The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have launched a fresh offensive in Russia’s western Kursk region, which has been under partial Ukrainian control since August, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, announced on Sunday.
Yermak wrote that Russia would “get what’s coming for it” in the Kursk region, but did not provide any more details.
Andriy Kovalenko, the head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation at Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, confirmed that the AFU had begun a new advance in the region, which borders northern Ukraine, launching attacks on Russian positions “from several directions, which caught them by surprise”.
The new offensive was first reported by Russian pro-war bloggers and Telegram channels on Sunday morning, with pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Rybar reporting that the AFU had begun its new advance from the Russian town of Sudzha, which has been under Ukrainian control since August, and that its forces were moving further east, towards the village of Bolshoye Soldatskoye.
Capturing Bolshoye Soldatskoye would be “one of the most difficult” objectives for the AFU, according to Russian military blogger Roman Alyokhin, who wrote that the Ukrainian military was using tanks, armoured vehicles and electronic warfare techniques to render Russian drones ineffective.
The Russian Defence Ministry said that the AFU had attempted to advance to the northeast of Sudzha on Sunday morning but that the attack had been “thwarted” by the Russian army, state news agency TASS reported.
Announcing that he had met with Russian Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov on Sunday morning, acting Kursk Governor Alexander Khinshtein posted a photograph of the two standing beneath a portrait of Vladimir Putin, and though he provided no details of their meeting “for obvious reasons”, he vowed that Kursk region officials would do “everything in their power” to aid the Russian army “in their holy war against Nazism”.
On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the AFU’s August advance into the Kursk region as “a turning point” in the war, adding that its success had been a “feather in the cap” for Kyiv internationally, particularly among countries in the Global South, many of whom had previously believed Russia to be “invincible”.
Despite the initial success of the AFU’s incursion into the Kursk region on 6 August, Russian forces have continued to retake Ukrainian-held villages in the Kursk region since then in a counteroffensive that has involved North Korean troops. Meanwhile, exhausted Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region were ordered to hold the “maximum territory” possible there until US president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, the BBC reported in December.