Ukraine denies Russia’s claim – Kursk region ‘fully liberated’

KYIV: Ukraine’s military on Saturday denied an assertion by officials in Moscow that Ukrainian troops had been forced out of their last footholds in Russia’s Kursk region.

The Ukrainian military’s general staff, in a statement posted on social media platform Telegram, said its forces were continuing their operations in some districts of Kursk region.

The general staff also said its incursion into another part of Russia, Belgorod region, was still underway.

Earlier in the day, Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov said that Russian army has fully liberated the border Kursk region from Ukrainian control.

Kyiv had hoped it could use land in the Kursk region as a bargaining chip in future peace talks with Russia, which has seized parts of eastern and southern Ukraine since its offensive began in 2022.

“Today, the last settlement in the Kursk region, the village of Gornal, has been liberated from Ukrainian forces,” Gerasimov said during a video conference meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The Kyiv regime’s adventure has completely failed,” Putin told Gerasimov, thanking the soldiers for the service and saying that Kursk’s liberation will create the conditions for further advances at other parts of the front.

Russian troops are now at the border and are poised to beef up threats to the Ukrainian region of Sumy, which faces Kursk, where Moscow has already carried out incursions in recent weeks.

Gerasimov especially hailed the “heroism” of the North Korean soldiers taking part in the operation, who “provided significant assistance in defeating the group of Ukrainian armed forces”.

According to South Korean and Western intelligence agencies, more than 10,000 soldiers from North Korea were sent to Russia last year to help Moscow fight Ukraine’s shock offensive in Kursk.

Separately, the weapon that killed at least eight people in a major Russian aerial attack on Kyiv overnight was a North Korean KN-23 (KN-23A) ballistic missile, a Ukrainian military source told Reuters on Thursday.

Russia has not commented directly on the strike, with Kremlin saying only that it has been hitting “military and military-adjacent” targets. Russia and North Korea have denied weapons transfers that would violate UN embargoes.

Russia’s military cooperation with North Korea grew rapidly as Moscow became internationally isolated after invading Ukraine in February 2022.

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By the start of 2025, Pyongyang had supplied Russia with 148 KN-23 and KN-24 ballistic missiles, Ukraine’s military spy agency says.