The Ukraine Retreats from most Russia’s Course region

According to military analysts and soldiers, the Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from all to a piece of land in the region of Russia.

At the height of the offensive, the Ukrainian armed forces checked around 500 square kilometers of Russian territory. On Sunday they clung to a narrow country strip along the Russian-Ukrainian border and, according to Pasi paroins, a military analyst at the Black Bird Group, based in Finland, covered barely 30 square miles.

“The end of the battle is coming,” said Mr. Paroins in a telephone interview.

The amount of the Russian territory under Ukrainian control could not be confirmed independently, and soldiers reported violent fights in the region. But in the midst of fast Russian progress, which was supported by relentless air strikes and drone attacks, the Ukrainian troops retired from several villages in the Kursk and Sudzha region, the capital under their control last week.

The Ukrainian military command said that the troops had withdrawn to what it described as a more defensive soil in Russia along the border, with the hilly terrain a better fire control through the approach to the Russian armed forces. On Sunday it released a map of the battlefield, which shows the piece of land that still controlled Ukraine in the Kursk region.

However, it remains unclear how long Ukrainian forces can hold on to this patch.

The persistent fights in Kursk are now less about keeping Russian territory, according to the Ukrainian soldiers, and more in the control of the best defensive positions to prevent the Russians from pushing into the Sumy region of Ukraine and opening a new front in the war.

“We continue to keep positions on the Kursk front,” said an attacking platoon commander who asked, only to be identified by telephone, only by his call tag, Boroda. “The only difference is that our positions have shifted much closer to the border.”

While the Ukrainian retreat was quick from most price nations, military experts said after months of Russian attacks and bomb attacks that have steadily interrupted that capture Ukraine in the region and separated its care routes, which finally forced a retreat.

“What has happened in the past few months was a design operation that determined the conditions for successful pressure,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, an Austrian military analyst who attended the Sumy Ukraine region on the border last month to speak to Ukrainian commanders.

From December, the Russian armed forces, which were reinforced by newly posted North Korean troops, started repeated attacks on the flanks of the Ukrainian binge in the Kursk region. By mid -February, they had driven from the main supply routes of Ukraine to Sudzha within five miles, so that they target the streets with drone swarms.

At the end of last week, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Sudzha had recaptured it. On Saturday it was said that Russian armed forces had recaptured two villages outside the city.

In contrast to the previous retreats of Kyiv’s armed forces elsewhere, as in parts of the eastern Ukraine, military analysts said that what happened in Kursk was relatively decent and not to include a large number of troops – despite the opposite of President Vladimir V. Putin and President Trump.

“There was no danger from the division of the Ukrainian troops, and there is no evidence of this,” said Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian security and cooperation center, a non-governmental research group.

Kyiv had hoped to use his control over the Russian country in Kursk as a lever at every negotiation to terminate the war. Ukraine has agreed to support a monthly ceasefire supported by the USA as long as Russia does the same. The Kremlin has not yet agreed and seemed to extend the negotiations on the ceasefire that Washington and Kyiv proposed last week by stating conditions.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special representative in the Middle East, who also acted as a conversation partner with Russia, said CNN on Sunday that he was expecting the President to speak to Mr. Putin this week. Mr. Witkoff said he had a positive meeting with Mr. Putin last week, which lasted three to four hours. He refused to share the details of her conversation, but said he was optimistic that a deal was within reach.

This was done after the Foreign Ministry had stated that Foreign Minister Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov from Russia talked about “next steps” on Saturday without providing further details.

Nataliya Vasilyeva And Tyler Pager Reported reports.