medicine arrived in Sittwe two months later, but some items such as solar lights, hygiene and newborn kits remained held up, OCHA reported in August.

Teams still can’t access the surrounding townships or areas further afield.

The UN aid officials made clear in their meetings, which have not been previously reported, that the status quo is unacceptable, the sources said. Separately, the two officials said the agency has raised the issue with the UN Security Council, the European Union and China, among others.

But “that’s a lame excuse,” said a senior aid official. “We don’t need the junta to cover for our security.”

Aid workers and officials say the junta’s blockade is part of a wider war strategy long used by the military, designed to chip away at the rebel group’s popular support by cutting off food, water and medical care to the civilian population.

Bauchner, the Human Rights Watch researcher, said the blockades are “deliberate, and they are intended to harm the population in what is an apparent war crime.”

Myint Kyaw of the junta’s information ministry, said humanitarian groups are “being allowed to go to safe areas” after completing a verification process and alleged — without evidence — that rebel groups are blocking aid deliveries.

In the statement, the junta linked instability in the region to armed groups allegedly engaging in online gambling, planting and selling illegal drugs, human trafficking, online scams and illegal weapons deliveries to “terrorist groups” in rebel-controlled areas.

Ejaz — a local aid official who works in northern Rakhine — said the junta is “punishing civilians collectively” by blocking most food and medicine imports. Even the limited food that is available in the state is prohibitively expensive to most, largely thanks to blockade-induced inflation, he said.

“People are surviving on the bare minimum … like rice and salt,” said Ejaz, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for his safety.

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

War and hunger

Many of the displaced in Rakhine are members of the stateless Rohingya minority, who have been persecuted for decades in a country that denies them citizenship.

Jamila, 26, a former resident of the predominantly Rohingya town of Buthidaung, close to the Bangladesh border, said the community recently suffered food shortages for at least six months due to the fighting.

Many shops were looted by fighters and soldiers, she said, and those still open could only get supplies by smuggling them at high prices across the border from Bangladesh.

Food supplies were also strained as droves of displaced people from surrounding villages fled to Buthidaung to escape fighting and landmines.

“Everyone was helping everyone,” she said. “I lived life with risk and hunger.”

With little food and no medicine, Jamila said her children suffered from diarrhea and vomiting. “I am suffering from allergies. My whole body is full of itching. But there is no medicine, no treatment,” she said.

In late May, the Arakan Army said it seized Buthidaung. Activists and relatives of residents accused AA soldiers of extrajudicial killings, torching and looting Rohingya neighborhoods, and forcing thousands of people to flee.

Jamila said fighters stormed her village, drenching her home in petrol and setting it on fire while she and her family were still inside.

As the flames consumed their home, they scrambled to grab what belongings they could salvage — but only those on the ground floor had time to flee. Her parents-in-law, asleep in their beds upstairs, did not make it out.

They had no time to mourn. As they ran to escape their village, the howl of gunfire rang out, and a bullet pierced her younger brother. He did not survive.

“We didn’t try to save him,” Jamila said. “We were hearing the screams of people, the cries of children.”

She walked for six days to reach Bangladesh, saying “we lived by eating banana leaves and drinking pond water.”

In a statement, the AA denied it torched Buthidaung, saying it “adheres to its principle of fighting under the military code of conduct and never targets non-military objects.”

Earlier this month, the AA was accused of killing Rohingya people in drone strikes and artillery fire as villagers fled the nearby town of Maungdaw. It denied involvement and blamed the deaths on the Myanmar military and allied Rohingya armed groups.

“Emergency responses are extremely slow. The ULA government, including HDCO, is making every effort to provide food, shelter, water, and healthcare with the limited resources available,” it said.

“The primary challenge remains the acute shortage of essential supplies, including food, non-food items, medicines, medical equipment, women’s dignity kits, agricultural products, seeds, and fuel.”

The HDCO, which said its primary focus is on data collection, emergency response, monitoring aid requirements and tracking aid distribution, said junta blockades and risk of aerial bombardments means “there are instances where we are unable to reach those in need.”

‘We are invisible’

When the junta blocks official aid deliveries, regional and local humanitarian groups use covert tactics to operate without approval from the military, risking their lives to deliver aid to those in need, according to officials at four local aid groups, all of whom declined to publicize their tactics because it could jeopardize their operations.

But it’s far from enough.

At least 18.6 million people — about one third of Myanmar’s population — need humanitarian assistance this year, but aid workers have only been able to reach 2.1 million, according to an OCHA report published last week. Even in territories that the junta does not blockade, intensifying war, record-low funding and international apathy are also limiting aid workers’ access.

Aid workers have also become targets in the junta’s war.

A World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse in Maungdaw was looted and burned in June, depriving that community of urgently needed food aid. But WFP’s local partners were already struggling to reach their warehouses in Rakhine because “artillery shells are falling everywhere,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Meanwhile, the UN’s humanitarian response program in Myanmar is among the most underfunded in the world. UN agencies and their local partners estimate that about $1 billion is needed to fund aid efforts in the country through 2024, but they have only raised about 20% of that amount.

Without an immediate injection of cash and a lifting of the blockade, aid officials say they will be forced to choose who does — and does not — receive humanitarian aid, leaving millions of desperate civilians without urgently needed assistance.

“Underfunding will result in livelihoods falling beyond the point of repair,” the OCHA report warned.

A senior UN aid official in Myanmar blamed the funding shortfall in part on international apathy. There are relatively few global advocacy groups and international news outlets consistently reporting on the country, and unlike Gaza and Ukraine, human rights abuses in Myanmar have gained little international attention, he said.

“We have become invisible,” the official said. “Donors will find it difficult to fund missions that are invisible.”

The monastery in Sittwe, where Khin Mar Cho and her family now reside, relies on food donated from the local community.

“The soldiers took all the money we had,” she said. “All we need at the moment is aid and support to survive this.”

Though his small monastery is overwhelmed with displaced people, the monk said he tries to collect more donations from the community, hoping to feed those in the compound more than small helpings of rice.

But they receive meager food donations. Adding to the dire situation, his makeshift camp is overfilled, many families are forced to sleep outside without a covering in the height of the rainy season, so sickness and diarrhea is rife, the monk said.

“There are no NGOs or medics helping them,” he said.

“The only help we get is from the fire service for their funerals.”