Ukraine launches new offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, Kyiv and Moscow confirm
Yevhenii Vasyliev/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Ukrainian forces on Sunday launched a new offensive inside Russia’s western Kursk border region, going on the attack with substantial forces according to reports from Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers.
Russia’s Defense Ministry reported a large-scale attack by Kyiv’s forces involving armored columns that began on Sunday morning, with Ukrainian troops attacking in three directions inside Kursk.
Ukraine first seized a foothold inside the Kursk region with a surprise offensive in August. But Kyiv’s forces have since been slowly pushed back by Russia, including recently with support from North Korean troops.
A Ukrainian military source confirmed to ABC News that a new offensive operation had begun.
The head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, Andrii Yermark, also appeared to cryptically confirm the offensive, writing on Telegram: “Kursk Oblast, good news! Russia is getting what it deserves.”
Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s counter-disinformation center, also wrote that Ukrainian troops have gone on the attack in multiple directions inside Kursk.
Videos posted to Russian military blogger channels appeared to show columns of Ukrainian armored vehicles on the move. The Ukrainian assault appears to be Kyiv’s most substantial offensive operation in Kursk since August.
Multiple Russian military bloggers reported that Ukrainian troops, tanks, armored vehicles and demining equipment attacked the villages of Berdin and Bolshoye Soldatskoye, north of Sudzha — the main administrative border town that Ukraine captured in August.
Bloggers also reported an attack further west on the border town of Tetkino.
Prominent Russian military bloggers — some close to Russia’s Defense Ministry — said that the offensive was expected but that the situation is challenging for the Russian defenders.
The Defense Ministry said in a statement that two assaults were repelled. “The operation to destroy the Ukrainian Armed Forces formations continues,” it wrote on Telegram.
Ukrainian troops appeared to make small advances on Sunday but did not achieve significant breakthroughs of the Russian lines, according to open-source monitors. Some Russian military bloggers said they believe Ukraine will attempt another push through Monday, with others suggesting Kyiv’s main attack was yet to come.
The new Ukrainian assault comes just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, with the expectation that his new administration will push for a peace deal to end the nearly 3-year-old war.
ABC News’ Natasha Popova contributed to this report.
Emergency responders are dispatched to the scene after a Russian attack that killed at least 13 people in Glukhiv, Sumy Oblast. The number of victims increased to 13, including 3 children. Search and rescue efforts continue for those trapped under the rubble of the partially destroyed dormitory building. (Photo by Ukraine State Emergency Service / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON and KYIV) — Russia on Thursday launched an intercontinental ballistic missile toward a southeastern Ukraine, officials in Kyiv said, but two U.S. officials told ABC news it was instead an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM.
Ukraine’s military was “95% sure” the strike was with an ICBM, a Ukrainian official told ABC News, but added that they were still examining the missile parts on the ground and had not yet reached a final conclusion.
“Today it was a new Russian missile. All the parameters: speed, altitude — match those of an intercontinental ballistic missile,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said in a statement on social media. “All expert evaluations are underway.”
Moscow did not immediately confirmed the launch, with Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declining to comment, saying questions about it should be instead directed to the Russian Defense Ministry.
The Ukrainian Air Force announced on Thursday morning that it had tracked the launch of the ICBM, along with six additional missiles, all of which were targeting the Dnipro region. The ICBM appeared to have been launched from the Astrahan region, in Russia’s southwest, Ukrainian military officials said.
All of the missiles were launched in about two hours, beginning at about 5 a.m., Ukraine said.
All were targeted at businesses and critical infrastructure, but only the missile that Ukraine identified as an ICBM struck the city, Ukraine said. The six other missiles were shot down. There were no reports of casualties or significant damage, officials said.
The U.S. officials said the assessment of the launch, the type of missile and warhead and the damage in Dnipro was continuing. The distance from what Ukraine said was the launch point to the strike location in Dnipro is about 600 miles, a distance shorter than what an ICBM would be expected to travel.
Two experts told ABC News the projectile, seen in video circulating online, looks likely to be “a ballistic missile with MIRV-ed capabilities.”
The launch of an ICBM, if confirmed as such, would arrive amid concerns that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine could further escalate. Ukraine’s military this week first launched U.S.-made ATACMS missiles toward targets within Russia, days after U.S. President Joe Biden allowed for such use of the long-range weapons.
Kyiv launched on Tuesday six of the ATACMS at targets within Russian territory, according the Russian Defense Ministry.
Zelenskyy said he would not confirm if Ukraine had used ATACMS to conduct a strike on an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of Russia, but said Ukraine has ATACMS and “will use all of these,” against Russia.
Within hours of Russia announcing it had struck down five of the ATACMS on Tuesday, the Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin had updated the country’s nuclear doctrine, a move that lowered the bar for Russia to response with nuclear weapons. Russian ICBMs are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, although it appeared the missile fired on Thursday was not equipped with one.
Following that warning, Ukraine on Wednesday fired long-range British Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia for the first time, a Ukrainian military unit involved in the operation told ABC News. At least 10 of those missiles hit an estate in the village of Marino, the unit said.
They were targeting a command post where North Korean army generals and officers were present, the unit said. More than 10,000 North Korean troops are said to be operating alongside Russian forces in the Kursk region.
Ukraine’s 413th Separate Unmanned Systems Battalion, which helped provide fire control for the strikes, told ABC News that there was intelligence showing high-ranking North Koreans were present.
Zelenskyy cast the Russian strike on Thursday as a result of Russia and its leader being “terrified.”
“Obviously, Putin is terrified when normal life simply exists next to him. When people simply have dignity. When a country simply wants to be and has the right to be independent,” Zelenskyy said. “Putin is doing whatever it takes to prevent his neighbor from breaking free of his grasp.”
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Lauren Minore, Yulia Drozd and Natasha Popova contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — President Joe Biden will see out his term knowing that President-elect Donald Trump — a man he fought desperately hard to unseat in 2020 and called a “genuine danger to American security” — will succeed him.
Foreign policy has been central in Biden’s long political career. It will likewise form a major chunk of his legacy, as will the two wars — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Middle East conflagration sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack — that erupted during his term.
Now less encumbered by political calculations — for himself or for Vice President Kamala Harris — and with only two months until Trump’s second inauguration, the outgoing president may have one last window to wield the power of the Oval Office in both theaters.
But with Trump looming above the outgoing Biden-Harris administration, American allies and enemies may be hesitant to engage with the outgoing administration.
European nations, for example, are already shifting focus to how best to court Trump, Leslie Vinjamuri of the British Chatham House think tank told ABC News.
“All these European leaders are very quickly reaching out,” she added. “They’re congratulating him. They want to talk with him. They want to work with him, because they understand that the stakes are extremely high and they clearly feel that by talking with him, they have an ability to influence policy and the outcome.”
“What they don’t want to do is to be seen to be making a deal with Joe Biden that undercuts whatever it is that Trump is going to do,” Vinjamuri added.
“It’s a very tricky position to be in, because if anything’s visible that cuts across what he wants to do, you as a leader risk being punished.”
Those at the top of American politics know that foreign policy success can accelerate careers and define legacies. Former President Richard Nixon infamously undermined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War during the 1968 election campaign for fear it would reduce his chances of victory.
Though he has already secured his second term, Trump appears unlikely to help the Biden administration with any foreign policy “wins” in its closing days.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty and room for maneuver — it’s highly unpredictable,” Vinjamuri said.
Russia and Ukraine
Russia’s war on Ukraine has dominated much of Biden’s presidency. He will leave office with Moscow’s forces holding large parts of Ukraine and still advancing, even if slowly and at huge cost.
“I think that now Biden can be much more decisive in support of Ukraine, especially when he sees that Trump will be the next president,” Oleksandr Merezhko — a member of Ukraine’s parliament and the chair of the body’s foreign affairs committee — told ABC News.
“Biden has his hands completely untied,” Merezhko added. “Now Biden is thinking about his legacy.”
“He might even try to take some decisions which will make irreversible changes in support of Ukraine — for example, he might lift all the restrictions on the use of the Western weapons on the territory of Russia,” Merezhko said. “And he might start the process of inviting Ukraine to join NATO.”
Merezkho acknowledged that progress on the NATO front might be ambitious. “Yes, he doesn’t have much time,” he said. “But he — with [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan and [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken — might do something creative to help Ukraine.”
It appears unlikely that Biden’s final months will bring Kyiv any closer to NATO membership. Ukrainian leaders are still pushing for an invitation to join the alliance despite fierce opposition from Russia — and hesitance among key alliance members. Allies have repeatedly said that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” but even top officials in Kyiv acknowledge this cannot happen amid war with Moscow.
The outgoing president may at least be able to ring fence much-needed funding for Kyiv.
Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in the U.K., said Biden “might choose in his last months in office to use the remainder of the funding available for support to Ukraine under Presidential Drawdown Authority, amounting to over $5 billion.”
The Pentagon has already committed to rolling out new funding packages between now and January totaling some $9 billion. “That is consistent with how we’ve been doing this in the past,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told journalists last week. “It’s something that we’ve done on a pretty regular, almost weekly, basis.”
Biden has also reportedly already decided to allow non-combat American defense contractors to work in Ukraine to maintain and repair U.S.-provided weaponry.
Yehor Cherniev — a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chairman of his country’s delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — told ABC News that deeper sanctions on “Putin’s inner circle” are on Kyiv’s wish list, along with the delivery of all previously allocated aid, commitments for more, plus the end to restrictions on Western weapon use inside Russia.
Trump has suggested he would quickly end Russia’s invasion by threatening to cut off military aid to Kyiv unless it agrees to hand Moscow direct or indirect control of swaths of occupied territory in the south and east of the country.
As such, his election has raised concerns in Ukraine of an imminent sellout.
Merezhko, though, stressed the unpredictability of the president-elect. “Trump might become even more critical of Russia to show that all suspicions about him are groundless,” he said.
“We know that Trump loves his country and seeks to protect its interests in accordance with his vision,” Cherniev said. “Therefore, we are confident that the U.S. will not leave us alone with Russia, since this is not in the interests of the U.S. and the free world.”
“However, much will depend on Putin’s willingness to make concessions and compromises,” he added. “If the Russian dictator does not show due flexibility, I think Trump will increase his support for Ukraine.”
As to potential tensions between Trump and Biden in the coming months, Merezhko said, “Competition between them will continue.”
“For us, it would be better if they compete amongst themselves on who will do more for Ukraine.”
European nations, meanwhile, will be bracing for Trump while hoping to influence the president-elect’s take on the war.
Vinjamuri, of the Chatham House think tank, said Europeans will also be working closely with the Biden administration “to put in place everything that they can to keep Europe and Ukraine in as good a place as possible before Jan. 20, when Trump comes in and tries to negotiate a peace deal.”
“That means that getting Ukraine in the best position on the ground, because when you start negotiating a peace, a lot of what gets locked in is based on what land people hold,” she said.
The Middle East
The Biden administration’s pre-election Middle East diplomatic push does not appear to have made significant breakthroughs in either Gaza or Lebanon. Fierce ground fighting and devastating Israeli airstrikes continue on both fronts, with the toll of civilian dead and displaced growing ever larger.
The regional war began with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, which killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel and saw around 250 taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel’s military response in the strip has killed some 43,600 people and injured more than 102,000, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Israel’s airstrike and ground campaign in Lebanon has killed more than 3,000 since Oct. 8, 2023, Lebanese health officials say.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replaced Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — one of his prime political rivals and an advocate for a cease-fire deal — on the eve of the U.S. election, reinforcing his position and entrenching his government’s commitment to what he has called “total victory.”
Hafed Al-Ghwell, senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, told ABC News he has little expectation of peace during Biden’s final months. “I don’t think he has any incentive to do anything,” Hafed said.
“In the case of Israel and Palestine, Biden has taken not just a political stand but an ideological one, and there is no sign that he is going to change that,” Hafed added. “He has called himself a Zionist, and he had ample opportunity to stop this war. Even when the United Nations proposed a resolution to end the occupation, he didn’t support it.”
“It would be really controversial for an outgoing president to make any major decisions,” he continued.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu will be confident in the new White House’s backing in his suppression of Palestinian and Lebanese groups, as well as in his wider showdown with Iran.
Netanyahu “probably feels like he has a free run,” Vinjamuri said. “Even if Biden tried to push him, I’m not so sure he would be responsive, because he knows that Trump is now coming into office.”
Hafed suggested Netanyahu’s domestic concerns, too, will be driving his policy in the coming months. “He knows that the minute this war stops, the Israeli public won’t want him around,” he said. “So, he will continue the war in Lebanon and probably threaten Iran, knowing he will have the full support of Trump.”
Burcu Ozcelik at RUSI said the extent of Trump’s influence over Netanyahu tops “a complex list of unknowns.”
“Trump in recent weeks indicated that he was prepared to give Israel freer rein, provided that the war ended by the time he entered office,” he added.
Those living in the region will be left grappling with the fallout, Hafed continued. “For the people of the Middle East, Biden’s legacy is one of a bloodbath,” he said. “The region is bitter and battered.”
ABC News’ Luis Martinez contributed to this article.
(LONDON) — Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Izvestia newspaper in an interview published Wednesday that Russia sees “no grounds for negotiations yet” to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine.
President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House has revived speculation as to a possible deal to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor, which by the time Trump takes office again will be nearly three years old.
Russia still occupies around 20% of Ukraine and claims to have annexed four entire regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — though it only partially occupies the areas it claims.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top officials have repeatedly said that Kyiv and its Western partners must accept the “new territorial realities” of Russian occupation, including of Crimea which was annexed in 2014.
Both Moscow and Kyiv have raised the prospect of renewed peace talks in recent weeks, though the two sides still appear far apart on key issues. Among them are the fate of the partially- or fully-occupied Ukrainian regions and Kyiv’s ambition to join NATO.
Peskov told Izvestia that “many countries have declared the readiness to host” possible peace talks, among them Qatar.
“Indeed, the emirate has been a very active mediator in various areas, it has been quite effective,” he added. “Besides, our bilateral relations with Qatar have been developing perfectly. We are grateful to all states, among them Qatar, for their goodwill.”
Russian and Ukrainian leaders are spending the last months of President Joe Biden’s time in office trying to gain leverage on the military and diplomatic fronts.
Former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson announced on Wednesday that he had returned to Russia to interview Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Carlson interviewed Putin in February and has been a fierce critic of the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine.
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has spent the last week receiving high-level allied visits in Kyiv. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, European Council President Antonio Costa and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas all travelled to the Ukrainian capital, with Scholz pledging $680 million in new military aid.
The U.S. also announced this week its latest tranche of military support worth some $750 million. Zelenskyy said such support is “exactly what we need.”
Ukrainian forces need “significant reinforcement, particularly through weapons from our partners,” the president said on Tuesday, amid difficult battlefield conditions.
Russian forces continue to advance in the east of Ukraine, while pressing their efforts to eject Ukrainian troops from Russia’s western Kursk region where Kyiv’s forces took up positions in a surprise August offensive.
Meanwhile, both sides continue long-range drone and missile attacks. Russia’s strikes are focused on Ukraine’s energy network, while Kyiv continues to target military sites and oil infrastructure facilities.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s air force reported 28 Russia drones launched into the country overnight, of which 22 were shot down and three went off course. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces shot down 35 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Peace talk speculation looks set to continue through to Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Oleksandr Merezhko — a member of parliament representing Zelenskyy’s party and the chair of the body’s foreign affairs committee — told ABC News it is possible that Russia may soften its inflexible negotiating position in 2025.
“Putin is afraid of Trump and considers him to be unpredictable and stronger than Biden,” said Merezhko, who last month nominated the president-elect for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
“At the moment, Putin is in a hurry to grab as much territory as he can and to get the Kursk region back,” Merezhko said. “He is trying to improve his position before Trump coming to power and before the possible negotiations.”
