Russian forces are trying to cross the border and gain a foothold in Ukraine’s Sumy province as they press ahead with a counteroffensive aiming to eliminate the last of Kyiv’s position in the Russian Kursk region.

A Ukrainian state border guard spokesperson, Andrii Demchenko, told national television that Russian forces were trying to advance around the Ukrainian village of Novenke and cut off supply lines.

The Russian efforts indicate that Moscow does not want to halt its counteroffensive at the national border, should it manage to recapture the rest of the shrinking Ukrainian pocket around the village of Sudzha.

Though Moscow has been trying to expel the Ukrainian forces since August, after Kyiv seized about 1,000 sq km of Russian territory in a surprise attack, one expert group noted its rate of success had dramatically improved in the past few days.

“Russian forces are collapsing the northern part of the Ukrainian salient in Kursk oblast,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote on Sunday night, before suggesting that the change in frontline position may be linked to the withdrawals of US support for Ukraine announced by the White House last week.

“The temporal correlation between the suspension of US intelligence sharing with Ukraine and the start of Russia’s collapse of the Ukrainian Kursk salient is noteworthy,” the ISW said, though it acknowledged the conclusion was tentative, and based on emerging observations.

Russia operations are reported to have intensified on Thursday and Friday last week, a day after the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, publicly confirmed that the US had stopped sharing intelligence - principally real-time surveillance and reconnaissance data, considered particularly useful in dynamic battlefield situations - with Ukraine.

On Friday, Donald Trump, the US president, noted that Russia was “bombing the hell out of Ukraine” and taking advantage of Kyiv’s weakness in the absence of US intelligence. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was “hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them”, adding “probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now”.

Moscow’s forces are making heavy use of “fibre-optic drones” in Kursk – small craft that are coordinated by a thin high-speed cable which is resistant to electronic jamming, according to a soldier who spoke to Ukraine’s Suspilne public broadcaster. “The situation is not developing in our favour,” they added.

Ukraine has lost more than two-thirds of the territory it controlled inside Russia in the summer, but on Monday, Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said there was “no threat of encirclement” and that he had taken a decision to reinforce his army’s forces in the area.

He insisted in a social media post that the border region was “under the control of the Ukrainian defense forces” – though some units in the area were “taking timely measures to manoeuvre to favourable defence lines”. Russian forces had lost a battalion of troops in the past four days by trying to advance, he added.

It would “make sense for Russia to push forward and do what they can while Ukraine is at a disadvantage”, said Keir Giles, an analyst at the Chatham House thinktank, emphasising that he expected Moscow to press on into Ukraine’s Sumy region if its forces are able to close up the Sudzha pocket.



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