The incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is allowing Kyiv’s forces to help better protect their border, Ukraine has said.
Ukraine’s state border service spokesperson Andriy Demchenko said Kyiv’s forces can now construct fortifications right on the frontier in the Sumy oblast, rather than further away from the border as it has to do elsewhere due to Russian shelling.
Using drones and “other technical means of control,” Demchenko said on Sunday that Ukraine now had the opportunity to build fortifications “directly along the border line.”
“We hope that we will be able to do this in the future as powerfully as possible in order to have powerful defense capabilities directly along the border in the future,” he told Ukrainian television, according to a translation.
On August 6, Kyiv began an operation that appeared to have taken Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s allies by surprise. NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance did not receive any warning of Ukraine’s intentions for the push.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.
Ukrainian soldiers in a training exercise operated by Britain’s armed forces in southern England on August 19, 2024. Kyiv said its incursion into Kursk means it can now construct fortifications directly on the border with Russia.
JUSTIN TALLIS/Getty Images
Demchenko’s comments offer an insight into the state of the Russian-Ukrainian frontier one month on from the first push and capture of Moscow’s territory by foreign forces since World War II.
The relative success of Ukrainian operations showed the fragility of Russian defenses in the region under attack, but it would be wrong to assume that the entire Russian border is defenseless, said Nicolò Fasola author of Reinterpreting Russia’s Strategic Culture: The Russian Way of War.
“While penetrating in the Kursk region, Ukrainians have tried [incursions on] the Russian border also in other spots, but these attacks largely failed,” he told Newsweek. “Also consider that the Kursk region had not been an area of active conflict for quite some time.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said this month that Kyiv plans to hold on to the territory in Russia, although there are concerns about the opening of a new front, especially given the width of the front line in Ukraine’s Donbas region where Russian troops are advancing toward Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk oblast.
“This incursion might affect Ukraine’s ‘resource balance’ negatively,” said Fasola, who is a research fellow at the University of Bologna, in Italy. “However, the incursion has not yet reached such a breadth to impose onto Ukraine a serious assessment of over-extension risks.”
“Indeed, avoiding such risk might be one of the reasons why the incursion will fail to gain further depth into Russian territory,” he told Newsweek.
He said the Ukrainian attack highlights yet another failure of the Russian military, although, “I believe it is unlikely that Ukraine will achieve any major breakthrough in Kursk.”
On Sunday, Russian forces conducted counterattacks in Kursk as Ukrainian forces continue to target ground lines of communications in rear areas, according to the Institute for the Study of War think tank. The Ukrainian Telegram channel Khorne Group posted a video it said was of Kyiv’s forces destroying a bridge across the Seim River north of Karyzh, in the Glushkovsky district.
