Russia Ukraine war latest: 15,000 of Putin’s soldiers killed in Kursk, Zelensky says – UK Times

A Russian drone attacked a civilian passenger bus in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson yesterday, killing at least one person and injuring nine more, the Kherson regional governor said.

The bus with shattered windows and pools of blood on its floor could be seen on a video from the site, shared by the governor alongside his statement on Telegram.

A 49-year-old man was killed, the regional prosecutor’s office said.

Civilians in Kherson region, which Russian forces partially occupy, and its capital constantly come under Russian drone attacks. Local authorities report casualties from such strikes on an almost daily basis.

Over the weekend, Ukraine began a new offensive inside Russia to extend its incursion within Kursk oblast, an attack Kyiv has not yet acknowledged.

In a brief remark alluding to the events in Kursk, a senior Ukrainian official said Russia was “getting what it deserves” there.

Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had established a buffer zone and inflicted heavy losses in Kursk, preventing Moscow from deploying its troops in key areas of the eastern front.

Ukraine’s main achievement in the past five months of fighting has been its capture of territory inside Russia’s Kursk region, something it hopes could prove a bargaining chip in possible peace talks.

Independent military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady said Ukraine was trying to hold its pocket of Kursk for as long as possible, even as Russia continued to push deeper into eastern Ukraine.

“There’s a likelihood that we haven’t seen the main thrust of this Ukrainian offensive operation just yet,” he told Reuters. “We are essentially talking about platoon-sized, company-sized assaults with fairly limited gains thus far.” It remained to be seen if Kyiv’s forces could open up another axis of advance, Mr Gady added.

Russia claims its forces have made important gains in eastern Ukraine while continuing to fend off a new Ukrainian offensive inside the Kursk region of western Russia, where a second day of fierce fighting was under way.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in a late evening report, said Russian forces had launched 25 attacks on Ukrainian positions around Kurakhove, but said nothing about the town changing hands.

The Russian defence ministry said its forces had captured the town of Kurakhove, 32km (20 miles) south of Pokrovsk, a Ukrainian logistics hub toward which Russian forces have been advancing for months.

The Russian ministry said taking Kurakhove, which had held out for many weeks, would enable its forces to boost the pace of their advance in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. It also said it had captured Dachenske, a village five miles (8km) Pokrovsk.

Officials in Kyiv have denied the loss of Kurakhove. Viktor Trehubov, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Khortytsia group of forces, told Reuters that, as of yesterday morning, Kyiv’s forces were still engaging Russian troops inside Kurakhove.

Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow had suffered big losses in five months of fighting in Russia’s Kursk region with nearly 15,000 killed but made no mention of Kurakhove.

The attack started over the weekend, with unverified footage circulated by Russian military bloggers showing a column of Ukrainian tanks and armoured personnel carriers heading towards the village of Berdin, a small area outside of what Ukraine currently controls in Kursk.

Kyiv’s military has not officially acknowledged a fresh offensive, months after an initial incursion that caught Russia off guard and allowed Ukraine to capture a swathe of Russian territory in the region. The head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak, said: “Kursk region, good news, Russia is getting what it deserves”.

Russia has suffered heavy losses in five months of fighting Ukrainian forces in southern Russia’s Kursk region, with nearly 15,000 killed, Volodymyr Zelensky said.

“During the Kursk operation, the enemy has already lost 38,000 of their soldiers in this direction alone, with nearly 15,000 of these losses being irreversible,” Mr Zelensky said in his nightly video address.

His remarks come a day after he said North Korea has lost more than 3,800 soldiers fighting in Kursk.

Ukraine launched a mass incursion into the Kursk region in August and has seized chunks of territory, though Russia’s military says it has recaptured much of that.

Ukrainian and Western assessments say some 11,000 North Korean troops are fighting alongside Russian forces in the region. Russia has neither confirmed nor denied their presence.

Donald Trump’s incoming Ukraine envoy has postponed a fact-finding trip to Kyiv and other European capitals until after the US president-elect’s inauguration on 20 January, sources said.

Retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, who is set to serve as Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, had initially planned a mission to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian leaders in early January, Reuters reported last month. His team was also setting up meetings with officials in other European capitals, including Rome and Paris.

But the trip, which would have marked the first time incoming Trump administration officials headed to Kyiv since the 5 November election, has been pushed back, according to four sources with knowledge of the trip’s planning.

Mr Kellogg is now expected to travel to Ukraine after Trump takes office, though no date has been set, the sources requesting anonymity said.

It was not immediately clear why the diplomat was delaying the trip.