Battles persist in Russia’s Kursk region; Ukraine said to occupy villages
KYIV – In what appears to be Ukraine’s largest incursion into Russia more than two years since Russian forces invaded the country, fighting continued for a third day in the Kursk region.
Russian military bloggers claimed Ukrainian forces had occupied several border villages and part of the town of Sudzha.
The blogger reports could not be independently verified, and Ukrainian officials for days have declined to comment on the unusual operation.
Previous Ukrainian offensives into Russia were led by anti-Putin volunteer militant groups not formally affiliated with Ukraine’s Armed Forces. However, this assault appears to involve regular Ukrainian brigades, according to Russian officials, who claimed that some 1,000 troops with armored vehicles and tanks crossed the border on Tuesday from Ukraine’s Sumy region.
Video posted by a pro-war Russian Telegram channel purported to show U.S.-provided Stryker fighting vehicles near Ukraine’s border with Kursk as part of the incursion. The Washington Post could not independently verify the video.
Though the White House has recently permitted Kyiv to use donated weapons to strike Russian forces at some points across the border, taking U.S.-supplied fighting vehicles into Russia is still prohibited as a condition of Ukraine receiving the weapons. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said Washington is reaching out to the Ukrainian military to learn more about the operation and its objectives.
Ukraine has not yet been criticized by Washington for the cross-border assault, said an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Ukraine now controls a gas metering station about five miles inside Russia, the adviser said.
Some analysts speculated that Kyiv’s goal could be to turn off all Russian gas deliveries to Europe as a leveraging point. On Thursday, gas was still flowing through Sudzha, the last operational shipping point for a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine. Ukraine earns lucrative transit fees but has expressed a desire to cut off Russia’s remaining energy business in Europe.
Russia’s National Guard said it had beefed up security around the Kursk nuclear power station, about 40 miles northeast of the town.
“Ultimately, the decisions about how Ukraine conducts its military operations are decisions that Ukraine makes,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday.
Russia’s most senior military commander, chief of general staff Valery Gerasimov, told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that the Ukrainian offensive had been halted. The Defense Ministry said Thursday that Russia had used half-ton airdropped bombs to attack Ukrainian forces in the Russian region.
But Russian military bloggers painted a drastically different picture, criticizing Russian forces for not better fortifying the border and lamenting the town of Sudzha as lost to the surprise Ukrainian invaders now turning the tables on their occupiers.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, suggested on the country’s national television news broadcast that any military actions on the Russian territory could better Ukraine’s position during future negotiations with Russia to end the war. He did not comment on the Kursk incursion specifically.
Podolyak wrote on the social media platform X on Thursday that Russia “has consistently believed that restrictive legal norms do not apply to it, thus it can attack neighboring countries’ territories with impunity and hypocritically demand … the inviolability of its own territory. War is war, with its own rules, where the aggressor inevitably reaps corresponding outcomes.”
Military analysts questioned why Kyiv would choose to open a new area of the front when its forces have been steadily losing ground in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk.
Russian forces have advanced around the strategic hub of Pokrovsk – a key transit point that connects other cities in the Donetsk region to the large city of Dnipro just two hours west.
While Ukraine might be trying to divert forces from the east to defend its new offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, Russia already has more personnel and maneuverability than Ukraine. Kyiv has been mobilizing thousands of troops in recent months in a ramped-up conscription campaign, but those recruits need to undergo weeks of training before reaching the battlefield.
Ukrainian officials have expressed some sense of urgency to better their military position before the U.S. presidential elections in November. The last tranche of American security assistance was held up for more than six months by Republicans in Congress – a signal that future military aid is not guaranteed, especially if GOP nominee Donald Trump wins office. Trump has said that he would quickly push the two sides to reach a negotiated settlement of the war.
With the situation in the area apparently still volatile, and Kyiv bracing for Russian reprisals, Ukrainian officials ordered the evacuation of about 6,000 people from the Sumy region.
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Serhiy Morgunov in Kyiv, John Hudson and Alex Horton in Washington, and Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.