Moscow’s military claimed to have seized another town in eastern Ukraine as Kyiv’s troops continued a new offensive in Russia’s Kursk region and the United States warned that the Kremlin may give “advanced space and satellite technology” to North Korea.
The Russian defence ministry said its forces had taken Kurakhove on Monday after months of heavy fighting in the area, as its invasion force pushes towards the small city and military logistics hub of Pokrovsk, about 30km to the north.
Ukraine said its troops were still defending Kurakhove, which was home to about 18,000 people before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, has a power station and reservoir and sits on a major east-west road between occupied Donetsk city and Kyiv-held Zaporizhzhia.
Heavy fighting continued in the Russian border region of Kursk, where Kyiv’s troops launched a new wave of attacks over the weekend in areas they first occupied last summer.
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Both sides appear intent on improving their positions on the battlefield before the return to the White House on January 20th of Donald Trump, who has said ending Europe’s biggest war in 80 years is a top priority and claimed he can do it “in one day”.
During a visit to South Korea, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said Ukraine’s “position in Kursk is an important one because certainly it’s something that would factor into any negotiation that may come about in the coming year.”
He argued that Ukraine would need “adequate security assurances” from western powers to move ahead with any peace negotiations, because otherwise Russian president Vladimir Putin would not view any agreement as “game over”.
“His imperial ambitions remain, and what he will seek to do is to rest, refit and eventually re-attack,” Mr Blinken said.
He also warned that Mr Putin could help strengthen North Korea’s dictatorship in exchange for its current provision of shells, missiles and thousands of troops to Russia.
“We have reasons to believe that Moscow intends to share advanced space and satellite technology with Pyongyang,” Mr Blinken said.
“Putin may be close to reversing a decades-long policy by accepting [North Korea’s] nuclear weapons programme,” he added, shortly before Pyongyang test-fired a ballistic missile that landed in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has claimed that 3,800 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded in fighting in Kursk region. The figure could not be verified.
During an interview with popular US podcaster Lex Fridman, he also said he would be ready to meet Mr Trump this month to discuss how to end the war, and then to meet Mr Putin at some later date if western security guarantees for Ukraine were established.
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