Russian troops are close to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, where they grabbed a chunk of land last August and have held on to it through more than seven months of fierce fighting.
Where is Kursk and what’s happening there?
Kursk is a part of western Russia that borders the Sumy region of Ukraine. On August 6 last year, Ukraine sprang one of the biggest surprises of the war when its troops smashed across the frontier and captured a piece of territory that it said measured 1,376 sq km (530 sq miles) at its peak and included about 100 towns and villages.
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Since then, Russian forces and troops from Moscow’s ally North Korea have clawed back close to 90 per cent of that land.
President Vladimir Putin visited Kursk on Wednesday in a sign of confidence that Russia is close to recapturing the entire region, and ordered his top commander to finish the job as soon as possible. Ukraine’s top army commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on Wednesday that Kyiv’s troops would keep operating in Kursk as long as needed and that fighting continued in and around the town of Sudzha.
What did the Kursk offensive mean for Ukraine?
The territory that Ukraine captured was a small fraction of the area that Russia has captured in Ukraine since 2014, which amounts to about a fifth of the country. But the operation provided Ukraine with its biggest gains since late 2022 and delivered a massive morale boost: after 2 1/2 years of fending off Russia’s invasion, it had stunned its enemy by launching an invasion of its own.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of “restoring justice”, bringing the war home to ordinary Russians and making a mockery of Putin’s attempts to set “red lines” to deter adversaries.
Ukraine hoped the operation would slow Russia’s advances in eastern Ukraine by forcing it to divert troops to the defence of Kursk – although this did not happen, and Russia’s gains in the east only accelerated.
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Zelensky also saw Kursk as a bargaining chip that he said as recently as last month could potentially be traded for Ukrainian territory under Russian control.