By Andrew Osborn and Anastasiia Malenko
LONDON/KYIV (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops who smashed into Russia last summer and took control of a swathe of territory there are nearly encircled by Russian forces and cut off from their main supply lines, open source maps showed on Friday.
Ukraine’s situation in Russia’s Kursk region has deteriorated sharply in the last three days, the same maps show, after Russian forces retook territory as part of a gathering counteroffensive that has nearly cut the Ukrainian force in two.
The precarious situation for Ukraine raises the possibility that its forces may be forced into a politically awkward and psychologically difficult retreat back into Ukraine, or risk being captured or killed at a time when Kyiv is under mounting pressure from the U.S. to agree a ceasefire with Russia.
“The situation (for Ukraine) is very bad,” Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group, told Reuters.
“Now there is not much left until Ukrainian forces will either be encircled or forced to withdraw. And withdrawal would mean running a dangerous gauntlet, where the forces would be constantly threatened by Russian drones and artillery,” he said.
“If Ukrainian forces are not able to restore the situation quickly, this could be the moment where the Kursk salient begins to finally close into an encircled pocket.”
There was no official confirmation of the Russian thrust from the Russian Defence Ministry or the Ukrainian military, both of which tend to report battlefield changes with a delay.
TAKING WAR TO RUSSIA
Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk last August was the most serious attack on Russian territory since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and was designed to bring the war to ordinary Russians, whom the Kremlin had tried to shield from the fallout from the fighting raging inside Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said it was also aimed at trying to ease pressure on Ukrainian troops defending their own country from Russian forces in the east by forcing Moscow to divert resources to defend its own territory, and at giving Kyiv a potential bargaining chip in future peace talks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said his forces would regain full control of Kursk by force and rejected any idea of making it part of wider future talks.
Open source mapping from Deep State, an authoritative Ukrainian military blogging resource, showed on Friday that around three-quarters of the Ukrainian force inside Russia had now been almost completely encircled.
It showed they were joined to the remaining Ukrainian force located closer to the Russian border by a land corridor around 1 km long and less than 500 metres wide at its narrowest point as Russian forces move to cut that off too.
Deep State said late on Thursday that Russian forces had advanced near the nearby settlement of Kuryilovka. Yuri Podolyak, an influential Russian war blogger, said Russian forces had broken through south of Sudzha, a Russian town located inside the nearly surrounded pocket.
“The Russian Armed Forces have driven a deep wedge (up to 4 kilometres deep) and actually reached the alternative supply route to Sudzha (which the enemy was using because the main road could not be used),” Podolyak wrote on his Telegram channel.
Ukraine’s General Staff said on Friday that its armed forces had repelled 32 Russian attacks in the Kursk region over the past day.
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn in London and Anastasiia Malenko in Kyiv; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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