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Speaking with 5 Ukrainian soldiers who recently fled Kursk Oblast in Russia, the BBC received the picture of a disorganized and vulnerable retreat in which “hundreds” of vehicles and soldiers were destroyed and killed.
One soldier called Anton on his Telegram channel said that logistics “no longer work–organized deliveries of weapons, ammunition, food, and water are no longer possible”. Anton said he managed to leave Sudzha, the largest town seized by the 12,000-man-strong Ukrainian incursion, by foot, at night. “We almost died several times. Drones are in the sky all the time”.
“Everything is finished in the Kursk region,” said another named Dmytro, “the operation was not successful”. BBC didn’t have access to the front, as media was strictly prohibited. Instead, they maintained contact with several soldiers through Telegram.
President Trump will soon have a phone call with Vladimir Putin regarding the stalled ceasefire negotiations that seemed poised to take off in the infancy of his second tenure.
“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told Russian media outlet Izvestia. “Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of NATO countries to accept it into the alliance”.
Putin said publically that the 30-day ceasefire is the “right idea” but that any new discussions have to address the original causes of the war, which according to the Kremlin remain the militarization of Russia’s southern neighbor, her alignment with NATO, and her repression of ethnic Russians in the Donbas.
Trump’s National Security Advisor Steve Witkoff said recently that “[t]here were very, very what I’ll call cogent and substantive negotiations framed in something that’s called the Istanbul Protocol Agreement. We came very, very close to signing something”.
Witkoff was referring to talks that took place just a few months into the war’s outbreak when Kyiv almost accepted Russian terms and concessions before being told by the then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that if Ukraine instead kept fighting, the West would supply them with the weapons and monetary support they need to retake areas in the east.
“I think we’ll be using that framework as a guidepost to get a peace deal done between Ukraine and Russia,” Witkoff said.
“Tragically, three years later, the ceasefire talks will pick up where the Istanbul talks left off,” writes journalist and analyst Ted Snider, for Antiwar. “After all the loss of land and loss of life, Ukraine will still surrender territory and NATO membership. They will not receive a security guarantee that involves a US military commitment”.
“And [Russia] is not going to stop the war without Crimea and at least some of the four oblasts they have annexed and a guarantee in the Ukrainian constitution of the protection of the rights of ethnic Russians in the territory that remains in Ukraine”. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Destroyed Ukrainian tanks during the summer counteroffensive. PC: public domain.
