Russian forces are trying to cross the border and gain a foothold in Ukraine’s Sumy province as they press ahead with a counteroffensive aiming to eliminate the last of Kyiv’s position in the Russian Kursk region.
A Ukrainian state border guard spokesperson, Andrii Demchenko, told national television that Russian forces were trying to advance around the Ukrainian village of Novenke and cut off supply lines.
“These are small assault units, composed of a few people. They try to penetrate our territory, accumulate forces, and advance further into Ukraine, probably to cut off logistical routes,” he said.
The Russian efforts indicate that Moscow does not want to halt its counteroffensive at the national border, should it manage to recapture the rest of the shrinking Ukrainian pocket around the village of Sudzha.
Though Moscow has been trying to expel the Ukrainian forces since August, after Kyiv seized about 1,000 sq km of Russian territory in a surprise attack, one expert group noted its rate of success had dramatically improved in the past few days.
“Russian forces are collapsing the northern part of the Ukrainian salient in Kursk oblast,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote on Sunday night, before suggesting that the change in frontline position may be linked to the withdrawals of US support for Ukraine announced by the White House last week.
“The temporal correlation between the suspension of US intelligence sharing with Ukraine and the start of Russia’s collapse of the Ukrainian Kursk salient is noteworthy,” the ISW said, though it acknowledged the conclusion was tentative, and based on emerging observations.
Russia operations are reported to have intensified on Thursday and Friday last week, a day after the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, publicly confirmed that the US had stopped sharing intelligence – principally real-time surveillance and reconnaissance data, considered particularly useful in dynamic battlefield situations – with Ukraine.
On Friday, Donald Trump, the US president, noted that Russia was “bombing the hell out of Ukraine” and taking advantage of Kyiv’s weakness in the absence of US intelligence. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was “hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them”, adding “probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now”.
Moscow’s forces are making heavy use of “fibre-optic drones” in Kursk – small craft that are coordinated by a thin high-speed cable which is resistant to electronic jamming, according to a soldier who spoke to Ukraine’s Suspilne public broadcaster. “The situation is not developing in our favour,” they added.
Ukraine has lost more than two-thirds of the territory it controlled inside Russia in the summer, but on Monday, Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said there was “no threat of encirclement” and that he had taken a decision to reinforce his army’s forces in the area.
He insisted in a social media post that the border region was “under the control of the Ukrainian defense forces” – though some units in the area were “taking timely measures to manoeuvre to favourable defence lines”. Russian forces had lost a battalion of troops in the past four days by trying to advance, he added.
It would “make sense for Russia to push forward and do what they can while Ukraine is at a disadvantage”, said Keir Giles, an analyst at the Chatham House thinktank, emphasising that he expected Moscow to press on into Ukraine’s Sumy region if its forces are able to close up the Sudzha pocket.
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Both sides recognise the fight for territory is acute at the moment, because the US is trying to force Ukraine into peace talks with Russia. The US hopes to persuade both sides into agreeing a ceasefire on the current frontlines, and some sort of acceptance by Ukraine of the reality of Russian occupation.
Ukraine originally launched its incursion into Kursk in August partly to show it was still capable of mounting effective attacks after its failed offensives of 2023 – but also to take Russian prisoners and to give it a territorial negotiating chip in any peace talks to end the conflict.
The initial success of the effort was a boost to Ukraine’s morale and its credibility among its western backers, but raised questions about whether it was wise to divert scarce resources away from the eastern Donbas region at a time when Russia was making gains towards Pokrovsk.
If Ukraine were to lose the remainder of the salient in the coming days, Kyiv would have been left, having mounted a risky operation without having a foothold on Russian territory, at a time when peace talks actually took place. But some analysts argued that did not mean the effort was not worthwhile.
“It reminded people that Ukraine had offensive potential and they held on to the pocket for a remarkable amount of time” said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare expert with the Royal United Services Institute thinktank. “I hesitate to say it wasn’t worth the attempt, and it had a shaping effect on Russian thinking.”
About 12,000 North Korean soldiers joined the fighting in Kursk on Russia’s side, taking heavy casualties, estimated by Ukraine at 4,000, during fighting in the autumn and winter. But a fresh influx has returned to the battlefield during the latest counteroffensive and are now making gains against outnumbered Ukrainian defenders.
Giles said “the rationales were valid” for Ukraine’s attack on Kursk at the time, arguing there was a high value to holding on to Russian territory, as well as capturing prisoners for exchange and disrupting a potential attack from Moscow into the Sumy region. “But what nobody could have foreseen is the determination of the US administration to force a Ukrainian surrender,” he added.