In under a week, Ukrainian forces have captured around 1,000 square kilometers in their surprise offensive into Russia, Kyiv’s top commander said on Monday.
The amount of Russian territory Ukraine says it has seized in a matter of days — roughly 386 square miles — is almost as much as Moscow has captured in Ukraine this year.
Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi briefed Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and other senior officials on the military incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, which began last Tuesday.
Kyiv has been extremely tight-lipped about this particularly ambitious operation, which caught Moscow and many observers of the conflict off guard, but has started to disclose more information publicly.
“As of now, we control about 1,000 square kilometers of the territory of the Russian Federation. The troops are fulfilling their tasks,” Syrskyi said in a video call with Ukrainian leadership. “Fighting is ongoing actually along the entire front line,” he said, adding that “the situation is “under our control.”
Business Insider was unable to independently verify the provided figure, but Syrski’s assessment suggests that the Ukrainian gains over the past week are nearing the total land area seized in Russian advances since January — which would be an impressive feat for Kyiv given the challenges that its armed forces have faced.
According to Mitch Belcher, a geospatial analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, which tracks battlefield movements and developments, Russian forces occupied around 108,163 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory on December 31. By August 11, this figure had increased to 109,338 square kilometers.
“We assess that Russian forces have occupied an additional 1,175 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory thus far in 2024,” he told BI on Monday. That works out to just over 450 square miles. A key question, though, is if Ukraine can hold its recent gains.
Ukraine’s bold attack into Russia began on August 6, with thousands of soldiers accompanied by armored vehicles pouring across the border into the Kursk region. Kyiv appears to have advanced several miles deep into Russia and now controls dozens of settlements. Over 100,000 civilians have fled the area amid the fighting.
The overall goal of the incursion is not immediately clear. Conflict analysts have suggested that Ukraine may be trying to alleviate some pressure on its forces elsewhere along the sprawling front line, gain leverage for potential territorial negotiations with Russia, or even just humiliate Moscow and boost morale in Kyiv.
“We are grateful to all soldiers and commanders for their steadfastness and decisive actions,” Zelenskyy said Monday on the Telegram messaging app.
Some experts have suggested that, at the very least, the Kursk operation has temporarily awarded Ukraine the battlefield initiative in one area of the front line while contesting Russia’s overall theater-wide initiative.
ISW experts wrote in their Sunday assessment that “Russia’s possession of the theater-wide initiative since November 2023 has allowed Russia to determine the location, time, scale, and requirements of fighting in Ukraine and forced Ukraine to expend materiel and manpower in reactive defensive operations.”
“The Ukrainian operation in Kursk Oblast, however, has forced the Kremlin and Russian military command to react and redeploy forces and means to the sector where Ukrainian forces have launched attacks,” they said.
How this plays out remains to be seen. John Kirby, a White House National Security Council spokesperson, told reporters last week that the Biden administration has been in touch with its Ukrainian counterparts about the ongoing operation.
“We are working to gain a better understanding of what they’re doing, what their goals are, what their strategy is,” he said Friday.
Ryan Pickrell contributed to this report.
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