Ukrainian forces have launched a major new offensive in Russia's Kursk region, an area that Ukraine captured parts of over the summer but which, in the past couple of months, has been struggling to hold on amid pressure from Russian and North Korean forces.
Ukrainian and Russian officials confirmed the offensive, but the sides offered different accounts of the scale and effectiveness of the new operation.
Andrii Kovalenko, head of the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation, said on Telegram that Ukrainian troops were working to attack the Russians in several directions, and that Moscow was “in great distress” from amazing offense.
“Russia is getting what it deserves,” Andriy Yermak, chief presidential adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a short Telegram post.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has not officially commented on the Kursk attack, nor has Zelensky or the Ministry of Defense.
The Ministry of Defense of Russia said in a post on Telegram that Ukraine launched an offensive period on Sunday morning in Moscow with two tanks, a mine-clearing vehicle, and a dozen armored fighting vehicles with troops landing.
Russian officials said they had defeated the initial advance, although they said work to repel the attack was continuing.
Russian military bloggers also confirmed that a major offensive was underway, with the popular writer Rybar posting on his Telegram channel that Ukraine had entered Kursk in several forms that had been ' gathering in the Ukrainian region of Sumy, which are neighbors of Kursk.
Rybar said that Ukraine was concentrating its efforts from the city of Sudzha, which Ukraine captured in August, and further north to the Bolshesoldatsky region.
The offensive comes after Ukraine's surprise August offensive on Kursk, the first foreign attack on Russian soil since World War II, stalled and came under heavy pressure from a Russian counteroffensive backed by the thousands of North Korean soldiers.
Ukraine has lost dozens of square miles of land to the Russian counterattack and has been on the back foot in the region for over a month.
Zelensky has said that Kursk was a key strategy in the war effort, aimed at diverting Russian troops from the main fighting in eastern Ukraine while also taking prisoners, which destroyed Russia's military assets, and proved that Moscow was defenseless.
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