Over a month into Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Ukrainian soldiers told CNN the situation there was getting tougher, with casualty rates similar to those seen in parts of the front line in Ukraine.
Ukraine caught Russia off guard on August 6 by launching a shock offensive into Kursk, and earlier this month it claimed to have taken almost 500 square miles of Russian territory.
But the incursion has come at a cost.
Vasyl, who goes by the call sign Bumblebee and was recovering in a hospital in Ukraine, told CNN he had pieces of shrapnel stuck in his leg after a drone loaded with explosives targeted him while he was operating several miles inside Russia.
“It was very quick,” he told the outlet, adding: “We ran to the trees, and then there was a bang a meter or two away from me.”
Another soldier said that his four-man unit — one of the first to cross into Russia — was in charge of demining and dismantling Russian defenses and spent two weeks working nonstop.
Working in an area they were unfamiliar with made their task extremely hard, he added.
The Kursk incursion has forced Russia to redeploy tens of thousands of soldiers and stopped its advances in the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine’s army chief, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi told CNN last week.
And it has boosted Ukrainian soldiers’ morale, he said.
But Russia has started counterattacking in Kursk, and this week said it had recaptured 10 settlements.
All 14 of the soldiers CNN talked to, four of whom had been injured, said it was getting tougher there, and some questioned the decision to proceed with the operation while Ukraine was struggling to defend important towns and cities in the east.
“We have a lot of guys who have been killed, and we have a lot of destroyed hardware,” Vasyl said.
He predicted it would get “more and more” difficult, and that there would be “very big and difficult battles,” as Russia is sending “a lot” of troops and artillery.
