Warring sides battle inside Russia as Moscow reports gains in Ukraine

Russia said on Monday its forces had made important gains in eastern Ukraine while continuing to fend off a new Ukrainian offensive inside the Kursk region of western Russia, where a second day of fierce fighting was under way.

The Russian defense ministry said its forces had captured the town of Kurakhove, 20 miles south of Pokrovsk, a Ukrainian logistics hub toward which Russian forces have been advancing for months.

The ministry said taking Kurakhove, which had held out for many weeks, would enable Moscow’s forces to step up the pace of their advance in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState, which tracks the front line using open sources, showed most of Kurakhove under Russian control. Ukraine’s Khortytsia group of forces said Russian forces continued to attack Kurakhove but the Ukrainian side was working to identify and repel Russian assault groups on that part of the front.

Ukrainian troops fire artillery in the Donetsk region on December 24, 2024.Ivan Antypenko / Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images file

Both sides are fighting to improve their battlefield positions before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to bring a quick end to the nearly three-year-old war, takes office on Jan. 20.

Ukraine’s main achievement in the past five months of fighting has been to capture and hold on to a slice of territory inside Russia’s Kursk region that could provide it with an important bargaining chip in possible peace talks.

Ukraine has not revealed details of the new offensive it launched in Kursk on Sunday, though a senior Ukrainian official has said Russia is “getting what it deserves.”

Russia’s defense ministry said the attempted Ukrainian breakthrough had been foiled and the main Ukrainian force had been destroyed near the settlement of Berdin, close to a road running northeast towards the city of Kursk.

A senior Russian commander said a further attack was expected.

“Of course, this is not the end. Now we are recording a concentration of enemy equipment in another direction and naturally we understand that he (Ukraine) will try to strike in this direction. Right now I won’t say where,” said Major General Apti Alaudinov, commander of a Chechen unit fighting for Russia in Kursk.

Independent military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady said Ukraine was trying to hold on to its pocket of Kursk for as long as possible, even as Russia continued to push deeper into eastern Ukraine.

“There’s a likelihood that we haven’t seen the main thrust of this Ukrainian offensive operation just yet,” he told Reuters. “We are essentially talking about platoon-sized, company-sized assaults with fairly limited gains thus far. It’s fair to assume that there are several hundred Ukrainian troops involved in this assault.”

It remained to be seen if Kyiv’s forces could open up another axis of advance, Gady added.

Ukrainian and Western assessments suggest about 11,000 troops from Russian ally North Korea have been deployed in the Kursk region to support Moscow’s forces. Russia has neither confirmed nor denied their presence.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday more than 1,000 North Korean troops had been killed or wounded. Reuters does not have access to the Kursk war zone and cannot verify casualty figures.

Reacting to the new Ukrainian offensive, the United States, Britain and the European Union have reaffirmed their support for Kyiv.

“Ukraine has the right to defend itself, and under international law, this right extends beyond its borders,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a statement to Reuters.

“Moscow’s unlawful war against Ukraine has included numerous Russian attacks originating from the Kursk region. So Russian military forces there are legitimate targets under international law.”

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said on Sunday: “We are committed to putting Ukraine in the strongest possible position on the battlefield, including by surging security assistance and utilizing all available resources authorized by the Congress.”

Britain said it would support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.”