UN: Ukrainian Forces’ Attack on Russia’s Kursk Region Escalates Conflict

The United Nations is deeply concerned about the large-scale invasion of the Russian Kursk region by Ukrainian forces, involving more than a thousand Ukrainian soldiers supported by some fifty tanks and armored vehicles. The Ukrainian offensive was preceded by a massive missile attack that killed more than 30 people, including at least six minors, in the Russian town of Sudzha.

The battle, which has already lasted three days, cost the lives of about two hundred Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, and a thousand civilians were forced to flee to a safe area. Contrary to the expectations of the Russian military commanders, the Ukrainian army seems unwilling to withdraw from Russian territory, forcing Moscow to send numerous reinforcements to the area.

The Ukrainian military operation threatens very dangerous consequences. Farhan Haq, a spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said “all these episodes raise the risk of an alarming escalation of the crisis, at a time when the UN wants the situation to de-escalate as much as possible.”

And while “the United Nations supports the reduction of tensions,” Dmitry Medvedev, vice president of the National Security Council and former president of the Russian Federation, said that following the invasion of the Kursk region by Ukrainian forces, “the military operation should acquire an extraterritorial character”: Russia should target Ukraine’s largest territories.

“There is another important political-legal consequence of what happened. From this point on, the special operation should become blatantly extraterritorial. It is no longer just an operation to retake our official territories and punish the (Ukrainian) Nazis. It is possible and necessary to attack the still existing territories of Ukraine from Odessa to Kharkov, to Dnepropetrovsk, to Nikolaev. Even in Kiev and beyond,” Medvedev wrote in his Telegram channel.

Meanwhile, the international press is questioning the real reasons for this Ukrainian military adventure and Kiev’s decision to throw hundreds of its soldiers into the “meat grinder.” The United States intervened immediately: the American press wrote that “the Ukrainian military offensive in Russia’s Kursk region was planned by Kiev without informing the USA in advance, and its objectives remain unclear.”

It emphasizes that “Ukrainian units have been trained and equipped with vehicles and weapons supplied by the USA.” In this regard, the US Defense Department said “that it is not against their use on Russian territory.”

The Wall Street Journal emphasized that “it would be unthinkable for the Ukrainian army to be able to maintain control over Russian-occupied territories” because “Ukrainian forces are suffering from growing shortages of men and equipment on many other parts of the front, particularly in Donetsk, where the Russian army has made significant gains in well-fortified areas in recent weeks.”

The experts quoted by the New York newspaper emphasized that the Russian army has “reserves of troops and military equipment more than sufficient to cope with the situation” and that “an adventurous attack risks putting the already numerically inferior Ukrainian forces under further pressure.” According to Pasi Paroinen, an expert at the Finnish think tank Black Bird Group, who gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, from an operational and strategic point of view, this attack “makes absolutely no sense. It seems like a big waste of people and resources that are needed somewhere else.”