President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had anticipated Moscow's counteroffensive in the Russian region of Kursk, his first comments on the pushback this week, more than a month after Ukraine's cross-border incursion.
Ukraine’s troops captured an enclave of western Russian territory in a surprise raid that began in early August, a move aimed at wresting the battlefield initiative from Russia including by diverting Moscow’s forces from the eastern front.
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Its forces made rapid initial gains before stalling, while the situation around the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, which has been the focus of Russia’s main offensive operations in recent weeks, remained perilous.
“The Russians have begun counteroffensive actions. It is going according to our Ukrainian plan,” Zelensky told a news conference in Kyiv with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda.
Zelensky’s words confirm statements made the previous day by Major General Apti Alaudinov, who commands Chechnya’s ‘Akhmat’ special forces fighting for Russia in Kursk. According to him Russian troops had gone on the offensive and taken back control of about 10 settlements in Kursk, the TASS state news agency reported.
“The situation is good for us,” said Alaudinov, who is also deputy head of the Russian defense ministry’s military-political department.
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Similar claims were made by several Russian military bloggers.
Yuri Podolyaka, a Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, and two other influential bloggers - Rybar and the Two Majors - said that Russian forces had begun a significant counteroffensive in Kursk.
“In the Kursk region, the Russian Army launched counter-offensive actions on the western flank of the enemy’s wedge, reducing the Ukrainian zone of control near the state border,” the Two Majors blog said.
Reuters has not been able to independently verify the battlefield reports on either side.
Russia sends experienced troops
According to a daily report published on Wednesday evening by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), visual evidence suggests the Russians are using company-sized units, some of which may have more combat experience than other Kremlin forces in the area.
As ISW noted, it is not clear whether even these experienced troops are enough to fully expel the Ukrainians from Russian territory taken during the previous month, or defend against further Ukrainian attacks, “since the Russian military command likely deployed elements of these units, instead of the entire formations.”
Other fronts
During his Thursday press conference, Zelensky repeated earlier assertions that Ukraine had also noticed a buildup of forces across the border with Belarus, Russia’s main ally in its full-scale war on Ukraine.
“We have seen it for a long time – this process is under control,” he said.
His comments came as fighting continued on several fronts.
Russian forces have advanced in eastern Ukraine and were fighting in the center of the town of Ukrainsk in the Donetsk region, according to Russian war bloggers and open-source maps of the war.
Red Cross in the crosshairs
During the Russian onslaught in Donetsk on Thursday, three Ukrainians working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were killed and two others wounded.
“I condemn attacks on Red Cross personnel in the strongest terms. It's unconscionable that shelling would hit an aid distribution site,” ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger said in a statement.
The statement added that ICRC teams are regularly present in the Donetsk region, and their vehicles are marked with the Red Cross emblem.
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office said on Telegram that the ICRC employees had brought fuel briquettes to residents for heating before winter. They were unloading the aid when the attack happened, it said.
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