By Andrew Osborn and Anastasiia Malenko
LONDON/KYIV (Reuters) -Thousands of Ukrainian troops who stormed into Russia’s Kursk region last summer in a shock incursion are nearly surrounded by Russian forces there, in a major blow to Kyiv which hoped to use its presence there as leverage over Moscow in any peace talks.
Ukraine’s situation in Kursk has deteriorated sharply in the last three days, open source maps show, after Russian forces retook territory as part of a gathering counteroffensive that has nearly cut the Ukrainian force in two and separated the main group from its principal supply lines.
The precarious situation for Ukraine comes after Washington suspended its intelligence sharing with Kyiv and 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.
The battlefield reversal comes at a time when Kyiv is under mounting U.S.
pressure to agree to a ceasefire with Moscow and as Russian forces continue to advance along parts of the front line inside Ukraine, even as Ukrainian forces stage a fightback in one area.
“The situation (for Ukraine in Kursk) 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.
Yan Matveev, another military analyst, said on Telegram that Ukraine had a difficult choice to make.
“The only argument in favour of holding the bridgehead is political.
To use the remnants of the bridgehead for bargaining. And also a little morale – after all, a retreat is a retreat…,” he said.
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.
The incursion was embarrassing for Moscow and raised uncomfortable questions about its ability to protect its own borders.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly 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. In an update released on Friday it also said that Russian forces were pressuring Ukraine’s positions in the border area with Sumy region as part of the same operation and moving to try to block supplies to Ukrainian forces inside Kursk.
“It is worth noting that the enemy has an advantage in UAVs (drones), both reconnaissance and strike.
The most commonly used is the FPV drone. They are mainly responsible for fire control of everything that moves ‘in’ or ‘out’ of Kursk region,” Deep State said in its note.
Yuri Podolyaka, 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),” Podolyaka wrote on his Telegram channel.
A Ukrainian military analyst and former commander, Evhen Dykyi, said Ukrainian forces had, however, improved their positions in the last day or two on the approaches to Sudhza.
“Just yesterday, we launched another round of counterattacks there,” he told Ukrainian Radio NV.
“Now it’s our turn to strike at their rear and logistics. We will see how successful this counter action turns out to be.”
Ukraine’s General Staff, in a late evening report on Friday said that its armed forces had repelled 29 Russian attacks in the Kursk region over the past day.
Russian forces, it said, had launched 22 air strikes.
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn in London and Anastasiia Malenko in KyivEditing by Alex Richardson, Gareth Jones, Ron Popeski and Chizu Nomiyama)
