Ukraine carries out new offensive operations in Russia’s Kursk region

Ukrainian units launched a surprise counter-offensive in Russia’s Kursk region on Sunday morning. This is reported by both the Russian Ministry of Defense and various Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers.

According to Moscow, the Ukrainian counterattack was launched around 9 a.m. local time “to stop the advance of Russian troops in Kursk.” Two Ukrainian attacks were reportedly repulsed, the Kremlin said. The chief of staff of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Andri Jermak, also reported the Ukrainian offensive. “Kursk region, good news,” he wrote on Telegram. “Russia gets what it deserves.”

It is the first Ukrainian offensive since the armed forces crossed the Russian border in the Kursk region in early August. According to Russian reports Ukrainian units would try to advance from the occupied town of Sudzha with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to the east and northeast, including in the direction of Bolshoye Soldatskoye. That town is located about seventy kilometers southwest of the city of Kursk.

During their operation, Ukrainian forces are said to have disabled most Russian drones over the battlefield through extensive electronic warfare. According to Russian war bloggers, the fighting took place on Sunday mainly near the village of Berdin, not far from the main road leading to the regional capital Kursk.

‘Significant losses’

On Saturday, President Zelensky said in his daily speech informed the population that Russian and North Korean units had suffered heavy losses near the Russian village of Makhnovka, in the Kursk region. “This is significant.” He provided no further explanation.

Earlier in the day, the Russian Ministry of Defense had reported Ukrainian attacks with American ATACMS on Russian soil. According to Moscow, Russian air defenses intercepted eight of these missiles, which have a maximum range of three hundred kilometers. No further details about the Ukrainian attacks were released. It is also not known whether there is a connection with the Ukrainian offensive that started on Sunday morning.

It is difficult to determine the precise purpose of the latest Ukrainian operation. And whether the offensive actually leads to new territorial gains in Kursk will have to be seen in the coming days. The moment of the Ukrainian counterattack is in any case surprising, now that Moscow and Kyiv are preparing for the changing of the guard in the White House in Washington, where Donald Trump will succeed Joe Biden as American president on January 20. Just as in August, Russia now appears to have been surprised again by the Ukrainian offensive.

One of the reasons why the Ukrainian government decided to invade Kursk last summer is said to have been that Kyiv would have a stronger position with the occupation of Russian territory once negotiations with Moscow begin. It seems likely that this argument will now play a role again for Kyiv.

Rare Ukrainian offensive

The operation in Kursk was one of the rare offensive movements of the Ukrainian armed forces on the ground last summer. But since the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk, where Moscow deployed thousands of North Korean soldiers in the fall to help drive out the Ukrainian occupying forces, Russia recaptured almost half the territory that initially occupied Ukraine. At its peak, the area of ​​that occupied territory would have been 1,376 square kilometers.

It is assumed that both Moscow and Kyiv want to create the most favorable possible starting position with the latest offensive operations before Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump has consistently said that he wants to end the war between Russia and Ukraine as quickly as possible, although he has never explained how he plans to do that.

One of the bleakest scenarios for President Zelensky would be for the US to end its military support to Ukraine. Washington has been by far the most important supplier of arms and ammunition to Ukraine in recent years. But Zelensky has publicly emphasized in recent weeks that Trump’s return to the international stage offers opportunities for Ukraine.

At the end of last year, Trump appointed former General Keith Kellogg as special envoy for the war in Ukraine. Kellogg was expected to travel to Kyiv at the beginning of this month to familiarize himself with the situation in Ukraine.

Slow Russian advance

For Ukraine, a new offensive, should the plan succeed militarily, would be the first bright spot after a long period of bad news. For almost the entire year of 2024, the Ukrainian armed forces were on the defensive along the more than a thousand kilometer long front line.

In the first months of the year, Ukraine suffered from major shortages of weapons and ammunition, and in the second half of 2024 the shortage of personnel increasingly affected the Ukrainian army. In Ukraine, this also led to criticism of its own government and army leadership: according to critics, the raid in Kursk would have cost so much manpower that the defense lines in the Donbas increasingly showed cracks.

In the Donetsk region, the Russians shifted the front line tens of kilometers westward during the course of the year, even though the advance was slow and the Russians paid a huge price with heavy personnel and material losses. According to the latest Ukrainian figures Since their large-scale invasion, the Russians have lost almost eight hundred thousand soldiers – dead, wounded and missing. Independent journalists knew almost 85,000 Russian identify dead.

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