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KYIV — Russia pulled some troops out of southern Ukraine and back into its own territory to try to fend off an escalating incursion by Kyiv’s forces, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s ongoing surprise attack has triggered scrambling in Moscow where President Vladimir Putin has expressed anger after Kyiv snatched dozens of settlements and huge areas of territory in the Kursk and Belgorod regions of southern Russia.
“Russia has relocated some of its units from both Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine’s south,” Dmytro Lykhoviy, a Ukrainian army spokesman, told POLITICO.
The Kremlin initially attacked the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of southern Ukraine in the first days of Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022. POLITICO was unable to independently confirm how many Russian troops have been redeployed back across the border, though Lykhoviy said it was a “relatively small” number of units.
To try to counter Ukrainian gains, Russian troops have, however, continued their offensive on Pokrovsk and elsewhere in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, according to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army, in one of the hottest spots on the war front where Russia is gaining ground.
But Lykhoviy added on Ukrainian TV that Russia has been relocating personnel to “other directions, including to Kursk.”
In a tense meeting in Russia on Monday, local authorities described to an irritated Putin how Ukrainian forces had overrun meager defenses in the south starting last week, sparking mass evacuations of nearly 200,000 people.
As Ukraine captured territory, Russian commanders initially played down the assault, insisting the military had things under control. But more than a week later, Ukraine now controls at least 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory.
“Our forces continue to advance in the Kursk region,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an evening statement. “74 communities are under Ukrainian control, where inspections and stabilization measures are being carried out. The development of humanitarian solutions for these territories continues.”
The incursion has boosted morale in Ukraine, which has been suffering under Putin’s full-scale invasion for two and a half years, while also giving a fillip to Western allies that want to see Kyiv tilt the battlefield in its favor.
In Moscow on Monday, an ally of Putin pointed the finger at Russia’s military for not being prepared to stave off a Ukrainian attack and added that Russian border troops were the last to receive information about the ongoing Ukrainian offensive, leaving them scant time to act.
But while withdrawing some units for Kursk, Russian forces have actively attacked and initiated fights across the war front in Ukraine, including in the south from where troops were pulled out.
“However, Russians have accumulated a large number of personnel, in particular in the Zaporizhzhia region, and the number of units they are redeploying is relatively small,” Lykhoviy said on Ukrainian TV.
And they indeed initiated several attacks on Kherson the night they withdrew some forces. “We must still understand whether it is a smokescreen activity,” Lykhoviy added.
This article has been updated with a statement from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
