From @rnintel on Telegram: “Russia’s counteroffensive in the Kursk region: Russia has recaptured 519.8 sqkm of area. Ukraine still holds 559.3 sqkm”
From @rnintel on Telegram: “Russia’s counteroffensive in the Kursk region: Russia has recaptured 519.8 sqkm of area. Ukraine still holds 559.3 sqkm”
Not quite.
The only locality they managed to take (at least one that is larger than just a village with a couple of houses) is Sudzha, which is not a city but a small town of around 6000 inhabitants (before the incursion, now probably mostly empty) less than 10 km from the border. They went there and made a bunch of videos of themselves looting and destroying the local supermarket, spray-painted swastikas on it, you know… the usual. That was about the extent of what they managed to achieve.
They are still holding onto that town, and the latest news i’m reading is that they are currently in a panic trying to hastily dig trenches and fortify it for fears of an imminent Russian breakthrough which may be occurring as we speak.
This town is all they have to show for the whole incursion, and they sacrificed a lot of their most elite brigades and most valuable equipment, so losing it would be very bad for PR and for morale. Especially now that their gamble hoping this would divert Russian forces from elsewhere didn’t pay off. Instead they just diverted their own best forces and the pace of Russian advances has accelerated all across the Donbass as a result.
They got nowhere close to either the city of Kursk itself or the nuclear power plant that they were aiming at. You can’t even see those on this map.
They also tried a second incursion around a week or two ago a bit further west to try and outflank the Russian counterattack but apparently that plan failed catastrophically and today i read some sources are saying that it was finally called off. Not sure that last bit is true, my guess is they are probably going to try something again. They haven’t given up on this operation and they desperately want to cling on to what they managed to take because it’s one of the last things still buoying the otherwise plummetting morale in their ranks. That is very good news for Russia because it means they will keep feeding more and more of their resources into the grinder.