Russia’s border regions began to form volunteer forces to fight Ukraine’s four week-old counter-invasion in Kursk, as Moscow continued to resist any major redeployment of forces from Ukraine to defend its own territory.
Kursk governor Alexei Smirnov said last Friday that he would form a volunteer combat reserve force, and Ukrainian Kharkiv forces spokesman Vitaly Sarantsev said Russia’s Bryansk and Belgorod regions were doing the same. All three regions border Ukraine.
Sarantsev estimated the strength of the three volunteer forces at just below 5,000 soldiers.
Moscow appeared to have redeployed limited units to Kursk, as Al Jazeera reported last week, but it has mainly relied on a hotch-potch of existing border and internal security forces to defend Russia.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday told NBC that Moscow had diverted 60,000 soldiers from Ukraine to Kursk. A week earlier, his commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, put the figure at 30,000. But they have not provided details to back up these assertions, that appear at odds with what open-source intelligence suggests.
Putin downplayed the importance of the incursion during a visit to a secondary school in the Tuva region of Siberia. “We have to deal with these thugs who made it into Russia,” he told students in Kyzyl. Putin has studiously avoided launching a general mobilisation during the war.
Russian defensive efforts appeared to have slowed the Ukrainian advance. Ukraine was reported to have captured one settlement during the past week, Nizhnyaya Parovaya north of Sudzha, and Russian forces managed to recapture Ulanok, southeast of Sudzha.
Meanwhile Russian forces continued to press on towards Pokrovsk, a city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region which has been their focus since they seized Avdiivka in February. They have formed a 29km (18 mile) long salient stretching to the west of Avdiivka since then and are within about 8km (5 miles) of the outskirts of Pokrovsk.
During the past week, Russian forces overran Novohrodivka and entered Hrodivka, two towns east of Pokrovsk. They also claimed to be on the outskirts of Myrnohrad, a town immediately to the east of Pokrovsk.
Zelenskyy has referred to the estimated 1,300sq km (502sq miles) it has taken in Kursk as an “exchange fund”, presumably intending to swap it for Ukrainian land in a peace settlement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov quashed any such notion on Saturday during an interview with Russia Today.
“Zelenskyy said… that they will need this for future exchanges. That’s why they are taking prisoners and want to seize square kilometers,” said Lavrov. “It’s so simple-minded and naive. We do not discuss our territory with anyone. We do not negotiate about our territory.”
Putin took the same line in Tuva, saying the Kursk operation was doomed to failure, and when it did, Ukraine “will have a true desire — not in words, but in deeds — to move to peaceful negotiations”.
Zelenskyy reshuffles cabinet
Zelenskyy has said the Kursk invasion is part of his victory plan and it is achieving all of its aims.
On Tuesday night he warned of a government shake-up ahead of an autumn that will be “extremely important for Ukraine”. His top priorities included increasing weapons production, speeding up “real negotiations” with the European Union and a “special interaction” with NATO
