Six months after stunning the Kremlin, the West and its own soldiers by ordering a cross-border attack on Russia, Ukraine still holds a swathe of enemy territory that could be a bargaining chip in any peace talks brokered by US president Donald Trump.
“On August 6th our first group went into Kursk region and on August 9th I went there too. We were in two groups using armoured vehicles,” says Mykola Pasalsky, a company commander with Ukraine’s 22nd separate mechanised brigade. “It was a shock for me, I couldn’t believe it was happening at first and that we would mount an operation in Kursk – but we received an order and did what we were told to do.”
Ukrainian forces quickly seized about 1,300sq km of Kursk region, catching Russia off guard and prompting it to bring in thousands of North Korean soldiers to help it try to retake the town of Sudzha and surrounding villages.
Yet Ukraine still controls Sudzha and more than 500km of territory, and claims the operation pinned down tens of thousands of Russian troops, thwarted Kremlin plans for new attacks of its own and inflicted heavy losses on Moscow’s military and reinforcements sent by Pyongyang.
“I don’t like to throw around words like ‘historic’… but this was definitely very important,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said as he marked half a year since the start of the Kursk operation and thanked the military units that were involved.
“They have shown the world that, even with limited resources, we can act decisively, unexpectedly and effectively. We are exposing Russia’s bluff for what it is – a bluff. With our active operations on Russian territory we have brought the war home to Russia, and it is there that they must feel what war is. And they do.”
Ukraine says it has killed 16,000 Russian soldiers in Kursk, wounded a further 24,000 and captured 900, as well as killing or injuring a third of the 12,000 North Korean troops that it claims were deployed to the region.
Those figures cannot be confirmed and are denied by Russia, which has issued its own unverifiable claim that 57,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in Kursk.
Up to 2,000 people are thought to be living in occupied parts of Kursk, and Moscow accuses Ukrainian troops of terrorising and killing civilians; Kyiv denies such claims and has called on Russia to allow United Nations agencies and the Red Cross into the area to monitor the situation there.
“We are ready to open a humanitarian corridor from Kursk region to the depths of Russia,” Zelenskiy’s office said last week, accusing Moscow of showing “indifference” to its citizens. “Apparently the Russians do not want such a humanitarian corridor because we have not received a corresponding request from them.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said such questions depend “on contacts which are conducted by our militaries”.
“They, of course, cannot be carried out publicly. The authorities are doing everything they can to provide help to our citizens, who have found themselves in such a difficult situation due to the aggressive actions of the Kyiv regime,” he added.
In a Kremlin meeting with Kursk governor Alexander Khinshtein last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin did not mention Ukraine or the occupied territory, but acknowledged that “the situation there is very difficult” and that residents faced “critical problems”.
Ukrainian and western critics of the attack on Kursk say it drew some of Ukraine’s best units away from the front line in the east of the country, allowing Russia to accelerate its advance in the Donbas areas and gain ground in parts of Kharkiv region.
Pasalsky, whose unit has also fought in Donbas and Kharkiv, backs the official Kyiv line that the operation prevented fresh attacks on northern Ukraine and boosted morale by showing that Kyiv could turn the tables on Russia and take the initiative on the battlefield.
“We only saw a few civilians in the villages we drove through…It seemed to me that this was a kind of buffer zone from where the Russians planned to attack Ukrainian territory. I think that by moving fast across the border we stopped their plans, and it was a heavy blow for them,” he says.
“When the top commanders decided to go into Kursk…we showed that Ukraine is strong and brave and a serious force. We showed that if we need to go into enemy territory we can do it and get the upper hand.”
Kyiv says the incursion has also made a mockery of Putin’s claim to be the guarantor of his country’s strength and security but any public anger in Russia over the Kursk events is stifled by the Kremlin’s control over media and politics, and the criminalisation of public criticism of the Kremlin regime and its military.
Zelenskiy said last week that the true value of Ukraine’s hold on some Russian territory will become clear if Trump succeeds in bringing the warring neighbours to the negotiating table. “At some point, when the war moves toward a diplomatic resolution, you will see just how important this operation was.”
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