Moscow. Fighting in Russia’s Kursk region on the border with Ukraine continued for a second day on Wednesday, after nearly 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers, supported by artillery and missile fire and an undetermined number of tanks and armored vehicles, managed to advance nearly 10 kilometers into Russian territory on Tuesday, taking Russian border guards by surprise and approaching or entering Nikolayevo-Darino, Darino, Sverdlikovo, Oleshnia, Tolsty Lug, Nizhny Klin and Sudzha, among other towns.
This is what emerges, in summary, from what was said on Wednesday by the Russian authorities and from the reports of the so-called Z-bloggers (Russians who identify themselves with the last letter of the Latin alphabet as a distinctive sign of those who support the “special military operation” in Ukraine), who cover the hostilities on a daily and unofficial basis, many of them with military sources and from the various security agencies of Russia.
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday acknowledged the need to evacuate the population from that part of the Kursk region in view of the “large-scale provocation” being carried out by Ukraine.
“As is known, the Kiev regime has launched a new large-scale provocation. It is carrying out indiscriminate shelling with various types of weapons, including missiles, against civilian facilities, residential buildings and ambulances,” Putin said at the start of a meeting of the Russian government, broadcast on local television, and instructed Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov and Kursk Governor Aleksei Mironov to immediately coordinate all the assistance required by the inhabitants affected by the incursion from Ukraine.
The Russian president then held a closed-door meeting with the heads of the Defense Ministry, Andrei Belousov of the Federal Security Service (FSB, in charge of the border guard troops), Aleksandr Bortnikov of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, and via video conference with the Chief of the Army General Staff and head of the campaign in Ukraine, General Valeri Gerasimov.
In the report submitted by Gerasimov, according to the public part distributed by the Kremlin, the general confirmed that “on August 6, at 5:30 a.m., units of the Ukrainian army, numbering about a thousand soldiers, began an offensive with the aim of seizing part of the Sudzha district in the Kursk region.”
According to Gerasimov, the army and border guard troops “were able to stop the enemy’s advance” into Kursk and are now “continuing to annihilate the invaders in the districts bordering the Russian-Ukrainian border.”
The Russian Chief of Staff put the Ukrainian casualties at 100 dead and 215 wounded, as well as 54 armoured vehicles, including seven tanks, and said: “The operation will end with the defeat of the enemy and the recovery of our border.”
While the Ukrainian command chose to remain silent on what would be the first incursion of its military into Russian territory, the initial triumphant report by the Russian Ministry of Defense (on Tuesday) on the expulsion of enemy troops became unsustainable in the face of the alarming news spread on social networks (on Wednesday) by Z-bloggers.
Rybar, a Telegram channel close to a group of experts from the Ministry of Defense, posted that Ukrainian forces took control of the Sudzha gas metering station, which is used for the transit of blue fuel to Europe through Ukraine, and entered five towns in Kursk. Yuri Podolyaka’s World Today, who claims to be reporting from the scene, implied that Sudzha is practically surrounded, “taking into account that the enemy’s reserves are close; and ours are far away.”
Meanwhile, Semyon Pegov, the author of the WarGonzo channel, warned that “this is not a raid to take a photo and leave. This time there is a full-blown battle. The enemy has really prepared, and it should be remembered that Sudzha is not the only target of such attacks.” The pro-government political analyst Sergei Markov wrote on social media that “in the long run, we should not rule out an attack on the town of Kurchatov, where the Kursk nuclear power plant is located, located less than 50 kilometers from the border.”
It is not clear what the real objective of this incursion into Russian territory is. Unlike previous attacks, particularly in the Belgorod region, which were always claimed by paramilitary groups of Russian volunteers opposed to the Kremlin, Russia has now directly attributed the attack to the Ukrainian army.
Of all the versions circulating – showing that Russian territory is vulnerable to infantry attacks; using several of the 14 brigades that kyiv was forming as reserve troops; staying in one or several towns in Kursk for as long as possible; advancing towards the atomic power plant in the city of Kurchatov, to mention only four theoretically possible ones – military analysts are inclined to the one that seems the most sensible of all: that this attack on one of the least fortified areas of Russian territory adjacent to Ukraine, and in the absence of reserve troops nearby, could be due to a maneuver by kyiv to attract Russian forces from the front in the face of its slow but sustained advance in the Donetsk region near Chasiv Yar, Toretsk and Pokrovsk.
Moscow, it should be recalled, has been trying for weeks to break through this Ukrainian defence line and, if successful, prevent the arrival of reinforcement troops and be able to cut off supplies to the enemy army, which would facilitate approaching the next Ukrainian defence line further north that protects the key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, still within the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk region.
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– 2024-08-13 21:14:23