Russia Withdraws Some Forces From Ukraine in Response to Kursk Invasion

SUMY, Ukraine—Russia is withdrawing some of its military forces from Ukraine to respond to a Ukrainian offensive into Russian territory, U.S. officials said, the first sign that Kyiv’s incursion is forcing Moscow to rejigger its invasion force.

The officials said the U.S. is still seeking to determine the significance of Russia’s move and didn’t say how many troops the U.S. assesses Russia is shifting. But the new U.S. assessment bolsters claims by Ukrainian officials who said last week’s surprise invasion of Kursk province had drawn Russian forces away from Ukraine, where Moscow’s advantage in manpower and equipment is allowing them to grind forward in several places.

Ukrainian forces have advanced at least 20 miles into Russian territory since launching the surprise assault last week, quickly overrunning the lightly defended border. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his military and security forces to eject Kyiv’s military, but Russia is struggling to mount a coherent response.

On Tuesday, a Ukrainian soldier raised his fist as he rode a tank toward the Russian border. Heavy equipment and trucks loaded with logs used to reinforce bunkers and trenches trundled the same way. In the opposite direction, a pickup truck raced by carrying a half-dozen Russian prisoners with tape over their eyes.

Ukraine’s top military commander said Ukrainian forces were advancing and had taken control of 74 Russian towns and villages.
“There are battles across the front line,” Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy reported to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a snippet from a video call that was aired online.

Ukraine carried out its largest drone attack on Russian airfields in the early hours of Wednesday, a Ukrainian official said, striking four air bases deep inside Russia where warplanes and drones are launched from to target Ukraine. Ukraine is still assessing the scale of the damage, the official said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy watches as two recently acquired US-made F-16s perform a flyover during a commemoration of the country’s air force day.

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Tuesday it was inflicting heavy losses on Ukrainian forces taking part in the operation, which Putin has blamed on Ukraine’s backers in the West, led by the U.S.
The Biden administration said it wasn’t given prior warning about the operation and has sought in recent days to understand Ukraine’s goals. One of the U.S. officials said Tuesday that Kyiv told the U.S. it had been looking for opportunities to exploit gaps in the Russian lines and found one in Kursk that was loosely defended. Ukraine was also hoping that the incursion would force Russia to pull troops out of Ukraine, which happened in the last day or so, the official said.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian officials gave their most detailed public comments yet on the reasons behind the operation, saying its aim was to destroy logistics and infrastructure that Russia uses to make war on Ukraine.

Russia “is sure that its territory is informally inviolable, and no one will destroy the logistics and infrastructure of the war” there, said Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser. “Today, Ukraine is showing that this is not the case.”

Russia has used the Kursk region to launch aerial and artillery strikes on Ukraine as well as to support its incursion into Ukraine’s Kharkiv province. Podolyak said in a post on X that ground operations were one way to destroy Russian war infrastructure. The other, he noted, was to use long-range missiles of the kind that the West has provided but not cleared for use against Russian territory.

Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhi said Kyiv wasn’t interested in occupying Russian territory.

“The purpose of the operation is to save the lives of our people and protect the territory of Ukraine from Russian attacks,” he told reporters. “The sooner the Russian Federation agrees to restore a just peace…the sooner the raids of the Ukrainian defense forces on the territory of the Russian Federation will stop.”

Images of Ukrainian forces tearing down Russian flags have raised morale among troops after months of grinding attritional warfare that favors its much larger enemy. The incursion has also demonstrated to Kyiv’s partners that Ukraine is still capable of striking back against Russia after a failed counteroffensive last year. Ukrainian forces haven’t regained significant territory since the first year of the war, when they pulled off a surprise counteroffensive in the northern Kharkiv region and squeezed Russian forces out of Kherson in the south.

“We have proven once again that we, Ukrainians, are capable of achieving our goals in any situation—capable of defending our interests and our independence,” Zelensky said in his nightly address Tuesday.

Lightly-armed Russian conscripts surrendered en masse after Ukrainian forces burst across the border a week ago, and Zelensky noted in the call with his military chief that these soldiers—which he said numbered in the hundreds—could be exchanged for Ukrainians detained in Russia.