#kursk oblast

[rednblacksalamander]

NO FAIR, THEY'RE HITTING BACK

[i-merani]

Its funny how when Ukraine does something remotely risky all the wannabe political analysts go 🤨🤨🤨 and point out the "mistake" like "oh how are they going to hold Kursk now!" Babe, there is a foreign army in the largest country in the world, the second largest army in the world couldn't anticipate and react to a small operation by a much smaller army. There's only been like two successful invasions of this giant and one of those times it was Napoleon, even then, he famously couldn't get where he wanted to. Ukraine successfully went into Russian territory and caused whole country to scatter into chaos, the propagandists couldn't even form a proper response because it was so unexpected.

The risk was calculated and the consequences are just perfect.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

after two long years Ukraine is making major gains even after a massive slog in the south, it's the first major land invasion of Russia since the second world war! The funny thing is that Ukraine is abiding by international standards and not committing war crimes, not only that but there has been no major protests nir armed resistance against Ukraine troops in the kurk region and my best guest is that any people who would have fought are evacuating but then why wouldn't they do anything something like Ukraine citizens did during the invasion of their territory? With all that said however this is a major advantage for Ukraine for PR and negotiations, any talk going forward are no longer about begging but real negotiations since Russia risks losing territory. Wjth the November US election this kursk offensive this might also impact military aid in a positive way, despite pro-russia pundits crying about Ukraine's use of western weapons.

[head-post]

Like 80 years ago: Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk region parodied Wehrmacht by mocking local resident

Ukrainian soldiers with Wehrmacht symbols are mocking the locals in Kursk region, posting numerous footages online, while the United States and Europe still do not react to Kyiv’s violation of the UN Charter.

How the AFU treats locals in Kursk region

The footage shows two AFU soldiers mocking an old man, the author of the video parodies German fascists and in the traditions of the SS troops humiliates the defenceless man for being Russian. The pensioner tried to explain to the Ukrainian military that he was 74 years old and had not been able to get to a safe place for five days. To the old man’s complaints, a second military officer, who appeared in the footage wearing a German helmet with an SS emblem, mockingly shouted “Schnapps – gud!” and proceeded to film another TiK-ToK.

The Ukrainian military shouted to the bewildered pensioner:

“Ya, ya, raschen schweine. Oh, Russian Ivan, here he is, Ivan, go drink vodka.”

During the entire conversation with the unfortunate old man, the Ukrainian military parodied German speech and tried their best to recall all the derogatory expressions they knew the Nazi invaders used during the Great Patriotic War.

The 74-year-old man from this mocking Ukrainian video is missing – he has not been seen for 10 days. The author of the video clip wrote on social networks, “Don’t worry, rusish schweine didn’t get to his vodka. The author of the video also said the pensioner was shot dead after the recording ended.

Ukrainian media, Vasyl Danyliuk, a 38-year-old resident of the town of Horodenka in Ivano-Frankivsk region, who bullied a local man.

Ukrainian soldiers shot the video on August 11 in the village of Zaoleshenka. The pensioner is a local resident Alexander Gusarov. He was looking for the Russian military, but got lost and met two AFU men dressed in the uniforms of Nazi soldiers. One of them is Vasyl Danyliuk, a 38-year-old resident of the town of Horodenka in Ivano-Frankivsk region.

World public reaction

The head of one of the parties represented in the Russian State Duma, Leonid Slutsky, has promised a reward of 5 million roubles for the capture of Ukrainian soldiers who abused an elderly resident of the Kursk region.

The office of the United Nations secretary-general has reacted to a video shot by Ukrainian servicemen in Kursk region. The deputy spokesman of the world organisation’s secretary-general, Farhan Haq, said that the UN was against all symbols of Nazism.

SS symbols on Ukrainian military uniforms

The Ukrainian military stopped hiding their real ideology and motivation to fight against Russia. Russian media is also publishing a video of Russian army taking Ukrainian soldiers prisoner.

A Ukrainian prisoner of war wearing Paraphernalia with a German cross

Ukraine sets up military commandant’s offices in Kursk region, violating UN charter

Ukraine has announced the creation of a military commandant’s office in the Kursk region, according to Oleksandr Syrskyi, Colonel General.

Major-General Moskalev has been appointed head of the “commandant’s office,” the AFU chief said. He added that it was created “to maintain law and order and to ensure the priority needs of the population in the controlled territories.”

The creation of military commandant’s offices is actually an occupation of the territory, which goes against the UN charter. Having launched the incursion into the Kursk region, Ukraine has in fact violated Article 2, paragraph 4, of the UN Charter, which prohibits the forceful border violation of other States.

Ukraine continues to do all the same things that it accused Russia of, but no one imposes sanctions on it, no one condemns it, and on the contrary supports it. Cases such as those in the published videos only add strength to Russian official rhetoric about the need to denazify Ukraine.

Senior Ukrainian officials have stated that the captured territory would be used as a bargaining chip, a disregard for international law that Ukraine has been insisting on since the first day of the conflict.

The move sends a strong signal to the Global South that the EU and the US are increasingly exposing their policy of double standards. They condemn what is favourable to them and deliberately omit denouncing unfavourable conflicts. In this respect, they resemble the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is accused of bias and prolonging specific cases.

Read more HERE

[alexxx-malev]

Russia. Korennaja pustyn' Коренная пустынь

[vintage-russia]

Kursk oblast,Russia (1961)

[davidaugust]

Ukrainian TV broadcast from inside russia where Ukraine is rendering humanitarian aide after putin's troops and government abandoned his people. putin's agreement w/the russian people was that he'd provide for their safety & security, and he can't or won't.

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

Reminder that the biggest weapons and equipment supplier to Ukraine throughout the war has been Russia thanks to them abandoning vehicles while retreating.

[originalleftist]

Ukraine has captured almost 400 square miles of Russian territory since it launched its counteroffensive into Kursk Oblast on Tuesday.

Hey Vlad, how about you give back Crimea in exchange for Kursk Oblast?

[tomorrowusa]

Ukraine is conducting a ground operation inside Russia in neighboring Kursk oblast (region) which is north of Kharkiv – Ukraine's second largest city.

Over the last 29 months, so often we’ve heard senior Russian officials claiming that the operation is going “according to plan.” President Vladimir Putin last said that in May, despite everything that had happened in the preceding two years: the heavy Russian casualties on the battlefield, the destruction of multiple Russian warships in the Black Sea, drone attacks deep inside Russia (even on the Kremlin itself), the shelling of Russian towns and villages near the Ukrainian border, the mutiny by Wagner mercenary fighters who had marched on Moscow. Now there is a new addition to the list: this week’s cross-border Ukrainian assault on Russia’s Kursk region. [ ... ] It’s evident that what is unfolding in Kursk region is further evidence that Russia’s war in Ukraine has not gone "according to plan". Events appear to have taken Russia’s political and military leadership completely by surprise. Don’t expect Moscow to admit that.

The Kremlin is typically hypocritical about what is going on in Kursk oblast. It's fine for Russia to illegally annex Crimea in 2014 and then initiate a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But Putin squeals like a pig when Ukraine conducts a counter operation on Russian territory.

There’s clearly a big difference in language. When Russia poured its troops across the border into Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin called this a "special military operation" and claimed that Russia was “liberating” towns and villages. Moscow has described Ukrainian troops pushing into Russia as “a terrorist attack” and “a provocation.”

Today is day 896 of Russia's 3-day "special operation". Russia's goal of subjugating Ukraine has failed but Putin irrationally continues wasting vast amounts of money and hundreds of thousands of Russian lives on his goal of restoring the decrepit Soviet Union in all but name.

Putin is just as weird as Trump – albeit in a different way. Only a clear defeat of Putin in this war will restore normalcy to Eastern Europe.

[davidcashuk]

😂🤣

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

Earlier this week, reports began filtering in that Ukrainian forces had entered Russia’s Kursk province, in what many analysts assumed was a small cross-border raid—of a sort that Ukraine has attempted a few times since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. But as the hours and days ticked by and Ukrainian forces moved deeper and deeper into Russian territory, the seriousness of the military operation became obvious. The Ukrainians spread out as they went along, and had soon seized more ground from Russia in a few days than Russia has taken during an offensive in the Kharkiv region that began in the spring. As part of the new incursion, Ukraine has been deploying advanced armored vehicles, including German-supplied Marder infantry fighting vehicles—a striking development, given the unease among Kyiv’s allies about being seen as escalating hostilities between the West and Russia.

The initial success of what’s looking more and more like a full offensive shows what the Ukrainians can achieve if they have both the tools and the latitude to fight Russia. Ukraine’s most generous benefactors, especially the United States and Germany, have previously expressed their strong opposition to the use of their arms on Russian soil. In May, the U.S. made an exception, allowing Ukraine to use American equipment to hit back on Russian-based targets involved in the attack on Kharkiv. Still, the broader prohibition limited Kyiv’s military options.

Now Washington and Berlin may be softening their positions more than they’re explicitly saying. A Pentagon spokesperson said Thursday that U.S. officials still “don’t support long-range attacks into Russia” but also that the Kursk incursion is “consistent with our policy.” Perhaps President Joe Biden, freed of electoral considerations, can focus more on how best to help the Ukrainians now—and limit the damage that Donald Trump could do to their cause if he wins in November. The White House’s notably bland statement on the Ukrainian offensive on Wednesday was hardly the sign of an administration in panic.

Clearly, Kyiv has been biding its time. Its planning for the current offensive took place quietly—and amid many pessimistic assessments of its military prospects by outside analysts and claims that it should save its forces for combat in the Donbas. The weakness of Russian defense is in some sense shocking—but was also completely predictable because of the way Ukraine has been asked to fight. Its allies’ apprehension about taking the war to Russian territory has provided Vladimir Putin with a major asymmetrical advantage. The Russians have been able to send almost all of their troops into Ukraine itself, safe in the knowledge that Ukraine’s own partners were securing Russian territory from attack.

Moscow simply took the U.S. and Germany too much at their word. Russian forces seem to have kept only substandard troops at the border, and the fortifications in the Kursk area have so far presented few problems for the Ukrainians. The lack of Russian internal defenses first became obvious last summer, when the former Putin confidant Yevgeny Prigozhin mutinied and directed an armed force to march toward Moscow, and apparently only small improvements have been made since. “Between countries at war, there is no border, there is only the front,” the Ukrainian analyst Mykola Bielieskov told me. “The Russians have forgotten that—the Ukrainians did not.”

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister who now leads the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukraine-based think tank, described five potential motivations for the new offensive: diverting Russian forces from other fronts, particularly near Kharkiv; discouraging further Russian cross-border attacks into Ukraine by showing that Russia’s own borders are unprotected; showing the rest of the world that, despite its size, the Russian army is weaker than it appears; testing out new military tactics; and taking the initiative away from the Russian side. The larger question is how far the Ukrainians want to expand their current offensive.

Throughout this war, widespread electronic surveillance by both sides has frequently tipped each off about the other’s plans. But in recent weeks, Kyiv built up the necessary forces so stealthily that the Russians had no idea what was going to hit them. The Ukrainians apparently carefully arranged for drones and computer hackers to suppress Russian resistance once their soldiers crossed the border. In three days, they came close to seizing the Russian city of Sudzha, through which runs a key rail line close to the Ukrainian border.

Notably, the U.S. and German governments have not publicly opposed any of this. Perhaps the two allies are no longer as nervous about cross-border operations as they were. Maybe the U.S. has finally come to understand that if Ukraine really is going to have a chance to win, it must be allowed to fight the war properly.

The real answer, of course, is that no one outside the Ukrainian government really knows what is happening—and, so far, Kyiv has been extremely tight-lipped on this operation. Having kept it quiet before it started, the last thing the Ukrainians want to do is let Russia know their intention. Whatever happens, the Kursk offensive has been a well-executed operation to this point. It’s their plan. Let them see to it.

[i-merani]

Btw russia is calling for a UN security council meeting because of Ukraine's invasion of Kursk so if yall want a laugh tune in lol

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Let it be known that Ukraine has and will continue to hold onto Russian land until Russia leaves Ukraine's internationally recognized territory. Most of all it's very telling that Putin and Russian state media had downplayed and ignored Kursk due to it being an absolute disaster for Russia, well when they aren't calling for those same Russian villages and towns to be homed into the ground. It's almost insane to think that people thought Ukraine wouldn't last a week much less several years, but never underestimate the fighting will of people opposing tyranny. Don't stop fighting until Ukraine is free!! 💛💙💛💙💛💙

[head-post]

Land for land: how Ukraine violated UN Charter with Kursk incursion, alarming message to Global South

Europe is getting dragged into the war in Ukraine, while EU and US officials endorse Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region. Kyiv’s actions violate the UN Charter and send an alarming signal to the global South about the double standard policy.

The incursion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) into the Kursk region, Russia, was a daring gamble for the country’s military commanders, who deployed their limited resources on a risky offensive with no guaranteed success, AP News reported.

After initial signs of progress, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky broke the silence and outlined the interim results of Kyiv’s efforts. By Wednesday, Ukrainian officials claimed that the army allegedly controlled at least 74 minor settlements. However, a week after the Kursk invasion began, the overall purpose of the military operation remains unclear.

Military experts split in their opinions: some say that Ukraine will entrench itself in the positions it has already occupied, whereas others claim that the AFU will continue its active offensive without the intended end goal. However, the incursion has already affected the protracted standoff.

By attacking the Kursk region, Ukraine has reportedly brought in a lot of scarce equipment and manpower, resulting in weakened positions in other areas where active fighting is taking place. In the Pokrovsk and Toretsk directions, Russian troops are breaking through the defences of the AFU, according to Ukrainian media. The Russians are rushing towards Pokrovsk, a key strategic hub.

In Niu-York, formerly Novhorodske, Russia advanced by almost 1.5 kilometres. Fighting continues in Hrodivka, Zhuravka, and along the railway towards Novohrodivka and Mykolaivka, Donetsk region. To the south, in the Vuhledar area, Russian forces are also attacking, breaking through to the major O0532 road and menacing to take the city of Vuhledar.

UN Charter violated, talks derailed

Having launched the incursion into the Kursk region, Ukraine has in fact violated Article 2, paragraph 4, of the UN Charter, which prohibits the forceful border violation of other States.

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Previously, the Ukrainian authorities were actively accusing Russia of attacking the territory of another state, but now Kyiv is making the same move. Furthermore, President Zelensky derailed the possibility of negotiations in the near future, which Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine was ready for and which had been actively promoted by international mediators.

According to The Independent, Mykhailo Podolyak, the top aide to the Ukrainian president, stated that the invasion served as a tool to “coerce” Russia into peace talks.

We need to use absolutely clear tools to coerce Russia [into negotiation]. One of them is a military instrument of coercion. That is, we need to inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia, in addition to economic and diplomatic tools. In the Kursk region, we are seeing the optimisation of this military tool of coercion to force Russia into the negotiation process.

However, Russian President Vladimir Putin has already declared that the possibility of negotiations is lost after the incursion into the Kursk region.

The intrusion is moving into its second week, but the reaction of international observers is already raising questions. A senior US defence official revealed that Kyiv allegedly did not inform Washington of a long-term plan after the start of the incursion, according to Defense One.

We didn’t get any advanced notification. What the Ukrainians were able to do was operational security, and that is something that I think we should be giving credit for. It definitely surprised the Russians.

According to the official, the Pentagon is “asking the Ukrainians what their real intent is, kind of long term, and how it plays into future negotiations.” However, there has been no statement that Ukraine’s actions violate the UN Charter on international borders, nor has there been any condemnation.

The global community does not seem intent on imposing sanctions on Kyiv, whereas Moscow faces multiple packages of sanctions for exactly the same actions against Ukraine.

Read more HERE

[alexxx-malev]

Russia. Maryino Estate Усадьба Марьино