A senior military commander says Russian forces have launched a major counteroffensive in Kursk, claiming gains in some territory seized by Ukrainian forces last month.
Major General Apti Alaudinov, speaking to Russia’s TASS news agency on Wednesday, said the campaign has successfully pushed Ukrainian troops out of “about 10 settlements” they had captured in the western region.
“The situation is good for us,” Alaudinov, who commands Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces who are fighting in Kursk, was quoted by TASS as saying.
Alaudinov’s claims were echoed by several pro-Russian war bloggers reporting on the Russian counteroffensive in Kursk.
Influential blogger Yuri Podolyaka said Russian forces had taken several villages on the west of the sliver of Russia that Ukraine had taken, pushing Ukrainian forces to the east of the Malaya Loknya River south of Snagost.
The statements could not be independently verified, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday said Moscow’s troops had “launched counter-offensive actions.”
Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv, Zelensky did not provide details on the extent of Russian operations, but said the incursion was still “going in line with our Ukrainian plan”.
The battlefield claims come a month after Ukrainian forces waged the biggest foreign attack on Russia since World War II, smashing through the border into Kursk aided with swarms of drones, heavy weaponry and artillery, some Western-made.
Zelenskyy said the attack was an attempt to bring the war to Russia, to force Putin to peace and to carve out a buffer zone to prevent Russian attacks on the neighbouring Sumy region.
As of last week, he said Ukrainian forces were in control of 100 settlements in the region, spanning an area of more than 1,300 sq km (500 sq miles).
However, Ukraine’s surprise assault in western Russia did little to reverse Moscow’s gains in eastern Ukraine, with Russian forces steadily advancing in the war-battered Donbas region.
Speaking on state TV Tuesday, Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu said Russian forces had only accelerated their offensive in Donbas since August, seizing some 1,000 sq km (386 sq miles) since then.
Shoigu, who sits at the heart of Kremlin policymaking on the Security Council, added that Moscow would not negotiate with Kyiv so long as its forces were on Russian soil, a position he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin also holds.
