Russia battled on Sunday to drive the last Ukrainian soldiers from western Russia, Russian officials said, after a seven-month incursion by Ukraine that aimed to distract Moscow's forces, gain a bargaining chip and rile President Vladimir Putin.

In one of the most striking battles of the three-year-old Ukraine war, Ukrainian forces smashed their way across Russia's western border in Kursk last August, marking the biggest attack on sovereign Russian territory since the Nazi invasion of 1941.

But a lightning offensive this month has reduced the area under Ukrainian control to about 110 square km (42 square miles), down from the more than 1,368 square km (528 square miles) claimed by Kyiv last year, according to open source maps.

Yuri Podolyaka, one of the most influential pro-Russian military bloggers, said Russia had pushed back Ukrainian forces to the border in some areas, though intense battles were underway and that Ukrainian forces were fighting back as they retreated.

Battlefield maps from both Ukraine and Russia showed two joined pockets of Ukrainian forces on the Russian side of the border in Kursk. Russia said it was clearing large numbers of mines in the area.

After a public appeal by U.S. President Donald Trump last week to spare "surrounded" Ukrainian troops, Putin said on Friday that Russia would guarantee the lives of Ukrainian troops in the region if they surrendered.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday his troops were not surrounded but sounded the alarm over what he said could be a new Russian attack on Ukraine's northeast Sumy region, which borders Kursk.

The influential Two Majors pro-Russian military blogger said the battlefield gains of Russian forces had allowed Russia to threaten Sumy, but cautioned that Ukrainian forces had been bolstering defences there for some time.

Putin has accused Ukrainian troops of carrying out crimes against civilians in Kursk, something Kyiv denies. Ukraine says as many as 11,000 North Korean troops are fighting with Russia in Kursk, though Russia and North Korea have refused to give any details on North Korean troops there.

The fierce battle for the Kursk region has framed efforts by Trump to end what he says is a "bloodbath" war that could escalate into World War Three.

CEASEFIRE?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and injured, displaced millions, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the sharpest confrontation for decades between Moscow and the West.

The U.S. agreed on Tuesday to resume military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after Kyiv said it was ready to support Washington's proposal for a 30-day ceasefire.

Putin said on Thursday Russia supported the truce proposal in principle, but that fighting could not be paused until a number of crucial conditions were worked out or clarified.

Putin has repeatedly said that he is ready to talk about peace though Ukraine will have to declare it will not seek NATO membership and Russia will keep all of the land that it claims in Ukraine, including some it does not control.

Russia has paid a heavy price for the invasion.

U.S. intelligence estimates say more than 100,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured, according to a 2023 assessment, while the economy has been heavily distorted by record defence spending and the toughest Western sanctions ever imposed.

Ukraine has also seen more than 100,000 troops killed or injured, according to leaked U.S. intelligence estimates. Its economy has been shattered. One-fifth of its territory is under Russian control, and Kyiv has been unable to defeat Russia's forces despite receiving more than $260 billion in Western aid.

Neither side discloses current death toll figures for the war.

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Zelenskiy says troops not surrounded in Kursk, Russia says it retakes two villages

Ukrainian troops are still fending off Russian and North Korean forces in Russia's Kursk region but face a potential new attack on Ukraine's northeast Sumy region, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday.

Military analysts say Russia is close to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region, seized in a mass cross-border incursion last August. That prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to warn that thousands of Ukrainian troops were "completely surrounded."

Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces had retaken two more villages near Sudzha, 10 km (six miles) from the Ukrainian border, a town which Moscow said it had recaptured on Thursday.

Russia's Emergencies Ministry said more than 300 residents had been evacuated from areas around Sudzha.

The region's acting governor, Alexander Khinshtein, said officials discussed restoring recaptured areas and establishing how many residents wanted to return to their home settlements.

Zelenskiy said on social media, after being briefed by his top general, that Kyiv's troops were not encircled in Kursk, but that Moscow was accumulating forces nearby for a separate strike.

"This indicates an intention to attack our Sumy region," he said. "We are aware of this and will counter it."

"I would like all (our) partners to understand exactly what Putin is planning, what he is preparing for, and what he will be ignoring."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he supported in principle Trump's proposal for a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine, but would fight on until several crucial conditions were worked out.

On Saturday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said European nations and Western allies were boosting preparations to support Ukraine in the event a peace deal was struck with Russia, with defence chiefs to firm up "robust plans" next week.

"The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy," Zelenskiy added. "It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war."

SITUATION STABILISED NEAR STRATEGIC CITY

In his statement, he also said the battlefield situation near the strategic eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk had stabilised, and that Ukraine had successfully used a new domestically-produced long-range missile in combat.

Kyiv is seeking to expand its domestic defence industry to wean itself off Western allies who have provided critical artillery, air defence and long-range strike capabilities.

Ukraine's new "long Neptune" missile has a range of 1,000 kilometres (621 miles), Zelenskiy said.

Russia's Defence Ministry said Moscow's forces had recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka, just outside Sudzha.

Russia has accelerated a push to drive Ukrainian forces out of Kursk, where they seized about 100 settlements last August.

Ukraine's popular DeepState war blog, which tracks the war's front line using open sources, said on Saturday that Russian forces now held Sudzha as well as Rubanshchina and another settlement.

The Ukrainian military's General Staff, in a late afternoon report, made no mention of the situation in Sudzha, but said 11 armed clashes had occurred in Kursk region, with three still going on. Russian forces, it said, had launched 21 airstrikes and 32 guided bombs and shelled Ukrainian positions 150 times.

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Kremlin spokesman claims Ukraine is under time pressure in Kursk

Time is running out for the Ukrainian forces fighting in the Russian region of Kursk, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday.

The offer to spare the lives of Ukrainian troops still stands, Peskov told the Russian state news agency TASS, but it would not last indefinitely.

US President Donald Trump had asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to spare the lives of Ukrainian soldiers believed to be surrounded in Kursk.

Putin, who had ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, agreed to spare the soldiers' lives for "humanitarian reasons," but he demanded that the leadership in Kiev order the Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region to lay down their weapons and surrender.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy has indirectly admitted that the army would have to withdraw from the region. "The situation is very difficult. I can only thank our fighters for this operation, which has fulfilled its task," the head of state told journalists.

Ukraine took the war into Russian territory in a surprise attack last August. The original justification for the move was to be able to exchange the occupied territories for occupied Ukrainian territory in the event of possible negotiations with Russia.

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Zelensky’s Kursk gamble: Was it worth it?

Last summer, Ukrainian troops mounted a shock-and-awe land grab inside Russia’s Kursk region, marking the first foreign invasion of Russian soil since the Second World War.

Kyiv’s men, equipped with Western tanks and artillery systems, caught their enemy off guard as they stormed across the border into Russia on Aug 6.

Within days, Ukraine held 1,300 sq km of Russian territory, including Sudzha, a key town for Russian gas shipments to Europe.

The size of the territory may have paled in comparison to what Moscow held inside Ukraine, but the newly formed bridgehead gave Kyiv what it believed to be a key bargaining chip heading into any talks over the end of the war.

But with negotiations over a potential peace settlement actually beginning – with help from Donald Trump – Ukraine’s grip over its salient in Kursk is slipping at an alarming rate.

On Thursday, Vladimir Putin, unusually dressed in military fatigues, visited the area as his defence ministry claimed to have wrestled Sudzha back from Ukraine after nearly eight months.

Credit: Kremlin

Hundreds of Russian troops, donning respirators, had crawled through an unused gas pipeline to reach the occupied settlement.

Many observers blamed the US shutting off the flow of intelligence to Ukraine for the sudden collapse of its positions there.

But in reality, Ukraine’s hold on Kursk had been slipping for months under the heavy pressure of waves of Russian conscripts, North Korean troops and more elite units ferried in to quash the invasion.

In their initial incursion, Ukrainian troops were mounted on American Humvees – sporting new triangular tactical markings – zipping through country lanes almost unopposed.

Fighting was reported around the town of Korenovo, about 20 miles from Sudzha.

Panicked pro-Russian military bloggers started to ponder whether Ukrainian forces would soon reach and capture the Kursk nuclear power plant.

The alarm was enough for Russian authorities to start digging new trenches to defend the plant.

Job adverts suddenly appeared online in Russia offering handymen up to 210,000 rubles (£1,800) a month to help build a multi-layered network of anti-tank ditches, trenches and pillboxes across Kursk.

However, the panic was premature and Russian forces moved in swiftly to prevent a major rout, blowing bridges and digging in at rivers to conceal the growing Ukrainian pocket.

By September, Russia had begun its counter-offensive proper. But Ukraine’s hold on its territory looked solid. Kyiv had turned Sudzha into the main garrison for a 10,000-strong force that would go on to hold the bridgehead for months.

Its motives for the surprise operation appeared to change almost daily.

At first, it was about boosting the morale of Ukraine, which had lost the initiative on the battlefield at home and was having to sustain creeping, demoralising Russian gains in eastern Donbas.

Then it became about building an “exchange fund” made up of close to a 1,000 Russian border guards and conscripts, which were later handed over for high-profile Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Some would say it was about creating a buffer zone around the Ukrainian border region of Sumy, where Russian was thought to be plotting a ground attack.

But the main motives soon became clear.

“After the first weeks of fighting, the Russian command, unable to cope with Ukrainian pressure, began to transfer individual units of the Russian army to the Kursk region, which accordingly reduced the combat capabilities of the Russians in east and south Ukraine,” said Serhii Kuzan, of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, and a former adviser to the ministry of defence.

Elements of elite Russian units, such as the 810th and 155th marine brigades, were moved from Ukraine to reinforce what became a 60,000-strong Russian force, predominantly made up of conscripts, border guards and North Koreans.

“They were there to stiffen the sinews and stiffen the arms,” said John Foreman, a former British military attache in Moscow.

The Russians started gradually chipping away at the Ukrainian positions from three sides of the salient.

By November, Ukraine’s foothold in Kursk had shrunk by about 40 per cent.

The Russians continued targeting Kyiv’s logistical routes, and by December managed to reduce access to Sudzha from Ukraine to a single road.

As Moscow’s men continued to put a squeeze on the Ukrainian presence in Russia, an elite drone unit was moved in to target vulnerable vehicles.

Credit: Telegram/@morpeh_810

The battles to disrupt Ukraine’s logistics involved the first use of fibre-optic drones, which are connected to their pilot by a sprawl of cable so they cannot be jammed.

In mid-January, Russia’s Rubicon drone unit, which was set up by Putin in August 2024, was deployed to the area, using some of the most advanced drones seen on the battlefield.

“The scale of the damage in Kursk is significant – hundreds of vehicles have been destroyed – posing a major threat to Ukrainian supply lines. Without significant advancements in jamming technology to counter Rubicon’s capabilities, maintaining a hold in Kursk may become unsustainable,” Andrew Perpetua, an analyst, wrote on social media last week.

With a manpower advantage, mostly thanks to the introduction of North Korean forces, Russia managed to creep closer and closer to the only road in and out of Kursk for Ukraine.

By last month the road was under almost constant fire from Russian drones, most likely from Rubicon, which was “striking the front, back and sides of a vehicle almost simultaneously”, according to Mr Perpetua.

A defeat in the village of Sverdlikovo in late February set off the latest Russian rout. At this point, Ukraine’s grip on Kursk looked virtually untenable.

The Russians were coming up with audacious plans to get behind Ukraine’s lines, including sending soldiers, wearing respirators, through 15km of unused gas pipe.

On Wednesday, it appeared that the order had been handed down by Ukraine’s top general to finally retreat out of Sudzha and back to more defensible lines.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said this was “doing what it should do – preserving as much as possible our soldiers’ lives”.

The withdrawal was mostly orderly, despite a few pieces of heavy armour, including a US-donated Abrams tank, being left behind in the rush.

Mr Foreman said scenes like this would not play well with Western nations concerned about Ukraine’s “husbandry” of their donated weapons.

But the military expert insisted Ukraine would not simply depart the Kursk region without putting up a fight.

“Hopefully the Ukrainians have prepared defensive positions in Ukraine to fall back to, to prevent the Russians exploiting their retreat via an open door,” he said.

Putin has claimed these Ukrainian troops are encircled, and will have to “surrender or die”.

His statement was latched on to by Mr Trump, who appealed to the Russian president to let the Ukrainians leave peacefully.

But Ukraine’s general staff accused the US president of falling for Kremlin propaganda.

“Reports of the alleged ‘encirclement’ of Ukrainian units by the enemy in the Kursk region are false and fabricated by the Russians for political manipulation and to exert pressure on Ukraine and its partners,” it wrote online.

No matter the reality on the ground, many other questions will always be raised over Ukraine’s time in Kursk.

Did the benefits outweigh the cost?

For Mr Kuzan, the 60-70,000-strong force deployed by Putin to oust the Ukrainians could have been used in Pokrovsk, the Donetsk region garrison town being hotly contested.

“This contingent could currently attack in the Donetsk region… but was forced to get bogged down in bloody battles on the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said.

“This gave Ukrainian command an advantage and exhausted the Russian offensive potential in the Pokrovsk direction.”

Mr Foreman has a dimmer view of the operation as a whole, which he said did not dramatically slow down Russian advances in the Donbas and led to a spike in recruitment from Moscow’s armed forces.

“I thought it was daft and unwise, strategically,” he said. “Tactically, it gave a boost to Ukraine’s morale, but that’s not going to win you the war.”

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