Ukraine risks losing all the Russian land it seized within months, US officials say

After a surprise offensive earlier this year, Ukraine’s forces have lost about half the territory seized in Russia’s Kursk region and may lose the rest in a matter of months, according to U.S. officials, potentially depriving Kyiv of important leverage for ceasefire talks with Russia.

Ukraine’s military is already grappling with a lack of manpower and uncertainty about the future flow of supplies from the U.S. and other allies, even as it struggles to fend off Russian advances in its east. In Kursk, the region in western Russia where Ukrainian forces seized a swath of land, Ukrainian troops are also facing off against about 12,000 North Korean troops reinforcing the Russians.

With a more concerted effort by Moscow to push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk, possibly as soon as next month, Kyiv’s forces may only be able to hold the land until spring before they are forced to retreat — or risk being encircled — the U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss their confidential assessments.

The timing is significant because Ukrainian officials have said they hoped to use territory seized in Kursk as a bargaining chip in any negotiations. While president-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said he wants to bring the war to a rapid end, it may take months for the two sides to agree to a ceasefire, given the complexity of both Ukrainian and Russian demands.

The Ukraine president’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that he isn’t familiar with a reported proposal from the incoming Trump administration to freeze the war in place if Russia is given guarantees that Ukraine won’t join the NATO military alliance in the next decade or two. Such a deal definitely wouldn’t work for Russia, Putin said.

With Russia currently enjoying the upper hand on the battlefield, it may have an incentive to stall talks as it seeks to claw back as much terrain as possible from Ukraine before negotiations and a possible truce freeze the front lines.

At the same time, Ukraine’s forces have already managed to hold on to land in Kursk longer than some initial predictions, aided in part by the U.S. decision to allow Kyiv to fire its long-range missiles into Russia, one of the officials said.

Another official cautioned that Ukraine’s intent in Kursk was never to keep it but rather for the shock value of its counter-invasion and to further reduce Russia’s forces. So a retreat could still be portrayed as a tactical success. Two of the officials expressed hope that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will order a retreat from Kursk soon enough to avoid suffering high casualties.

‘Massed Assaults’

Despite the possible Ukrainian retreat, the incursion has already imposed a heavy cost on both Russian and North Korean forces.

John Kirby, spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, told reporters Friday that the North Koreans backing Russia are conducting “massed, dismounted assaults against Ukrainian positions in Kursk,” resulting in more than 1,000 killed or wounded in just the past week.

It’s always been clear that Russia could retake Kursk if it chose to, said George Barros, who leads the Russia and Geospatial Intelligence teams at the Institute for the Study of War. But the Kursk incursion has shown that Russia’s international border isn’t fully protected and could be breached again at other points, he said, and that using U.S.-made equipment inside Russia didn’t result in catastrophic escalation.

“In going after Kursk, the Ukrainians demonstrated the war was not hopelessly stalemated but is indeed quite dynamic,” Barros said, which showed allies it was still worth support to further erode Russia’s military and economic resources.

If Russian forces embark on an effective counter-offensive in Kursk, they’d probably target key roads and towns to force a Ukrainian retreat and could send in additional North Korean troops, one of the officials said. North Korea could provide about 8,000 more soldiers to support Russia’s effort by spring, the official said, but cautioned that assessment was “low confidence,” intelligence jargon indicating a firm conclusion can’t be made based on the information collected.

Even without North Korean forces, Russia is still able, for now, to compensate for its own significant losses — averaging about 1,200 personnel per day, according to U.S. assessments. Yet that’s not a level that can be sustained indefinitely without a new mobilization, one of the officials said. Putin wants to avoid a repeat of the unpopular September 2022 callup of 300,000 reservists.

Amid the uncertainty over Kursk, Russian forces continue to make progress in Ukraine’s east, toward the town of Pokrovsk, an important logistics hub from which Kyiv moves troops to and from the front.

While Ukrainian troops may be able to bolster defenses and hold Pokrovsk for some time, one of the U.S. officials said it was a question of time whether Russian forces could envelope it, creating a dilemma for Ukrainian forces to either retreat or surrender.

—With assistance from Skylar Woodhouse and Volodymyr Verbianyi.