Troops are progressing in Sumy region and all sections of the front line, the president has said
FILE PHOTO. © Sputnik / Sergey Bobylev Russian troops have entered Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy Region for the first time since 2022, President Vladimir Putin has said. He briefly spoke about the situation with reporters in St. Petersburg, a day after the US and Russia held their first high-level talks in three years. According to Putin, in the early hours of Wednesday, soldiers from the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade “crossed the border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine and entered the enemy territory.” “Our troops are on the offensive in all sections of the front line,” he added. The Russian Defense Ministry posted videos of an Iskander ballistic missile hitting Ukrainian artillery positions in Sumy Region and Russian naval infantrymen flying kamikaze drones into the enemy trenches. The ministry did not report any major advancements in the area in its daily update on Wednesday. Kiev provided a different account of the events. Andrey Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, claimed that Ukrainian troops destroyed a reconnaissance unit that tried to cross the border and denied that a “large-scale offensive” is taking place in the area.
Read more Russia first entered Sumy Region in the early days of the conflict in February 2022 and withdrew two months later. In August 2024, Ukraine used the area to attack Russia’s Kursk Region and capture several border villages, as well as the town of Sudzha. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has since said he planned to use the incursion across Russia’s internationally recognized borders as leverage during potential peace talks. Russian troops have since been fighting to gradually push the Ukrainians from Kursk, with the MOD reporting the liberation of the village of Sverdlikovo on Wednesday. “We took many prisoners,” a soldier from Russia’s battlegroup North told RIA Novosti. Teams led by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed paths to end the Ukraine conflict in Riyadh on Tuesday. While no breakthroughs have been archieved, both sides agreed to work towards the normalization of bilateral ties, which were suspended by the Biden administration in 2022.
