The top commander of the Ukrainian army, General Oleksandr Chirsky, said on Friday that Kiev’s forces were advancing between one and three kilometers in parts of the Kursk region, 11 days after they began their incursion into Russia.
Kiev says it has taken control of 82 locations covering 1,150 square kilometers of Russian territory since August 6. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry insists that the area is larger than what Russia has seized in Ukraine this year.
Briefing President Volodymyr Zelensky via video link, Chirsky said fighting took place in the Malaya Lognia region, 11.5 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. The president said he hoped fighting in the region would allow Kiev’s military to take “many prisoners”.
“Action in the Kursk region – we are strengthening our positions and filling the ‘bargaining fund’ for Ukraine,” Zelensky said at X after Chirsky’s statement.
Kiev officials said hundreds of Russian soldiers had been captured, hoping it would speed up exchanges for Ukrainian fighters captured in Russia.
Russia called the incursion a “major provocation” and vowed to respond with a “dignified response,” more than two and a half years after it launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday that its troops had repelled Ukrainian attacks in several areas near the villages of Kordevka, Rusko Boreknoi and other villages.
Zelensky said Russia’s losses in the Kursk region were “very useful” for Ukraine’s security.
“This is about destroying the Russian military’s logistics and depleting its reserves,” he said in a speech later in the afternoon.
Kyiv Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk said in a telegram that aviation was active in the operation, targeting enemy supply routes and logistics centers. The man responsible posted a video of the attack on a bridge.
The governor of the Kursk region, Alexei Smirnov, said that a road bridge over the Sem River in Ukraine’s Glushkovsky district had been destroyed.
Aim east
However, the most intense fighting has occurred in recent days off the coast of Ukraine, where Russian troops have been advancing for months toward the strategic center of Pokrovsk.
Analysts say one of the objectives of the Ukrainian Kursk operation was to divert Russian forces eastward. But so far there is no sign of a slowdown in the East.
According to local officials, Russian forces were ten kilometers from the outskirts of Pokrovsk and about six kilometers from the neighboring town of Mirnohrad.
“If the objective is to divert the Russian effort from Donbass, it has so far failed,” said Yohann Michel, a French military expert and researcher at the IESD Institute in Lyon, France.
According to this expert, Kiev wanted to maximize the effect of the Kursk offensive, while Russia tried to do the same in eastern Ukraine.
“He blinked at first to stop his own attack,” she said.
Zelensky said Ukraine had “forgotten for a second” the east and promised new arms deliveries – beyond what had been planned – to bolster positions.
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