Ukraine launches surprise attack inside Russia

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.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up