When Wagner Group paramilitaries marched into Rostov-on-Don on Saturday, many residents responded by offering food and water. In one video, a young woman offers a soldier masked in a balaclava and wielding an assault rifle a packet of crackers. When asked why, she answers, “It’s a humane thing. They look tired.”

Those soldiers must be tired, and now their future is even more uncertain. The ones who participated in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup will escape prosecution because of their “heroic deeds on the front,” according to the Kremlin, while those Wagner paramilitaries who didn’t participate will be offered Russian Defence Ministry contracts. Although Prigozhin was able to negotiate a safe exit from Russia (at least for now), an early casualty of this coup seems to be the Wagner Group itself; Vladimir Putin is unlikely to keep it intact.

Over the course of a single weekend, Prigozhin and Putin have jointly done what the Ukrainian military and its NATO allies have failed to achieve in 18 months of war: They’ve removed Russia’s single most effective fighting force from the battlefield. Wagner Group fighters have, since 2014, combatted a long line of adversaries including the Ukrainian armed forces, the Free Syrian Army, the Libyan army, and even elements of the U.S. armed forces. Although many of those Wagner Group fighters may now be folded into the regular Russian military, their power will be forever diluted.

Wagner’s potency was derived both from its experience as a fighting organization and from its status as a private entity, one that has operated apart from the state. The grief of a mother mourning the death of her mercenary son doesn’t resonate politically the same as the grief of a mother mourning the death of her conscripted son. One is an employee in a private enterprise; the other is the responsibility of the nation. Outsourcing dirty wars to mercenaries is a practice as old as war itself. If it checks political costs at home in the short term, it increases long-term political risk. When loyalty to a commander eclipses loyalty to the side for which the soldiers are fighting, the result is a mercenary army that marches on its capital—as Putin has just seen.

Up to this point, Putin’s pathway to victory in Ukraine has relied on a strategy of attrition, both of Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield and of the political will of Ukraine’s allies. The most effective tool Putin had for the former has now ceased to exist. When it comes to the latter, before this weekend, Putin seemed to have a chance at sustaining his war in Ukraine longer than the West could sustain its interest; this was a strategy he pursued effectively in Syria. But the loss of the Wagner Group necessitates that Putin rely wholly on the Russian military. This reduces his ability to insulate the Russian population from the costs of war, diminishing the political space for such an approach.

Authoritarians aren’t the only heads of state fixated on the costs of war. We’ve all heard the term boots on the ground. It’s a fixation among American leaders in times of war. The Pentagon even bestowed an acronym on this concept, BOG, pronounced “bog,” as if it correlates with getting “bogged down” in a war. American presidents have long relied on special-operations forces, CIA paramilitary forces, and mercenary forces like Blackwater to reduce the U.S. military’s footprint in countries where we’ve been at war. But the stakes are different for democratically elected leaders. Unlike in authoritarian nations, the cost of a lost war for a president is likely a lost election, not the loss of his life.

We live in an age of rising authoritarianism. Those authoritarians have little respect for international order, and wish to redraw maps. This has made Ukraine a global, not a regional, concern. The greatest current authoritarian regime is China, and the ease or difficulty that Russia faces in Ukraine today informs the decisions that President Xi Jinping might make tomorrow in Taiwan. The biggest threat to any authoritarian is one from within. An autocrat considers his decision to wage war alongside his appreciation for whether that war will consolidate or weaken his power. Putin’s troubles in Ukraine are already a cautionary tale for autocrats the world over. This latest chapter highlights the existential threat from within that hired armies pose. Strategists in Beijing, Tehran, and elsewhere will likely be redrafting aspects of their war plans.

But there’s still an actual war going on in Ukraine, and it isn’t over because Putin is facing a political crisis. Ukraine is in the middle of a summer offensive. It’s still early, but gains in that offensive have thus far proved underwhelming. Even if Ukraine hasn’t yet retaken meaningful swaths of territory, it’s taken back something every bit as important: the strategic initiative. The strain Ukrainians placed on Prigozhin’s forces in Bakhmut, Kherson, and a host of other places contributed to this rebellion, and this rebellion is again placing the Ukrainians in the driver’s seat of the war.

Prigozhin ostensibly turned against Putin and marched on Moscow because of the insufficient support of the Russian military. In the opening hours of the coup, he said, “Those who destroyed our lads, who destroyed the lives of many tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, will be punished.” The coup attempt we’ve just witnessed was a profound punishment for Putin and Russia. In this regard, Prigozhin was successful. The question we should all be asking now is how to capitalize on Prigozhin’s success.

The Chonhar road bridge is damaged but there are no casualties, Russian-appointed officials in Kherson and Crimea say.

The bridge linking the peninsula to Kherson in the south was hit by British missiles, say officials.

A 28-year-old Ukrainian medic, Helena Popova, traveled from Lutsk to Kherson last Friday to help victims of the flood caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. She went “just to stay sane,” she told me. Across the Dnipro River, in her hometown of Oleshky, thousands of people, including her parents, younger sister, and grandfather, urgently needed food, evacuation, and medical attention.

There Oleshky was, less than ten miles away from her, across an expanse of river and floodwater. The Dnipro was the front line, and Oleshky sat on the Russian-controlled side. When Ukrainian boats tried to ferry help from the right bank to the left, the Russians opened fire. After a day of work in the Ukrainian-controlled area, Popova was soaking wet in her shorts and T-shirt. Now she stood in the rain, looking desolately across the water to where her loved ones lay beyond reach.

That Ukrainians can’t get help to their friends and family in the Russian-held flood zone is tragic but not surprising. Less explicable is the failure of international aid organizations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have been conspicuously absent from the Dnipro’s left bank. A little more than a week ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his dismay at the agencies’ nonappearance: “They aren’t here; we have not had a response.”

[Anne Applebaum: The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

The trouble, as volunteers like Popova know, is that crossing the Dnipro is manifestly dangerous. On Tuesday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs explained that Russia had “yet to provide the safety guarantees we need to cross the front line to the left bank of the Dnipro, including to Oleshky.” As a UN representative, Saviano Abreu, said to me, “Our priority is to keep negotiating.” But assurances from Russia are not forthcoming.

For Ukrainian volunteers who have been delivering food and rescuing people and animals for the past week, the UN’s timidity is maddening. Unsafe conditions have not stopped local efforts, at a cost in lives: On Sunday, Russia fired on a Ukrainian rescue boat, killing three people. In the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, volunteers supply water and food and have evacuated thousands of victims; still, at least 10 people have died and 40 are missing. Kherson victims told volunteers that their houses filled with water in mere minutes.

At the pace the UN and the ICRC are moving, “it will be too late to rescue people soon,” says Roman Timofeyev, the manager of the Ukrainian Rescue Now foundation, whose 56 social workers and more than 100 volunteers help war victims.

The Russian-controlled side of the river has likely fared worse than the Ukrainian-controlled side. Popova has kept a haunting recording of the last phone call she had with her parents and 12-year-old sister, Vika, on June 6, the day the dam exploded. The family was walking through chest-deep water, and Vika screamed into the phone: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to sink!” Her 70-year-old grandfather was trapped on an upper floor of a house whose first floor was entirely underwater. Popova’s mother told her: “People were on their roofs, screaming ‘Help, help!’ but nobody came.”

The Khutorishe neighborhood of Oleshky saw water levels rise above 16 feet and completely submerge the roofs of some single-story houses. One witness I spoke with on Saturday said that the current in her street was too powerful for even good swimmers to fight. She saw a neighbor die. Those who have made it out of the flood zone have taken their places in endless lines to collect humanitarian aid, Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told me on Tuesday. There is not nearly enough to go around. “It is a catastrophe,” Gorbunova told me. “Nobody evacuates these poor people.”

[David Patrikarakos: Inside Ukraine’s nonviolent resistance: chatbots, yellow paint, and payoffs]

The slow work and scant presence of deep-pocketed international aid organizations has become the subject of bitter commentary in Ukraine. In one popular meme, the word useless is superimposed on a photograph of UN SUVs parked in Kyiv. Oleksandr Mosiako, the head of communications for the Ukrainian Rapid Response Group, sent me photographs he had taken himself of six UN SUVs. “These vehicles are prepared to drive in water more than a meter deep. But they have been parked for several months in the center of Kyiv, near a five-star hotel,” he told me. “They are useless.”

Michael Bociurkiw, a Ukraine analyst at the Atlantic Council, says that the international organizations’ response betrays “shameful indifference.” That there has been no rescue mission to the occupied territory in the full week since the dam attack is bad enough; in addition, he told me, “some world players do not dare to come out even with clear and strong statements that would condemn this new Russian war crime.”

Many Ukrainians distrusted the UN and ICRC even before this disaster. They see the agencies as adopting a posture of neutrality that prizes dialogue with Russia over the protection of Ukrainians. In April, UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Moscow to discuss humanitarian concerns in Ukraine with Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The visit played very poorly with the Ukrainian public, as did Lavrov’s subsequent visit to UN headquarters in New York City. Peter Maurer, the president of the ICRC, traveled to Moscow in the midst of the battle for Kyiv last year as a “neutral, impartial humanitarian actor.” Many Ukrainians rejected the suggestion that a humanitarian actor could be impartial in a conflict where one side had invaded its neighbor and was shelling civilians.

[Read: How Can Individual People Most Help Ukraine?]

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has autonomous naitonal organizations across the globe and involves the work of more than 10 million people. The Russian Red Cross, established in 1867, is one such society that could be rescuing victims in flooded areas of the Kherson region. But if it has done so, it has kept its efforts quiet; its website reports no such operation, and its representatives have not responded to requests for comment. A Human Rights Watch report released this week said that Russian authorities started conducting “sporadic evacuations” from Oleshky almost a week after the catastrophe.   

The Ukrainian Red Cross Society has been active in relief efforts since the start of the war, having distributed 8,800,656 kits of humanitarian aid and evacuated 308,338 civilians. But its members often find that ordinary Ukrainians confuse them with the ICRC and misdirect their outrage.

With regard to the flood victims, Anton Dubovyk, a coordinator’s assistant at the Mykolaiv branch of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, does not think that the criticism of the ICRC’s slow reaction is entirely fair. “The ICRC has no access to Oleshky,” he told me. “They cannot hire tanks, helicopters, or armored boats to storm into Oleshky and rescue people.” His organization is doing what can be done, he said: “We have been providing medical care, humanitarian aid, and transportation for hundreds of evacuees of the Kherson region on this side of the river.”

According to Ukrainian reports, Oleshky, a town of 25,000 people, is currently 90 percent underwater. Other low-lying settlements in the Kherson region are in a similar situation. Every day now, Popova boards rubber boats, or aluminum motorboats that foreign NGOs have provided, and helps dress the wounds of flood victims, many of them farmers.

As the days go by without word from her family, she grows mystified by the purpose of international aid groups that seem so easily stymied by the conditions of war.

“This is a painful matter,” she told me. “Here we all count only on each other.”

In an interview, the 46-year-old who worked in logistics before the war said he learned to play the clarinet at a music school as a youth, then took up the saxophone during the coronavirus pandemic.

With humanitarian and ecological disasters still unfolding after the Karkovka dam collapse, tens of thousands of people have been deprived of drinking water, many are homeless and crops are ruined.

Less than a week ago, the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine collapsed following several explosions, releasing huge volumes of water from its reservoir. The dam sits on the frontline between warring armies, and was under Russian control at the time. The government of Ukraine blames the destruction—and the resulting disaster—on Russia, while Russia has claimed that Ukrainian attacks were the cause. The water level in the Kakhovka Reservoir was at a 30-year high, and the destruction downstream has continued, reportedly killing at least 10 residents and forcing thousands along the Dnipro River to evacuate in the midst of an ongoing war—with Ukraine and Russia accusing each other of shelling the Kherson region while rescue work was underway.

Those in occupied areas are reportedly trapped in floodwaters as Ukrainians in Kyiv-controlled Kherson receive help.

Russian shelling kills at least one person as residents flee floods caused by the Ukraine dam breach.

Groups calling themselves the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps have launched raids inside Russia. Drones have flown over Moscow, damaging what may be the homes of Russian intelligence officers and buzzing the Kremlin itself. Unusually intense fighting has been reported this week in several parts of eastern Ukraine, with completely different versions of events provided by Russians and Ukrainians. Conflicts have also been reported between the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group and the soldiers of the regular Russian army.

What does it all mean? That the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

In a week that also marks the 79th anniversary of D-Day, we should note the many ways in which this military action does not, and probably will not, resemble the Normandy landing. Perhaps at some point there will be a lot of Ukrainian troops massed in one place, taking huge casualties—or perhaps not. Perhaps there will be a galvanized, coordinated Russian military response—or perhaps the response will look more like it did on Tuesday, when a dam that was under direct Russian control collapsed, leading to the inundation of southern Ukraine. Nor was that the only disaster: A series of smaller man-made floods has also washed over Russian-occupied territories in the past few days.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

This counteroffensive will also look different from the D-Day movies, because Ukraine’s goals are not merely military. Yes, Ukrainian troops are probing Russian defenses up and down the 1,000-kilometer front line. Yes, the Ukrainians are conducting “shaping operations,” hitting ammunition dumps and other targets behind Russian lines. Yes, Ukraine wants to take back territory lost since February 2022, as well as territory lost in 2014. Yes, we know the Ukrainians can do it, because they’ve done it before. They fought the Russians out of northern Ukraine at the very beginning of the war. They recaptured Russian-held parts of the Kharkiv district in September, and the city of Kherson a couple of months later.

But in addition to taking back land, they are also conducting a sort of psychological shaping operation: They have to convince the Russian elite that the war was a mistake and that Russia can’t win it, not in the short term and not in the long term, either. Toward this end, they are also seeking to convince ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they thought, that the war is nearer to their own homes than they believed, and that President Vladimir Putin isn’t as wise as they imagined. And the Ukrainians have to do all of this without a full-scale invasion of Russia, without occupying Moscow, and without a spectacular Russian surrender in Red Square.

The anti-Putin Russians fighting in Russia are part of that battle. This group, which seems to contain some authentic Russian extremists and some authentic opponents of Putin (but may also contain Ukrainians pretending to be Russian extremists or opponents of Putin), does have a military purpose. These incursions can help neutralize the immediate border zone, and draw Russian troops away from more important battles. The group’s leaders appear to have killed a senior Russian officer and are said to have taken prisoners.

But they, too, are part of a different game. As one of the group’s members (nickname “Caesar”) told The New York Times, they aim to provide “a demonstration to the people of Russia that it is possible to create resistance and fight against the Putin regime inside Russia.” By their very existence, they prove that apathy is not mandatory, that the Russian nation is not unified, and that no one is secure just because they live inside the borders of Russia.  

[Tom Nichols: The world awaits Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

The drones in Moscow could have the same effect. I don’t know who launched them—Ukrainian special forces, Russian saboteurs, or Ukrainian special forces pretending to be Russian saboteurs. But the effect is the same: They show Muscovites that no one is untouchable, not even the residents of the Kremlin. Maybe they won’t persuade people to “create resistance and fight against the Putin regime,” but they might help persuade people to start thinking about what comes next.

And indeed, some people are clearly thinking about what comes next. Although no evidence indicates that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries, is actively trying to eliminate Putin, he does seem to be part of a competition to replace him, should the Russian president accidentally fall out a window. During an interview Monday, he mocked the luxurious life of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s daughter, implied that Shoigu himself is lazy, and described the chief of the general staff throwing “paranoid tantrums, yelling and squealing at anyone surrounding him.” We are, he said, “two months away from the firing squads”—by which he meant the firing squads that will eliminate these degenerate leaders. One Russian officer who said he had been captured and interrogated by the Wagner group issued a statement claiming that Prigozhin’s men were threatening and humiliating Russian soldiers. Prigozhin, in turn, says the regular Russian army opened fire on his mercenaries and left land mines to obstruct their movement.

In this context, the destruction not just of the big dam on the Dnipro River but of other dams and waterways all across occupied Ukraine has a clear purpose. Floods create chaos, forcing the Ukrainian state to care for evacuees. They put large, unexpected bodies of water between the Ukrainians and Russian forces, making it impossible to move equipment. These actions also send a psychological message: We will do anything—anything—to stop you. We don’t care how it looks. We don’t care who it damages. Confirmed reports say that the Russian occupation regime is not rescuing people stranded on the roof of their house by the flood, and that the Russian army is shelling people engaged in rescue operations. Russian soldiers have also drowned, Ukrainian spokespeople believe. An army that was willing to waste tens of thousands of men in the pointless nine-month battle of Bakhmut is unlikely to care.

Remember that all of this—the weird psyops, the exploded dam, the Russian infighting—has unfolded even before anyone has reliably spotted the Western-trained, Western-equipped Ukrainian brigades that are meant to lead this counteroffensive. On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced with great fanfare that it had destroyed some of this equipment, including a German Leopard 2 tank. Hours later, Russian bloggers examined the video clips they produced. Alas, the objects destroyed seem to be not Leopard tanks but John Deere tractors. Future reports from the Russian ministry should be treated with caution.

Future reports from any source should be treated with caution. What we can see is not the “fog of war,” in the old-fashioned sense; instead it is a kind of swirling tornado, a maelstrom of claims and counterclaims, memes and countermemes, real battles taking place away from television screens and fake ones happening on camera. The Normandy landings were followed by a long, bloody Allied slog through France, which no one back home watched in real time. The certainty that D-Day was a true turning point emerged only in retrospect. This Ukrainian counteroffensive is, so far, disappointing fans of panoramic drama, set-piece battles, and heroic tales. Those might, or might not, come later. In the meantime, remember that the true purpose of the counteroffensive is not your entertainment.