What is happening with Ukraine’s incursion into Russia, and how far has it got?
Ukraine launched a surprise incursion with armour and infantry into the Kursk and Belgorod regions of Russia on August 6th, involving thousands of troops amounting to 14 brigades. While initial details of the attack were murky, both Kyiv and Moscow have acknowledged the operation.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, claimed on Monday that Ukraine now controlled about 1,000sq km of the region. The claim was largely confirmed on the Russian side. Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of the Kursk region, told Russian president Vladimir Putin earlier this week that Ukrainian forces controlled 28 Russian settlements, including towns and villages up to 30km inside Russia. Smirnov said 121,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in the Kursk region, while 11,000 had been evacuated from Belgorod region.
Has Ukraine faced any sort of resistance?
While Ukraine has previously launched numerous small incursions and sabotage raids into Russian border regions, the scale of this incursion caught Moscow off guard and it initially struggled to respond to the attack.
Moscow has since announced a sweeping counter operation in Kursk and two other border regions. The Russian ministry for defence said last Sunday that its forces were fighting Ukrainian troops “in the areas of the settlements of Tolpino, Zhuravli and Obshchy Kolodez”.
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The Russian defence ministry said its forces had also blocked an attempt by Ukrainian mobile groups to forge deep into Russian territory near Kauchuk.
The Russian ally Belarus has also said it was increasing its own troop numbers at its border after claiming Ukraine had entered its airspace with drones.
What is Ukraine’s motivation?
While the Ukrainian operation is under tight secrecy, and its goals remain unclear, the advance brings Kyiv’s forces closer to key supply lines inside Russia supporting Moscow’s ongoing offensive in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the incursion was designed “to put pressure on the aggressor Russia” and push “the war into the aggressor’s territory”. Zelenskiy said thousands of strikes on Ukraine’s territory launched from Russia’s Kursk region deserved a fair response.
Putin said the attack appeared to reflect Kyiv’s attempt to achieve a better negotiating position in possible future talks to end the war. He added that Ukraine might have hoped the attack would cause public unrest in Russia, but it had failed to do so. Putin claimed the number of volunteers to join the Russian military had increased because of the assault.
Russia’s main task, Putin said, was to “drive the enemy out of our territories and, together with the border service, to ensure reliable cover of the state border”.