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Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
After months of losing ground to Russia in brutal, grinding battles in Ukraine, Kyiv shifted tactics with a surprise attack into Russian territory this week that caught Moscow off guard and opened a new front in the 30-month war.
Ukrainian forces have punched through Russian border defenses and seized several settlements in fighting that was still raging on Thursday, according to Russian officials, a Ukrainian soldier and analysts. The attack triggered a state of emergency in one region in the west of Russia. Ukrainian armored columns were filmed moving along roads as far as six miles inside Russia.
But the attack left some military analysts wondering why Ukraine would throw scarce resources into a risky assault in a new area at a time when it is fighting pitched battles to hold on to positions in its own territory.
It was unclear whether Ukraine would seek to hold the area. Whatever the next step by Ukrainian forces, the attack appeared to push the limits on attacking inside Russia with American-provided equipment and put the Russians in disarray. American-made armored vehicles were also filmed being blown up in a Russian counterattack.
The goal was to shift the fighting — and Russian soldiers and weaponry — onto Russian territory and ease the pressure of Moscow’s offensive in eastern Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official said. He asked not to be cited by name, as Ukraine has not acknowledged its soldiers are fighting in Russia.
“We are at war,” he said of striking inside enemy territory. “Why Russia can and we cannot?”
So far the assault has played out “much more successfully” than previous cross-border raids, the senior Ukrainian official said.
Operating surreptitiously to evade Russian reconnaissance and spies, Ukraine gathered a force that Russia’s top general has estimated at 1,000 soldiers for a mechanized assault on Russia’s border, an audacious move after repeated setbacks over the past year and a half.
Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst for Rochan Consulting in Poland, writing in Ukraine Conflict Monitor, said Ukraine could benefit if the attack reduced Russian attacks in the Donetsk region of Ukraine and allowed Kyiv to maintain a presence in the Kursk area, and thus improve its negotiating position. But Ukraine would be the loser if its troops were pushed back with high losses, he said.
“There is no middle ground here,” Mr. Muzyka wrote. “The operation is daring. Let’s see what the next few days bring.”
Military analysts say they are skeptical that Russia, which has a vastly larger army and arsenal of weapons than Ukraine, would be forced to divert forces from the fighting inside Ukraine to defend its border. Russia has reserves of conscript soldiers it is prohibited by its policies from deploying into Ukraine, but could on Russian soil.
Ukraine has remained mostly silent about the attack, which began on Tuesday. President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to hint at an aim of raising the cost of the war for Russians without directly acknowledging the Ukrainian incursion in a speech Wednesday. “The more pressure is exerted on Russia — the aggressor that brought war to Ukraine — the closer peace will be,” he said.
Surprise played the pivotal role, Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament, said in an interview. “It was obvious Russia was not prepared and it was a total surprise,” he said. “This is rare in modern war.”
Ukraine, he said, should fight wherever conditions are favorable, whether in Russia or along the front line inside the country. “Our readiness to strike in this way, here or somewhere else, will force Russia to deploy troops to respond.”
Ivan Kyrychevsky, a commentator on military affairs for Defense Express, said Ukraine’s official silence on the operation aided its success, in contrast to the highly telegraphed lead-up to Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year. “If we don’t understand what’s happening, it’s even less clear to the enemy,” he said.
The Russian and Ukrainian armies face off over about 600 miles of international border, in addition to the frontline inside Ukraine. In the Sumy region, Ukraine in June and July had been bracing for a Russian cross-border assault, officials had said. But when the fighting started, it was Ukrainian troops entering Russia.
“They were not expecting us, and they fled wherever they could,” said a Ukrainian soldier who fought in the assault and who asked to be identified by only his first name, Oleksandr, in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol. His unit took prisoners and captured a tank, he said in a telephone interview.
The Ukrainians, he said, were motivated to take the fight into Russia. “To be honest, we all have joy in our hearts,” Oleksandr said, though he acknowledged there were still risks.
Ukraine has not advanced so quickly since reclaiming the Kherson region in the country’s south in November 2022. In May, Russia had surprised Ukraine when it sent troops across the border in the area north of Kharkiv, where it still has a narrow foothold. In the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, understrength Ukrainian units are falling back, and Russia is fighting in or close to the strategic hilltop town of Chasiv Yar and rail and road hubs in Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk.
The incursion into the Kursk region is the third significant Ukrainian ground assault on Russian territory since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. But it appears to be the largest, according to open-source intelligence analysts studying photographs and videos from the area of Russia under attack, a rolling expanse of farm fields, forests and small towns.
Some analysts estimate that Ukraine has sent hundreds of troops into Russia, a major commitment as its forces are under pressure in the east. Russia’s chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, said in televised remarks that Ukraine deployed 1,000 soldiers.
In a statement on Thursday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said it was destroying Ukrainian formations and repelling the attack.
But a prominent Russian military blogger who writes under the name of Rybar said Thursday that Ukrainian forces had Sudzha, the main town in the area, “practically under full control.” Videos from Sudzha, verified by The New York Times, show cars trying to leave amid sounds of gunshots and roads littered with burned vehicles and what appeared to be mines.
The Kremlin sought to maintain calm as the state news media portrayed the incursion as akin to a natural disaster rather than a military crisis, Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst, said. State media highlighted efforts to help civilians while doing little to place the attack in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A noon news broadcast on Russia’s state-controlled Channel 1 on Thursday showed bottled water being dispatched for evacuees and supportive vigils in cities like Sochi on the Black Sea.
“Kursk, we are with you!” a person there was shown saying.
Mr. Vinogradov, in a phone interview, said the restrained coverage reflected the Kremlin’s avoidance of “politicization” of the Russian public, with Russian officials instead preferring to limit people’s exposure to the ups and downs of the war.
Dmitri Kuznets, an analyst of the war for Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet based in Latvia, said the Ukrainian Army had clearly found a loophole in Russian defenses and caught thin and ill-equipped troops off guard.
Mr. Zelensky’s administration offered its first commentary on the incursion on Thursday in a statement by a senior adviser that did not acknowledge any Ukrainian role but portrayed Russians as collectively backing Mr. Putin’s invasion, signaling the intention was not to affect morale inside Russia.
The adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said Russians were not going to “come out with flowers to greet the anti-Putin tanks,” and noted that a million Russians had volunteered to serve in the country’s military.
The Ukrainian push involves regular army units, analysts have noted, in a change from the previous incursions, which were carried out by armed groups of Russian exiles backed by Kyiv’s army. That tactic had offered Kyiv a veneer of noninvolvement.
The European Union spokesman, Peter Stano, told the Ukrainian news outlet Suspilne that Ukraine “has the legal right to defend itself, including by striking at the aggressor on its territory.”
Photographs and videos posted online and verified by independent military analysts suggested that Ukrainian forces had overrun a Russian metering station for a pipeline exporting natural gas to Europe across Ukraine, which had remained active despite the war. Gazprom, the Russian gas company, told Russian news media the flows declined slightly. In Europe, natural gas prices rose.
A video filmed by a Russian drone and posted by a Russian military blogger who writes under the handle Dva Mayora, or Two Majors, showed a damaged, U.S.-made armored vehicle at a road intersection six miles inside Russia.
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Anton Troianovski, Ivan Nechepurenko, Constant Méheut, Sanjana Varghese, Dzvinka Pinchuk and Stas Kozljuk.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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