Fighting in Kursk Region Enters Third Day

Farkhund Yousafzai

Moscow, 8 August 2024 (TDI): Heavy fighting in Russia’s Kursk region has entered a third day, with efforts “ongoing” to expel Ukrainian troops from the country, Moscow’s defence ministry said on Thursday.

It said that at least 1,000 Ukrainian forces, supported by tanks and armoured vehicles, crossed the border on Tuesday.
Some three thousand people have had to evacuate the region, as ongoing military altercations have killed at least 4 people, Kursk’s deputy Governor Andrei Belostotsky said in a statement.

Ukraine’s military has maintained a resolute silence on the accusations, but a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky has blamed Moscow’s unequivocal aggression for any military actions.

War is War

Mykhailo Podolyak, a long-term aide to President Zelensky said that war is war, with its own rules, where the aggressor inevitably reaps corresponding outcomes.

Russia’s defence ministry said breakthrough attempts and advancements by the Ukrainian army’s formations in the Sudzhansky and Korenevsky districts in Kursk were thwarted in a combined effort from the Federal Security Service and the military.

The Kremlin said Kyiv had lost 660 military personnel since the start of hostilities in Kursk. Belostotsky claimed Ukraine’s forces were beginning to retreat from the region.

In its update on Thursday Moscow said Kyiv had lost eighty two units of armoured vehicles. A much higher number than its initial report that leven tanks and more than twenty armoured vehicles had entered Russia near the town of Sudzha on Tuesday morning.

Also on Thursday Moscow suggested, for the third consecutive day, to have stopped Ukrainian forces from advancing in Kursk.

But on Wednesday, Russia’s Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov said the “advance” into the Kursk region had been halted, with Russian troops continuing to destroy the adversary in areas directly adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian border.

While the FSB made claims to a similar effect on Tuesday, when initial reports of a potential incursion by Ukraine surfaced.

In its latest report, the Institute for the Study of War said that geolocated footage from the past two days showed that Ukrainian armoured vehicles have advanced to positions 10km into the Kursk region.