Military tasked to hold part of Kursk Oblast until Trump's inauguration — BBC

Units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces have been tasked to hold the captured part of the Kursk Oblast of the aggressor country russia until the inauguration of the U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.

BBC News reported this with reference to several unnamed servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

One of the servicemen told reporters that units of the Ukrainian army in the Kursk Oblast are exhausted from fatigue and lack of rotation. The situation is also complicated by the arrival of units from other parts of the front. They consist mainly of middle-aged men who did not have time to rest between transfers to russian territory.

Several servicemen immediately said that they doubted that the original plan of the operation in the Kursk Oblast had worked. The russians never reduced the pressure in the east of Ukraine, continuing to advance in the west of the Donetsk Region.

Now, according to them, the order of the command is to hold the captured part of the Kursk Oblast until Trump's inauguration. It is scheduled for January 20, 2025.

"The main task facing us is to hold on to as much territory as possible until Trump's inauguration and the start of negotiations. Then we can exchange it for something. No one knows what," BBC News quotes one of the servicemen as saying.

The publication notes that since September 2024, when the advance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk Oblast stopped and the russian army's counteroffensive began, Ukraine has lost about 40% of the territory it managed to capture in the first weeks of the operation.

At the same time, the russians have also been able to achieve significant successes in the east of Ukraine. In October alone, the russian army occupied about 500 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, which is the largest figure since the start of the full-scale invasion.

One of the publication's interlocutors said that the operation in the Kursk Oblast is still important for Ukraine, despite the losses.

"It managed to divert part of the Russian forces from the Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv Regions," the publication quotes him as saying.

Some other soldiers of the Ukrainian army disagree with him. They believe that they are out of place. In their opinion, it would be more important to be in in the east of Ukraine, rather than enter russian territory.

"Our place should have been there, not here, on foreign soil. We don't need these Kursk forests, where we left so many comrades," the soldier said.

Serhii Kuzan, an employee of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, told BBC News that the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk Oblast are in incredibly difficult conditions, but russia is forced to spend significant resources on pushing the Ukrainian army out of the region. Moscow would prefer to use these resources on other parts of the front.

As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, on November 23, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that dictator putin had ordered his generals to push the Ukrainian Armed Forces out of the Kursk Oblast by the day of Trump's inauguration.

We will remind, on November 14, the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Andrii Kovalenko, stated that the Armed Forces of Ukraine had stabilized the situation in the Kursk Oblast, although the russians retain the ability to repeat the assaults.

Earlier, we wrote that in order to displace the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the russians had gathered a 50,000-strong group of troops in the Kursk Oblast.

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