Yesterday, Ukraine continued its advance into Russia for the fourth day in a row, fighting to capture a city near the border. It has sent small units to carry out new attacks in western Russia's Kursk region, independent military experts and pro-Kremlin military bloggers said.
The Ukrainian army announced yesterday that it had attacked a Russian airport in the Lipetsk region, which borders Kursk, hitting warehouses containing guided bombs.
That claim has not been independently verified, but local Russian authorities said a major drone strike caused several explosions and a fire at a military airfield.
A surprise offensive by Ukrainian forces into Russia, which began on Tuesday, temporarily shifted the focus of the war, opening a new front inside Russia and prompting Moscow to scramble to halt the Ukrainian advance.
At the same time, that operation has raised questions about whether it is worth the effort considering that Ukrainian forces are already overburdened, the New York Times writes. It is not clear whether this mission will help Ukraine improve its position on the rest of the battlefield, where it has been losing territory for a long time.
Ukraine's military has decided not to publicize the operation and has not publicly acknowledged launching an attack across the border, although President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised the military on Thursday for its ability to "surprise" and achieve results.
Several military analysts said the attack appeared to be the largest on Russian soil since the war began two and a half years ago. They said it involved elements of at least four brigades in a rare example of successful maneuver operations involving artillery, air defense and electronic warfare support, resulting in rapid advances on the ground.
"It appears to be a fairly well-coordinated and planned combined military operation," said Franz-Stefan Gadi, a Vienna-based military analyst.
“You have electronic warfare assets deployed to disrupt Russian command and control. You have air defenses that have been moved to create air defense zones around the Ukrainian advance. And you also have fairly efficient mechanized formations advancing at a steady pace.”
A possible motive for the Ukrainian attack is to draw Russian forces away from the battlefield in eastern Ukraine and to capture and hold Russian territory to use as leverage in negotiations
Gadi and other experts said that the main question now is whether Ukraine can maintain the momentum and turn success on Russian territory into useful gains. The Ukrainian army has few reserve forces it can call into action and continues to suffer from a shortage of weapons and ammunition, analysts say.
It is also unclear what Ukraine hopes to achieve in the end. A senior Ukrainian official who wished to remain anonymous told The Times that the goal is to draw Russian troops away from other parts of the battlefield where Ukrainian units are struggling. But military experts say Russia is likely to be able to respond with reserve forces not fighting in Ukraine.
"Does this really solve any major military strategic problem from which other parts of the front are suffering?" Gadi asked himself.
Ben Berry, a land warfare analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said Ukraine exposed Russian weaknesses and disproved the conventional wisdom about this war that the battlefield was "transparent" and that neither side could advance without heavy losses.
"They have clearly achieved a degree of surprise, which suggests that Russia's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities are inadequate," he told Reuters.
In Beri's opinion, the motive of the Ukrainian attack, apart from pulling Russian forces away from the battlefield in the east of Ukraine, is also to conquer and hold Russian territory in order to use it as a trump card in negotiations.
He also said Kiev may be seeking to lure Russian warplanes to Kursk, where they could be vulnerable to its land-based air defense missiles, and to dissuade them from conducting operations against Ukrainian F-16 fighter jets recently delivered from the West. .
The aim of the unexpected ground offensive on Russian territory, Berry said, is partly to show that he is bringing war to Russia, undermining Putin and the army's credibility.
The Ukrainians apparently achieved a degree of surprise, which suggests that Russia's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities are inadequate
A map of the battlefield created by the Black Bird group, a Finnish organization that analyzes battlefield images, shows that Ukrainian troops have taken about 259 square kilometers of Russian territory since the offensive began, although it remains unclear whether they have secured control of the entire territory. They advanced over two lines of Russian defense.
The Ukrainian army came particularly close to Suja, a small town with about 6.000 inhabitants, ten kilometers from the Ukrainian-Russian border.
Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst of the Black Bird group, wrote on the Iks network that some Ukrainian units are carrying out test attacks further north in the direction of Lygov, a town about 50 km from the border, which acts as a test of Russian defenses.
Reuters reported unconfirmed reports from Russian sources that the Ukrainians had advanced as far as 35 km from the border.
"The Times" states that it remains to be seen whether Ukraine will try to penetrate further into Russian territory in order to consolidate control over the area it has captured or will withdraw after a few days, as happened in previous, smaller cross-border incursions.
Kastehelmi said that Ukraine cannot continue north without expanding its flanks and exposing itself to Russian counterattacks. "Time is also working against the Ukrainians. The Russians will not be disorganized forever," he said.
The video showed the damage, Russia is sending reinforcements
A video posted on social media shows a convoy of about 15 burned Russian military trucks along a highway in the Kursk region. Some of them had corpses on them, Reuters reported.
A Ukrainian Telegram channel posted a video of the truck saying it was hit by the HIMARS missile system sent by the United States.
MASH, a Russian media outlet with contacts with the security services, reported that the video was made and sent to a Ukrainian channel by a local man who was subsequently arrested on suspicion of spying.
Two days after Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov informed President Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian advance had been halted, the Russian Defense Ministry said its forces "continue to repulse an attempt to invade the territory of the Russian Federation by the armed forces of Ukraine."
The ministry said that Russia is sending reinforcements with Grad multi-barrel missile systems, artillery and tanks.
In the statement of the ministry, it was stated that Russian troops, airstrikes and artillery in the past 24 hours "suppressed attempts to attack enemy units deep into Russian territory in the direction of Kursk".
Ukraine was reported to have lost a total of up to 945 soldiers and 102 armored vehicles during the fighting in Kursk, without mentioning losses on the Russian side. Gerasimov said on Wednesday that the Ukrainian attack was carried out by up to a thousand troops.
Ribar, a Russian military blogger, said Ukrainian units were moving from village to village and setting up ambushes against Russian reinforcements arriving in the Kursk region.
The acting governor of Kursk, Alexei Smirnov, issued a series of security warnings to residents, urging them to seek shelter from possible rocket attacks. Authorities have declared a federal state of emergency in the area.
The value of the Russian ruble fell by 2,5 percent against the dollar, and traders said that the Ukrainian attack on the Kursk region was one of the factors that contributed to the weakening of the currency.
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