11:36AMAugust 14, 2024.

Updated 1:12PMAugust 14, 2024

Dow Jones

Russia withdraws some forces from Ukraine after Kursk invasion

Russia is withdrawing some of its military forces from Ukraine to respond to a Ukrainian offensive into Russian territory, US officials said, the first sign that Kyiv’s incursion is forcing Moscow to rejigger its invasion force.

The officials said the US is still seeking to determine the significance of Russia’s move and didn’t say how many troops the US assesses Russia is shifting. But the new US assessment bolsters claims by Ukrainian officials who said last week’s surprise invasion of Kursk province had drawn Russian forces away from Ukraine, where Moscow’s advantage in manpower and equipment is allowing them to grind forward in several places.

Ukraine, meanwhile, sent tanks and other armoured vehicles to reinforce troops that have stunned the Kremlin by seizing a chunk of Russian territory.

Ukrainian forces have advanced at least 20 miles into Russian territory since launching the surprise assault last week, quickly overrunning the lightly defended border. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his military and security forces to eject Kyiv’s military, but Russia is struggling to mount a coherent response

On Tuesday, a Ukrainian soldier raised his fist as he rode a tank toward the Russian border. Heavy equipment and trucks loaded with logs used to reinforce bunkers and trenches trundled the same way. In the opposite direction, a pick-up truck raced by carrying a half-dozen Russian prisoners with tape over their eyes.

Ukraine’s top military commander said Ukrainian forces were advancing and had taken control of 74 Russian towns and villages.

“There are battles across the front line,” Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy reported to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a snippet from a video call that was aired online.

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Tuesday it was inflicting heavy losses on Ukrainian forces taking part in the operation, which Putin has blamed on Ukraine’s backers in the West, led by the US

The Biden administration said it wasn’t given prior warning about the operation and has sought in recent days to understand Ukraine’s goals. One of the US officials said Tuesday that Kyiv told the US it had been looking for opportunities to exploit gaps in the Russian lines and found one in Kursk that was loosely defended. Ukraine was also hoping that the incursion would force Russia to pull troops out of Ukraine, which happened in the last day or so, the official said.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian officials gave their most detailed public comments yet on the reasons behind the operation, saying its aim was to destroy logistics and infrastructure that Russia uses to make war on Ukraine.

Russia “is sure that its territory is informally inviolable, and no one will destroy the logistics and infrastructure of the war” there, said Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser. “Today, Ukraine is showing that this is not the case.” Russia has used the Kursk region to launch aerial and artillery strikes on Ukraine as well as to support its incursion into Ukraine’s Kharkiv province. Podolyak said in a post on X that ground operations were one way to destroy Russian war infrastructure. The other, he noted, was to use long-range missiles of the kind that the West has provided but not cleared for use against Russian territory.

Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhi said Kyiv wasn’t interested in occupying Russian territory.

“The purpose of the operation is to save the lives of our people and protect the territory of Ukraine from Russian attacks,” he told reporters. “The sooner the Russian Federation agrees to restore a just peace … the sooner the raids of the Ukrainian defence forces on the territory of the Russian Federation will stop.” Images of Ukrainian forces tearing down Russian flags have raised morale among troops after months of grinding attritional warfare that favours its much larger enemy. The incursion has also demonstrated to Kyiv’s partners that Ukraine is still capable of striking back against Russia after a failed counteroffensive last year. Ukrainian forces haven’t regained significant territory since the first year of the war, when they pulled off a surprise counteroffensive in the northern Kharkiv region and squeezed Russian forces out of Kherson in the south.

“We have proven once again that we, Ukrainians, are capable of achieving our goals in any situation – capable of defending our interests and our independence,” Zelensky said in his nightly address Tuesday.

Lightly-armed Russian conscripts surrendered en masse after Ukrainian forces burst across the border a week ago, and Zelensky noted in the call with his military chief that these soldiers – which he said numbered in the hundreds – could be exchanged for Ukrainians detained in Russia.

Ukrainian soldiers returning from Kursk on Tuesday said their forces were encountering greater resistance as they pushed to expand their foothold in the region. Some soldiers said Russia was pounding Ukrainian positions with aviation bombs.

“They are massing troops, bringing reserves,” said one soldier who was stocking up on cigarettes, gas and warm clothes to take back to his unit in Kursk. But he said Ukraine was pressing forward. “It’s go go go,” he said.

Still, analysts say Ukrainian forces will face serious challenges in sustaining its invasion as supply lines lengthen and Russia regroups. The incursion has also drawn scarce troops and military equipment away from the main front line in eastern Ukraine, potentially weakening Kyiv’s defence there. In recent days Russian forces have continued pressing gains toward the logistical hub of Pokrovsk.

Despite the bleak situation in the east, soldiers involved in the Kursk operation were upbeat.

“Everybody is quite positive,” said another soldier who was buying supplies to take back to his unit inside Kursk. Before the incursion, he had been holding back Russian troops in the neighbouring Kharkiv region, which Moscow reinvaded earlier this year.

Outside a convenience store on the road to Russia, the commander of an artillery battalion who had just returned from Kursk said the fight there was ongoing. “So far, we’ve got the upper hand,” he said.

Ukraine’s thrust into Kursk has pushed Russian artillery out of range of villages along the border that have been under fire for months. Zelensky said on Saturday that Russia had shelled border villages in the northern Sumy region more than 2,000 times since June 1. But Mykola Toryanyk, a local official who oversees 14 villages along the border, said Russian planes were now dropping aviation bombs on them instead.

“They’re never going to stop attacking Ukraine,” he said.