The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Russian and North Korean soldiers were slaughtered in an attack on a Kursk village.
He said that up to a “battalion of soldiers” of Vladimir Putin’s forces were lost during fighting in Makhnovka. Battalions are often made up of several hundred troops, but further details were not specified by Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader, referring to a report by a commander in the country’s military, said: “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka, in Kursk region, the Russian army lost up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers and Russian paratroops”
Makhnovka is in Russia’s southern Kursk region, which Ukraine seized 1,000 square kilometres of in August last year. Around half of it has been recaptured and Russia has continued its efforts to grab the territory back as experts warn Ukraine is losing territory on a daily basis.
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Russia controls about one-fifth of Ukraine
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Anadolu via Getty Images)
Russia controls about one-fifth of Ukraine and last year capitalised on weaknesses in Ukraine’s defences to slowly advance in eastern areas despite high losses of troops and equipment. Zelensky has said the incursion by Ukrainian forces into Russia’s Kursk border region is a “very strong trump card” in any future peace negotiations.
With the war about to enter its fourth year next month, and with Mr Trump coming to power, the question of how and when Europe’s biggest conflict since the Second World War might end has come to the fore.
The war’s trajectory is not in Ukraine’s favour. The country is short-handed on the front line and needs continued support from its Western partners.
Zelensky has said that US President-elect Donald Trump is “strong and unpredictable” and those qualities can be a decisive factor in his policy approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He said it would not be possible to end the almost three years of war in one day, as Trump claimed he could do during his election campaign.
Zelensky has said the incursion by Ukrainian forces into Russia’s Kursk border region is a ‘very strong trump card’
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AFP via Getty Images)
Trump, who takes office on January 20, has not publicly fleshed out his policy on Ukraine but his previous comments have put a question mark over whether the US will continue to be Ukraine’s biggest — and most important — military backer. Zelensky is eager to guarantee that Washington’s support keeps coming, and he met with Trump in New York even before last November’s US presidential election.
Trump responded favourably to the possibility raised by French President Emmanuel Macron of Western peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine to oversee an agreement that stops the fighting, Zelensky said. He met with Mr Trump and Mr Macron in Paris last month.
“But I raised an issue, saying we didn’t hear what specific countries will join this initiative, and whether the US will be there,” Zelensky, who is determined for his country to become a NATO member. The alliance’s 32-member countries say Ukraine will join one day, but not until the war ends.
“The deployment of European troops (to keep the peace in Ukraine) should not rule out Ukraine’s future in NATO,” Zelensky said in the television interview.