Five months after storming across the border into the Kursk region of southern Russia, Ukrainian forces were making a renewed push on Monday to drive deeper into Russia, even as they appear to have lost a strategic town in eastern Ukraine.
While the scale of the renewed Ukrainian offensive in Kursk remains unclear, both Russian and Ukrainian officials reported heavy fighting on Sunday night. Combat footage geolocated by military analysts indicated that Ukraine was trying to break through Russian defenses in at least three directions.
It is the first significant attempt by Ukrainian troops to advance in Kursk since the original incursion in August. Since then, Russia has regained roughly half of the territory it lost.
At the same time, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on Monday that its forces had seized control of Kurakhove, an important but shattered industrial town, further closing in on Ukrainian forces in the southern Donbas region after more than two months of withering bombardments and heavy fighting.
The Ukrainian military command in the east did not comment on the Russian claim that Kurakhove had fallen. Soldiers fighting in the area, and a local Ukrainian military official, said when reached by phone that while there were pockets of resistance in the factories on the outskirts, the town was essentially lost. They requested anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.
In a statement, the Kremlin said its defense minister, Andrei Belousov, had congratulated the Russian soldiers for capturing the town on Monday,
The fall of Kurakhove and surrounding towns could allow Russia to broaden its assault on the city of Pokrovsk, 21 miles to the north, military analysts said.
Russian forces are trying to encircle Pokrovsk, a focal point of the war in recent months, from the south, hoping to avoid brutal and prolonged urban combat. They have advanced to within about a mile of a vital supply road to the southwest of the city, according to several analytical groups, including the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group.
Despite the fact that both sides are battered and exhausted after nearly three years of war, the fighting along the front has only intensified.
The dueling offensives — with the Ukrainians on the attack, albeit modestly, in Kursk and the Russians continuing to launch headlong assaults in eastern Ukraine — underscored how both the Kremlin and Kyiv are seeking to demonstrate strength as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office, analysts said.
Mr. Trump has vowed to bring the war to a quick end without saying how.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a three-hour conversation with the podcaster Lex Fridman, expressed confidence that Mr. Trump could fulfill that promise.
“I think that President Trump not only has will, he has all these possibilities, and it’s not just talk,” he said. “I really count on him, and I think that our people really count on him, so he has enough power to pressure him, to pressure Putin.”
The appearance with a podcaster popular in Trump circles — including with Elon Musk, who highlighted the interview on his social media network, X — appeared to be an attempt to communicate directly with Trump supporters.
Mr. Zelensky also reaffirmed his belief that there can be no lasting peace unless Ukraine is militarily strong and supported by the United States.
“If we do not have security guarantees, Putin will come again,” he said.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, echoed those concerns wile traveling in South Korea on Monday.
“There is going to be, at some point, a cease-fire. It’s not going to be in Putin’s mind ‘game over’,” Mr. Blinken told reporters. “His imperial ambitions remain, and what he will seek to do is to rest, refit, and eventually reattack.”
Mr. Blinken also said that Ukraine’s campaign in Kursk would play a critical role in any peace talks.
“The positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk region are very important,” he said, “because, of course, this is something that will be relevant to any negotiations that may take place in the coming year.”
North Korea has dispatched more than 11,000 soldiers to fight alongside the Russian in Kursk, Ukrainian and American officials have said, and Mr. Blinken said the partnership between the two countries continues to grow. He reiterated previous assertions that Moscow was prepared to supply North Korea with advanced space and satellite technologies in return for weapons and equipment to aid its war efforts in Ukraine.
Despite the introduction of North Korean troops to the battle for Kursk, Ukraine has managed to hang on to more than 150 square miles of land inside Russia — a bit less than half the amount of territory it initially seized.
However, the amount of territory Ukraine holds inside Russia is less important than the message the campaign sends to the world, military analysts said.
“Kursk is a strategic shift in the narratives of the war,” said Taras Chmut, a former military officer and the head of Come Back Alive, a charity that supports the Ukrainian military. “It’s about the fact that Russia can lose territories, its own territories. It’s about the fact that Ukraine can implement some unexpected actions and unconventional asymmetric approaches.”
But Ukraine’s renewed offensive in Kursk comes as it struggles to stabilize defensive lines.
The loss of Kurakhove, which covers only about three square miles of land, underscored problems with the way Ukraine is managing and deploying its forces, Ukrainian analysts and soldiers said.
Under pressure to address those concerns, Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, has ordered a comprehensive review of the military command.
“Victory requires a deep analysis of experience, and an honest understanding of mistakes,” he said in a statement on Thursday.
The issues run deeper than a simple lack of personnel, analysts and soldiers have said in interviews over the past year.
“When undermanned brigades lose positions, it’s not always due to insufficient recruitment,” the Ukrainian analytical group Frontelligence wrote in a report released on Friday.
“Poor organizational decisions, such as funneling new draftees into new units rather than reinforcing depleted, veteran brigades, are often to blame.”
The report added: “The window of opportunity to address these identified issues is closing fast, and inaction is not an option.”
A scathing report by the Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov about the newly created 155th Anne of Kyiv Brigade, which was trained in France and equipped with Western weapons, raised concerns about problems in Ukraine’s military and helped fuel calls for urgent changes.
The State Bureau of Investigation opened a criminal case in December regarding the management of the brigade, which has experienced high levels of desertion and issues related to staffing and management.
Russia is also facing steep challenges even if they remain obscured from public view, military analysts said. The Kremlin keeps tight control over information and dissent is punished but it has yet to achieve an operationally significant breakthrough despite its superiority in both personnel and arms.
Over the course of 2024, Russia captured 4,168 square kilometers — or about 1,600 square miles — of territory, most of it fields and small villages, the Institute for the Study of War reported.
Even though Russian forces have recently been advancing as quickly as at any point since the first months of the war, the research group said that it would still take more than two years at their current rate of advance for the Russians to seize the remainder of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control.
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.
