Ukrainian forces launched a new large attack in Western Russian Kursk region, Russian military bloggers reported.
Ukrainian troops broke through the border in a surprise incursion in August 2024 and have resisted Russian attempts to expel them for the past five months.
Reports from Russian bloggers, who support Moscow's war in Ukraine but are often critical of its failures, indicate that the latest Ukrainian offensive has put Russian forces on the defensive, Reuters writes.
The Ministry of Defense of Russia claims that Russia repelled two Ukrainian counterattacks in the Kursk region, TASS reports.
Artillery and small arms battles are said to be taking place, and Ukraine is using Western armored vehicles to bring in large numbers of infantry.
Zelensky: Losses of Russian and North Korean forces
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that Russian and North Korean forces have suffered heavy losses in fighting in southern Russia.
"In the fighting yesterday and today, just at one village, Makhnovka, in the Kursk region, the Russian army lost almost a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroopers. This is significant," said Zelensky, according to the Guardian.
He did not provide specific details. A battalion is the basic tactical unit of the ground army and can consist of different numbers of soldiers. Usually it is a number of several hundreds.
Ukrainian and Western estimates say 11.000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces control swaths of territory after a massive cross-border incursion in August.
Sources: Reuters/Guardian/TASS
