The Ukrainian army has opened a second flank of attack in the Russian Kursk province. The new sector of advance is located about 40 kilometers from the area where the surprise offensive began on August 6. Since Sunday, fighting has been taking place in another location on Russian territory, in the border town of Tiotkino. The aim of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is to surround the Russian defenders in the Glushkovo region, which would allow them to add 600 square kilometers of Russian territory under their control.
The operation to encircle the Russian troops in Glushkovo has been carefully prepared and it is where the men of Oleksandr Sirski, commander in chief of the Armed Forces, are devoting the main efforts of advance. The west and south of the region are delimited by the border with Ukraine. It is to the west, across the Seim River, that a new flank has been opened on Tiotkino. At the eastern end of Glushkovo is the Russian territory under Ukrainian control, where the Russian units in this region are being put under greater pressure. The north of Glushkovo is marked by the Seim River, and it is there where the Ukrainian strategy has hit the mark. This Sunday, the third and last bridge that was still in use in the Seim was destroyed by the Air Force. The other two bridges were destroyed by Ukrainian missiles in previous days. Without these three river crossing points, the Russians may be isolated and the transport of reinforcements and military logistics severely reduced.
Last March, Tiotkino was the scene of military incursions from Ukraine, but carried out by units of the Russian Freedom Legion, one of the Russian armed groups in opposition to Vladimir Putin that fight in the Ukrainian ranks. Ukrainian defence analysts expect that fighters from these Russian units – the Russian Freedom Legion, the Siberian Battalion and the Russian Volunteer Corps – will join the operation in Kursk in the future as reinforcements.
John Helin, an analyst on the Ukraine war for the Finnish group Black Bird, believes that a Ukrainian push at Tiotkino and even a new flank from the south is very likely in the coming days. This is because in the east, the Russians are holding back Sirski’s troops in the town of Korenevo.
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The Russian army is already deploying pontoons on the Seim to replace the bridges that were destroyed. “It should not be difficult for the Russian forces to build new pontoons, the width of the river is only 30 to 80 meters,” he said. Defense Expressa Ukrainian media outlet specializing in military analysis. “In any case,” he adds Defense Express,“Any crossing on pontoons is much more vulnerable to the bottlenecks it creates in logistics.”
Defense ExpressThe report also indicates that the pontoons can be destroyed by precision missiles from the Ukrainian air force. Satellite images confirmed on Tuesday that one of these had already been destroyed by Ukrainian forces on Sunday, just 48 hours after it was deployed. Ukrainian military accounts on Telegram have also spread videos of drone bomb attacks on Russian sapper vehicles preparing to build mobile bridges on the Seyim.
The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Kiev on Friday of making the evacuation of civilians impossible by destroying the bridges. Moscow said Ukraine used Himars precision missiles in the attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday called for an acceleration of arms deliveries from his allies and for the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France to authorise the use of long-range missiles on Russian soil, a restriction they maintain for Kiev. NATO-provided ammunition and infantry armour are playing a decisive role in the invasion of Russian territory. Zelensky, the main promoter of the Kursk offensive, reported on the progress made during a meeting with his diplomatic corps: according to the head of state, Ukraine has 1,250 square kilometres and 92 Russian towns under its control.
Zelensky stressed that the Kursk invasion should serve to demonstrate to his NATO partners that they should not be afraid of Putin’s threats of an escalation of the war: “Many people around the world would have said a few months ago that [la ofensiva] “This was impossible because it would cross the strictest of Russia’s red lines. That is why nobody knew anything about our preparations.” “We are witnessing a significant ideological shift,” the Ukrainian president said. “The naive, illusory concept of the so-called red lines vis-a-vis Russia, which has dominated the analysis of the war by some of our partners, has been broken in recent days.”
The Ukrainian leader stressed that two main objectives of the operation in Kursk have been achieved: creating a safe zone on the border against Russian military actions and capturing hundreds of prisoners of war who will be used to free Ukrainian soldiers captured by Kremlin troops.
“Heads or tails”
The Ukrainian leadership knows that time is running out. It is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain military aid from its allies. The German government’s draft budget includes a severe reduction in military support for Ukraine and also includes the threat of a Donald Trump victory in the US presidential election. Trump is in favour of turning off the tap on kyiv. Zelensky himself wants to speed up future peace negotiations with Russia, for the time being only on his terms.
In this context, the Kursk offensive is understood as a penultimate and risky Ukrainian coup to take the initiative in the war and reach a hypothetical negotiating table with more weight. A source close to Zelensky’s team assured Morning Express on Saturday that the Kursk invasion is a “toss-up” move by the president: “If it goes well, it will be a huge success for the citizens, but if it goes wrong, the responsibility will fall on him.”
There are three scenarios in which the operation on Russian territory can go wrong: first, if Moscow manages to force the Ukrainians back at Kursk by destroying – as is happening – a large number of armoured vehicles and artillery pieces. And the further Kiev’s troops go into Russia, the more exposed the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be and the more vulnerable their supply chain will be. The second negative scenario would be if the occupation of Russian soil does not serve as an asset to negotiate with the Kremlin what the Ukrainian government has defined as “a fair peace.” Alexander Graef, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Peace and Security Policy in Hamburg, assessed on August 14 for this newspaper that he sees it as impossible for Putin to accept any dialogue while part of Russia is under Ukrainian occupation.
The third scenario that could go wrong is that the Kursk incursion does not stop the rapid Russian advance on the Donetsk front. This is where alarm bells are already ringing, even in the military establishment, because Russia has not yet transferred a significant number of its most experienced units in Donetsk to Kursk, where the defence of the province falls mainly on recently recruited recruits. On the contrary, it is the Ukrainian army that has moved the most assets from Donetsk to Kursk. “I don’t know yet whether this is a great idea or a suicidal decision,” Helin reflects on the Russian incursion, “what I do know is that there are many risks, and one is that it has weakened the defence in Donetsk province by diverting Ukrainian forces to Kursk.”
The situation in Donetsk is particularly serious in the town of Pokrovsk, one of the bastions of the Ukrainian defence in the province. Russian forces are only 11 kilometres from the town and its mayor, Serhii Dobriak, announced on Monday in a statement Radio Svoboda that civilians have two weeks to leave their homes because from next week, the increasingly close fighting will make life in the area impossible: “At the moment, public services and businesses are fully operational, but we understand that in a week, these services will begin to close.”
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