Russia pushed Ukrainian forces out of most of the territory they controlled in the Russian region of Kursk during the past week, raising questions about whether a weeklong US intelligence cutoff materially helped the Russian counterattack.
The US said it had restored intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine on Tuesday night, after Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire plan discussed in Riyadh for nine-and-a-half hours.
Russian efforts to recapture Kursk intensified on March 6, a day after the White House cut off military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine.
Russian forces attacked 32 times in Kursk, said Ukraine’s general staff.
According to Russian military reporters, Russia had prioritised that front, moving some of its best drone operators there and deploying electronic warfare to prevent Ukrainian drone counterattacks.
The effort became clearer on Friday, March 7, when Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian border areas in Sumy for the first time since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, in an attempt to encircle Ukrainian forces in Kursk from the south and cut off their supply lines.
On Saturday, Russian forces captured several settlements north of Sudzha, the main Ukrainian stronghold in Kursk, and began to fire upon Sudzha itself. One Russian operation involved infiltrating the industrial zone by making soldiers crawl inside a gas pipeline.
The UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported Ukraine was considering a withdrawal to avoid encirclement, but Ukrainian commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, on Monday said, “There is no threat of encirclement of Ukrainian units in the Kursk region.”
He did, however, send drone and electronic warfare reinforcements.
By Tuesday, Russia’s defence ministry announced it had recaptured more than 100sq km (40sq miles) in Kursk, including a dozen settlements.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told media on Wednesday that Sudzha had been liberated.
“The data from our military shows that our troops have been successfully progressing in the Kursk region as they liberate those areas that have been controlled by [Ukrainian] militants,” he said.
Later on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Kursk for the first time in months and a day later, the Kremlin claimed Moscow’s operation in Kursk was in its final stage.
Ukraine caught Russia off-guard in its August counter-invasion last year, and succeeded in leveraging a single division of 11,000 soldiers to pin down an estimated 78,000 Russian soldiers, slowing Russia’s advances in east Ukraine, embarrassing Putin and forcing him to reportedly seek the help of 12,000 North Korean mercenaries last November.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, assessed that Russian forces had managed to recapture 655sq km (250sq miles) by last month, more than half the Kursk territory Ukraine had held at the height of its operation.
Ukraine launched surprise offensives in early January and February to consolidate its positions, demonstrating the importance it placed on Kursk as an active defence.
Ukrainian military analyst Petro Chernyk expressed the view that “Putin gave a firm order to kick our group out of there by May 9, and if this does not happen, then for him it will really be a very serious ideological defeat,” in an interview, referring to the anniversary of the capture of Berlin by Soviet forces in 1945. Ukraine’s incursion on Russian soil was the first since the second world war.
A Ukrainian government source told Time magazine the role of the US intelligence cutoff had been key in the Russian advance, as Ukraine was unable to detect Russian bomber and fighter jet takeoffs or use US intelligence to set targeting coordinates for its most precise weapons.
After then-US President Joe Biden allowed Ukraine to use US-made ATACMS rockets to strike deep inside Russia last November, Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, had said the move amounted to “direct involvement of the US and its satellites”.
Europe to the rescue?
Europeans scrambled to find alternatives to US government intelligence and the Starlink satellite system Ukrainian forces use to communicate and coordinate counter-battery fire.
Four satellite operators in France, Spain, the UK and Luxembourg told the Financial Times on Friday they were offering services to replace Starlink.
Maxar Technologies, the commercial satellite imaging company, said European governments were able to pass on its images to Ukraine even though the US had stopped doing so.
Europe also tried to step up its deliveries of weapons to prevent Ukraine from suffering setbacks similar to those of early 2024, when US military aid was suspended for six months.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov on Saturday met with eight Nordic and Baltic countries – Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – to coordinate weapons deliveries.
“We are waiting for important decisions that will help Ukraine strengthen its defence capabilities,” he said.
Ukraine was in talks with Poland and Lithuania to step up joint production of weapons and ammunition.
Umerov signed two key private sector agreements – one with Germany’s Diehl Defence, which manufactures the IRIS-T air defence system, which he said would “increase threefold the supply of missiles and air defence systems”, and one with Britain’s Anduril for advanced roving munitions drones paid for by the International Fund for Ukraine.
Germany, which has supplied 37 billion euros ($40bn) in military and financial aid under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, announced on March 6 that it would up its defence spending by up to 1 trillion euros ($1.09 trillion) under an expected coalition between the Christian Democrats and Scholz’s Social Democrats. Polls suggested three-quarters of Germans supported this.
Ukraine has also been expanding its domestic defence industrial base impressively, and now supplies 40 percent of its own weapons.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said it would triple its purchase of domestically made first-person view drones this year.
“The capabilities of the domestic defence industry in 2025 amount to approximately 4.5 million FPV drones, and the Ministry of Defence plans to purchase them all,” said Gleb Kanevsky, head of procurement. These figures did not include long-range drones used to strike deep inside Russia.
Deep strikes inside Russia and Ukraine
Those deep strikes continued last week, despite the US intelligence cutoff.
Ukraine said a massive Ukrainian drone operation had succeeded in striking Moscow and the Diaghilev air force base in Ryazan on Tuesday. State wire service RIA Novosti reported a total of 337 drones were used, 91 of them over Moscow. Russian authorities reported three people were killed and 18 wounded.
Ukraine’s general staff said they struck the Ryazan refinery on Sunday, which they said produced jet fuel. The following night, the staff said they struck the Novokuybyshev refinery in the Samara region, which they said produced fuel for Russia’s northern grouping of forces. Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, said the plant was one of the 10 largest in Russia.
Kovalenko also said Ukrainian forces had struck the NLMK metallurgical plant at Novolipetsk, in Kursk. Its rolled steel was used in ships and submarines, combat vehicle hulls, missiles and aircraft, Kovalenko said.
Russia also struck Ukraine with one of its largest drone swarms of the war.
At least 11 people were killed when Russia conducted a combined strike using an Iskander ballistic missile, Tornado multiple launch rockets and Geran drones in the town of Dobropillya on March 7. The toll was high because the Russian drones attacked in two waves to kill first responders.
The Dobropillya attack was part of a nationwide shower of 67 missiles and 194 drones.
French-donated Mirage jets went into combat for the first time in the war, knocking out Russian Kh-101 missiles.
Data compiled by the ISW showed that there had been a massive increase in the size of Russian combined drone and missile attacks since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, as Russia attempted to leverage its position in advance of expected peace talks.
