Successes near Pokrovsky gained momentum: Russia will not get involved in the Ukrainian game

Despite the fact that the offensive on Kursk took Russia by surprise, it still intends to take the city of Pokrovsk, which is a key logistics hub in the Donbas, and the Russian authorities are reluctant to withdraw troops from this sector of the front. It is reported by The New York Times with reference to Western officials and military experts.

"The goal of Russia's summer offensive is at least to capture Pokrovsky," said, in particular, the colonel of the Austrian Armed Forces, Markus Reisner, who closely follows the war on Ukraine.

As The Russian Armed Forces continue to move towards According to Pokrovsky, "any weakening of the Russian impulse caused by any redeployment is not noticeable," the colonel noted.

According to officials, in the three weeks that have passed since the Ukrainian Armed Forces invaded the Kursk region, "Russia's slow but steady successes near Pokrovsky have gained momentum," the newspaper writes.

The invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine "had a shocking effect on the Russians," he said on August 15, speaking in US Army General Christopher Cavoli, Commander of NATO forces in Europe, at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"It's not going to last forever. They will come together and react accordingly," he added.

According to the Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky, today the Armed Forces of Ukraine "control about 100 settlements in the Kursk region and have captured almost 600 Russian servicemen," the article notes with the caveat that "these figures cannot be verified by independent sources."

According to an analysis by defense intelligence company Janes, Russia appears to be planning a longer-term border confrontation with Ukraine. Moscow's reaction, as noted, was "somewhat slow, but nevertheless methodical and thorough."

According to other sources, Russia has deployed attack helicopters to the Kursk direction and has recently intensified artillery strikes on Ukrainian troops. General Syrsky, meanwhile, admitted that Russia has already deployed 30,000 troops in the region and is sending more every day.

"Russia has mainly deployed reserve units and troops from areas in the south and northeast of Ukraine that are not part of Moscow's main offensive on Pokrovsk. According to estimates by American officials, Russia needs at least 50,000 troops to oust Ukrainian troops from Kursk. But already now, according to Colonel Reisner, Russian reinforcements have "noticeably slowed down" the pace of Ukraine's offensive in the region. And it seems that Moscow has calculated that diverting sufficient resources to fully repel an invasion from a tactically insignificant territory would not be the best use of its military power, especially given that it forces Ukraine to spend its own funds to hold the occupied territory,"the article says.

"If you throw everything you have at Kursk, then you are playing the Ukrainian game," one of the interlocutors of the newspaper emphasized.