About a thousand soldiers with artillery and missile support take Russian border guards by surprise

▲ Damage from Ukrainian shelling in Sudzha district of Kursk region. Russian officials say they are fighting cross-border incursions, while kyiv remains silent on the scope of the operation.AP Photo/Kursk Governor Alexei Smirnov on Telegram

Juan Pablo Duch

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Thursday, August 8, 2024, p. 25

Moscow. Fighting continued for the second day in a row in Russia’s Kursk region on the border with Ukraine on Tuesday, when nearly 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers, supported by artillery and missile fire and an undetermined number of tanks and armored vehicles, managed to advance 10 kilometers into Russian territory, taking Russian border guards by surprise and approaching or entering Nikolayevo-Darino, Darino, Sverdlikovo, Oleshnia, Tolsty Lug, Nizhny Klin and Sudzha, among other towns.

This is what emerges, in summary, from what was said yesterday by the Russian authorities and from the reports of the so-called Z-bloggers (Russians who identify themselves with the last letter of the Latin alphabet as a distinctive sign of those who support the special military operation in Ukraine), which cover the hostilities on a daily and unofficial basis, many of them with military sources and from the various Russian security agencies.

President Vladimir Putin yesterday acknowledged the need to evacuate the population from that part of the Kursk region in view of the large-scale provocation carried out by Ukraine.

As is known, the kyiv regime has launched a new large-scale provocation. It is carrying out indiscriminate shelling with various types of weapons, including missiles, against civilian facilities, residential buildings and ambulances.Putin said at the start of a meeting of the Russian government, broadcast on local television, and instructed Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov and Kursk Governor Aleksei Mironov to immediately coordinate all the assistance required by the inhabitants affected by the incursion from Ukraine.

The Russian president then held a closed-door meeting with the heads of the Defense Ministry, Andrei Belousov of the Federal Security Service (FSB, in charge of the border guard troops), Aleksandr Bortnikov of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, and via video conference with the Chief of the Army General Staff and head of the campaign in Ukraine, General Valeri Gerasimov.

Military report

In the report that Gerasimov presented, according to the public part distributed by the Kremlin, the general confirmed that On August 6, at 5:30 a.m., units of the Ukrainian army, numbering about a thousand soldiers, began an offensive with the aim of seizing part of the Sudzha district in the Kursk region..

According to Gerasimov, the army and border guard troops They were able to stop the enemy’s advance into Kursk and now, They continue to annihilate the invaders in the districts bordering the Russian-Ukrainian border..

The Russian chief of staff put Ukraine’s casualties at 100 dead and 215 wounded, as well as 54 armored vehicles, including seven tanks, and offered: The operation will end with the defeat of the enemy and the recovery of our border..

While the Ukrainian command has chosen to remain silent on what would be the first incursion of its military into Russian territory, the initial triumphant report by the Russian Ministry of Defense (on Tuesday) on the expulsion of enemy troops became unsustainable in the face of the alarming news spread on social networks (on Wednesday) by Z-bloggers.

Telegram channel Rybar, close to a group of experts from the Ministry of Defense, reported that Ukrainian forces took control of the Sudzha gas metering station, which is used for the transit of blue fuel destined for Europe through Ukraine, and entered five towns in Kursk. Yuri Podolyaka’s World Today, who claims to be reporting from the scene, implied that Sudzha is virtually surrounded, Taking into account that the enemy’s reserves are close, and ours, far away..

Meanwhile, Semion Pegov, creator of the WarGonzo channel, warned that This is not a photo-op and retreat raid. This time there is a full-blown battle. The enemy has really prepared and it must be remembered that Sudzha is not the only target of this type of attack.. Official political analyst Sergei Markov wrote on social networks that In perspective, we should not rule out an attack on the town of Kurchatov, where the Kursk nuclear power plant is located, less than 50 kilometers from the border..

The objective of the offensive is not clear.

It is not clear what the real objective of this incursion into Russian territory is. Unlike previous attacks, particularly in the Belgorod region, which were always claimed by paramilitary groups of Russian volunteers opposed to the Kremlin, Russia has now directly attributed the attack to the Ukrainian army.

Of all the versions circulating – showing that Russian territory is vulnerable to infantry attacks; using several of the 14 brigades that kyiv was forming as reserve troops; staying in one or several towns in Kursk for as long as possible; advancing towards the atomic power plant in the city of Kurchatov, to mention only four theoretically possible ones – military analysts are inclined to the one that seems the most sensible of all: that this attack on one of the least fortified areas of Russian territory adjacent to Ukraine, and in the absence of reserve troops nearby, could be due to a maneuver by kyiv to attract Russian forces from the front in the face of its slow but sustained advance in the Donetsk region near Chasiv Yar, Toretsk and Pokrovsk.

Moscow, it should be recalled, has been trying for weeks to break through this Ukrainian defence line and, if successful, prevent the arrival of reinforcement troops and be able to cut off supplies to the enemy army, which would facilitate approaching the next Ukrainian defence line further north that protects the key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, still within the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk region.