First Week of Battle of Kursk
Russia continues to send reinforcements, and the Ukrainians continue to advance, albeit at a much slower pace than before
A week has passed since the Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region began. Fierce fighting continues day and night, Ukrainian troops have managed to gain control over the town of Sudzha that hosts the compressor station from which Russian natural gas is sent to European countries.
According to sources of the US agency Bloomberg, the two sides do not intend to interrupt gas supply through the Sudzha gas metering station. “Both Ukraine and Russia,” the agency writes, “have a financial incentive to continue supplying fuel.” For Kiev, gas transit provides major funds for its war-ravaged economy – about $3 billion per year – while Europe has failed in its efforts to diversify supply over the past two and a half years and, after China, remains one of the main consumers of Russian natural gas, which continues to transit over this former Soviet-era pipeline despite everything.
In any case, on August 13, Gazprom cut export volumes, which fell from 41-43 million cubic meters per day – the average over the past few weeks – to 39.6 million cubic meters.
The Ukrainian attack took everyone, from Russian military leaders to international analysts and experts, by surprise. Although Russian forces are still unable to find a winning tactic to block the offensive, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Kiev’s army had conquered a thousand square kilometers of territory on Russian territory.
Russia has denied these statements by Kiev. Alexei Smirnov, interim governor of the Kursk region, said during a videoconference with President Vladimir Putin that “the Ukrainian army managed to penetrate 12 kilometers deep into Russian territory on a 40-kilometer front, with 28 settlements in the region falling into enemy hands.”
Smirnov’s statement was the first recognition of the scale and brutality of the Ukrainian invasion. While Smirnov was speaking live on air about the seriousness of the military situation, Putin interrupted him, suggesting that the governor limit himself to summarizing the humanitarian issue, while the military forces would handle the military situation. Smirnov later said that 122,000 people out of 180,000 had already been evacuated from their homes: “2 thousand people remained in the combat zones, and we know nothing about what happened to them,” the Kursk governor emphasized.
According to some analyses, the main reason Russia “is currently failing to effectively counter Ukraine’s offensive” is that Moscow’s military leaders “have refused to slow the Russian offensive by shifting troops from the Donbass front” to Ukraine and sending to Kursk “less-trained soldiers who have not been ‘battle-baptized’ and are fighting against more experienced Ukrainian troops.”
However, doubts remain, and there is little clarity regarding the long-term goals of the Ukrainian military operation. As the Kiev regime imposed a complete press blackout, some experts spoke of “an attempt to divert attention to ease the situation in Donbass, where Russian forces have been steadily advancing for months.”
