Ukraine launches surprise attack inside Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts security meeting on Ukraine's Kursk incursion

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting with top defense officials, called Ukraine's Kursk incursion a "large-scale provocation"

(Image credit: Gavriil Grigorov / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)

What happened

Ukraine has launched an assault on Russia's Kursk region, across the border from Ukraine's northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv provinces, military analysts and Russian officials said Wednesday. The attack, launched early Tuesday, appears to have taken Russia by surprise. Russian military bloggers, contradicting the Kremlin, said Ukrainian forces have pushed a few miles into Russia and captured several settlements.

Who said what

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting with top defense officials, called the incursion a "large-scale provocation." Squads of pro-Ukraine Russian fighters have raided Russia several times since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but "it's clear this is something completely new," Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the Moscow think tank CAST, told The Wall Street Journal. "This is a full-scale army operation."

The main "question from some military experts was: 'Why?'" the BBC said. "One of Ukraine's biggest battlefield issues is manpower," and its overstretched military is slowly losing ground to Russia's larger and better-armed forces in eastern Donetsk province. Ukrainian officials declined to comment on the operation.

What next?

"There are more questions than answers from events in the Kursk region," military analyst Mykhaylo Zhyrokhov said to the BBC, but if the operation slows Russian attacks or saps Moscow's momentum, Kyiv will see it as worthwhile.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.