Ukrainian troops withdrew all except a little ground in the Russian Kursk region, according to military analysts and soldiers, while their time campaign to grasp and occupy the Russian territory seems to approach the end of the counterattacks of Moscow.
At the height of the offensive, the Ukrainian forces controlled some 500 square miles of Russian territory. On Sunday, they clung to a narrow strip of land along the Russian-Ukrainian border, barely covering 30 square miles, according to Pasi Paroinen, military analyst of Black Bird Group, based in Finland.
“The end of the battle is coming,” said Paroinen in a telephone interview.
The amount of the Russian territory still under Ukrainian control could not be confirmed independently, and the soldiers reported fierce fighting in the region. But in the midst of a rapid Russian advance supported by implacable air strikes and assaults of drones, Ukrainian troops during last week withdrew from several villages in the Kursk region as well as from Sudzha, the main city under their control.
Ukrainian military command said That the troops had brought back what she described as a more defensible terrain inside Russia along the border, using hilly land to obtain better control of fire on the approach of Russian forces. Saturday, he published a Battlefield map showing the earth ribbon that Ukraine still controls in the Kursk region.
But it is not known how long the Ukrainian forces can keep this patch.
Continuous fighting in Kursk now targets Russian territory, Ukrainian soldiers said, and more to control the best defensive positions to prevent Russians from pushing in the Ukraine Sumy region and opening a new front in the war.
“We continue to occupy positions on the Kursk front,” said Boroda, a commander of the assault platoon, who asked to be identified only by his call signal, Boroda. “The only difference is that our positions were much closer to the border.”
While the Ukrainian retirement of the majority of the Kursk region was rapid, military experts said that this came after months of Russian assault and bombing that regularly eroded the plate of Ukraine in the region and broke its supply routes, finally forcing withdrawal.
“What has happened in recent months is a formatting operation that has established the conditions for a successful push,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, an Austrian military analyst who visited the Ukrainian Sumy region on the border with Kursk last month to speak with Ukrainian commanders.
From December, the Russian forces, reinforced by newly deployed North Korean troops, launched repeated attacks against the flanks of the bulge owned by the Ukrainian in the Kursk region. In mid-February, they had advanced less than five miles from the main reappointment routes from Ukraine in Sudzha, allowing them to target the roads with swarms of drones.
At the end of last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had resumed Sudzha; On Saturday, he said that the Russian forces had taken up two villages in front of the city.
Unlike previous pensions by the kyiv forces elsewhere, as in certain parts of East Ukraine, military analysts said that what had happened in Kursk was relatively ordered and did not lead to the encirclement of a large number of troops – despite the contrary to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Trump.
“There was no threat to encircling Ukrainian troops, and no evidence suggests the opposite,” said Serhii Kuzan, president of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a non -governmental research group.
Kyiv had hoped to use his control over Russian land in Kursk as a lever effect in any negotiation to end the war. Ukraine has agreed to support a one-month-old cease-fire supported by the United States as long as Russia does the same. The Kremlin has not yet agreed and seemed to extend the negotiations on the cease-fire that Washington and kyiv proposed last week by presenting conditions.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East who also acted as an interlocutor of Russia, he expected the president to speak with Mr. Putin this week on Sunday. Witkoff said he had a positive meeting with Mr. Putin last week, which lasted three to four hours. He refused to share the details of their conversation, but said that it was optimistic that an agreement was at hand.
Who came after the State Department says it Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey V. Lavrov, of Russia, spoke by telephone on Saturday “next steps”, without providing more details.
Nataliya Vasilyeva And Tyler Pager Contributed reports.
