Putin pushes towards Ukraine’s Pokrovsk, as smaller forces defend Kursk
Al Jazeera
As Ukraine seeks approval to strike military targets deep inside Russia with US weapons, its forces struggle in the east.
Russia’s border regions began to form volunteer forces to fight Ukraine’s four week-old counter-invasion in Kursk, as Moscow continued to resist any major redeployment of forces from Ukraine to defend its own territory.
Kursk governor Alexei Smirnov said last Friday that he would form a volunteer combat reserve force, and Ukrainian Kharkiv forces spokesman Vitaly Sarantsev said Russia’s Bryansk and Belgorod regions were doing the same. All three regions border Ukraine.
Sarantsev estimated the strength of the three volunteer forces at just below 5,000 soldiers.
Moscow appeared to have redeployed limited units to Kursk, as Al Jazeera reported last week, but it has mainly relied on a hotch-potch of existing border and internal security forces to defend Russia.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday told NBC that Moscow had diverted 60,000 soldiers from Ukraine to Kursk. A week earlier, his commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, put the figure at 30,000. But they have not provided details to back up these assertions, that appear at odds with what open-source intelligence suggests.
