Ukraine said on Wednesday it had destroyed Russian pontoon bridges with U.S.-made weapons to defend its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, while Moscow said its forces had halted Kyiv’s advance there and gained ground in eastern Ukraine.
Kyiv has announced a string of battlefield successes since it crossed unexpectedly into Kursk region on Aug. 6. Moscow has steadily inched forward in eastern Ukraine, pressuring troops worn down by 2-1/2 years of fighting.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s military was responding to the Russian push by strengthening its forces around Pokrovsk, the focus of Russian advances in eastern Ukraine.
Speaking in one of his regular televised addresses, he also urged Kyiv’s allies to honour commitments to send munitions for use by the Ukrainian armed forces. “This is fundamental for defence,” he said.
Ukraine said on Wednesday it had destroyed Russian pontoon bridges with U.S.-made weapons to defend its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, while Moscow said its forces had halted Kyiv’s advance there and gained ground in eastern Ukraine.
Kyiv has announced a string of battlefield successes since it crossed unexpectedly into Kursk region on Aug. 6. Moscow has steadily inched forward in eastern Ukraine, pressuring troops worn down by 2-1/2 years of fighting.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s military was responding to the Russian push by strengthening its forces around Pokrovsk, the focus of Russian advances in eastern Ukraine.
Speaking in one of his regular televised addresses, he also urged Kyiv’s allies to honour commitments to send munitions for use by the Ukrainian armed forces. “This is fundamental for defence,” he said.
Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, stated Berlin had not been notified beforehand and predicted that Kyiv’s progress in the Kursk region would be a “very limited operation in terms of space and probably also in terms of time”.
Though it has declared it has created a buffer zone from an area Russia has used to pound targets in Ukraine with cross-border strikes, Ukraine has jealously guarded its overall goals in the Kursk region.
In an attempt to cling onto the land it has conquered, Russia has stated that Ukraine has damaged at least three bridges over the Seym river. The strikes on multiple pontoon crossings in the Kursk region were filmed on camera by Ukrainian special forces.
“Where in the Kursk region do Russian pontoon bridges ‘disappear’? Operators precisely eliminate them, as stated by the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces via Telegram Messenger.
According to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Kyiv has gained more territory in the Kursk area this year than Moscow has in the country. Russia has referred to the incursion as a step up.
In an attempt to pressure Moscow to pull soldiers from the remainder of the front, Ukraine broke through the Russian border in the Kursk region on August 6. Despite this, Russian forces have been pushing forward in recent days.
Less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the transportation center Pokrovsk is the village of Zhelanne, which Russia seized, according to the Russian ministry of defense.
Major drone attacks were alleged to have struck both sides. Russia claimed that its air defenses had destroyed 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region. Ukraine claimed to have intercepted 50 of the 69 drones that Russia had fired.
Major General Apti Alaudinov, the deputy head of the military-political department of the defense ministry and leader of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces, reported back to Moscow that Russia had stopped the Ukrainian incursion.
“We stopped them and began to push them back,” Alaudinov said on state channel Rossiya. Though he could not provide any additional information, he stated that Ukrainian forces were reorganizing and might shortly launch a new onslaught.
Russia has declared again and time again that the Ukrainian offensive is over. Ukraine continues to brag about its victories, claiming to have taken control of 92 villages over more than 1,250 square kilometers.
The operation has given the Ukrainian military, which has not achieved major victories on its own territory since late 2022, a much-needed morale boost.
The national defense committee secretary of the Ukrainian parliament, Roman Kostenko, stated that despite the incursion, Russia’s top goal was still to seize the Donetsk region and that it was not bringing in troops from the vicinity of Pokrovsk.
“In fact, the enemy started moving some forces… However, their main stance is to keep soldiers moving in the direction of Pokrovsk,” the media outlet Espreso.TV cited him as saying.
Attacks against bridges and pontoons, according to Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank in Kyiv, would assist Ukraine in fortifying a defensive line along the river.
Speaking on national television, he stated, “This is an opportunity to make it more stable, systemic, and ready to repel Russian attacks.”
All of the pontoon bridge hit locations depicted in the video were on the Seym river in the Kursk region, according to confirmation from Reuters.
Along with military trucks, the footage showed drone strikes on what appeared to be an electronic warfare center in the area as well as a Russian ammunition storage. It was not possible to independently confirm the video’s other locations or the day it was shot.
At least one pontoon crossing appears to have been damaged, as confirmed by Reuters in a separate report.
It was probably erected between August 14 and August 17, after two bridges that had previously been damaged or destroyed, between the Russian towns of Zvannoe and Glushkovo.
By August 19, satellite photography revealed that the crossing, which was around 14 km (8.7 miles) from the border, was disappeared. Photos taken that day from the region also showed smoke.
This was Kyiv’s first formal admission that it had deployed the weapon during the incursion when it declared that operations to disrupt Russian supplies in the Kursk region had involved the employment of HIMARS rocket systems made in the United States.
Washington has stated that US policy has not changed and that Ukraine was defending itself against Russia’s continuous full-scale invasion, but it has not directly addressed the use of US-made weapons in the Kursk region.
Allies have prohibited Ukraine from using Western weaponry in long-range strikes inside Russia, but they have permitted Kyiv to use them to target border areas following Russia’s recent offensive in the Kharkiv region this spring.
