Wrecked Russian cars in Kursk.By way of Kriegsforscher
“AT THIS VERY MOMENT, THOUSANDS OF UKRAINIAN TROOPS ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY THE RUSSIAN MILITARY, AND IN A VERY BAD AND VULNERABLE POSITION,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote in all caps on social media on Friday.
Trump’s rant is a transparent connection with the Monday or Tuesday evacuation of round 10,000 Ukrainian troops from what was once as soon as a 250-square-mile salient they held in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
The Ukrainians are crushed. However they’re now not surrounded. “It’s a lie,” wrote Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian drone operator who fought in Kursk.
“Our workforce has a just right figuring out of the location in Kursk,” Tatarigami, the founding father of Frontelligence Perception, a Ukrainian research staff, chimed in. “There are not any encircled troops.”
A powerful Ukrainian pressure invaded Kursk in August, aiming to grab a swathe of Russian soil that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may just ultimately industry again to Russian President Vladimir Putin in alternate for Ukrainian soil the Russians occupy.
For 6 months, the salient held. Then, on Feb. 25, an elite Russian drone staff—the Rubicon Heart of Complicated Unmanned Techniques—introduced a devastating wave of assaults at the major provide line supporting the Ukrainian garrison in Sudzha, the middle of the Kursk salient.
Captured Ukrainian artillery in Kursk.By way of Russian social media
Drone offensive
Using what analyst Andrew Perpetua described as “complicated drone techniques” together with elaborate ambushes involving more than one explosive drones, Rubicon all of a sudden knocked out loads of Ukrainian cars—and necessarily strangled the Ukrainian brigades in Kursk.
Two weeks afterward Monday or Tuesday, the Ukrainian survivors slipped out of Kursk, leaving in the back of some valuable heavy apparatus however holding 1000’s of lives.
“The retreat was once in most cases arranged however every now and then chaotic,” Tatarigami wrote. “There is not any risk of encirclement, and no proof suggests differently.”
In falsely claiming 1000’s of Ukrainians are vulnerable to dying or seize, Trump is successfully parroting Putin’s place as conceivable ceasefire negotiations loom.
After all resolving a two-week falling out induced via a disastrous Feb. 28 press convention within the Oval Workplace, all through which Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance absurdly berated Zelensky for being insufficiently thankful for previous U.S. help, Kyiv and Washington after all agreed to the fundamental phrases of a possible 30-day ceasefire.
Moscow should conform to the similar phrases—or call for its personal. Trump claimed casual talks with Putin had been going smartly, and that the Russia-Ukraine battle may just finish quickly.
However Trump turns out to have framed preliminary discussions across the false declare that Russia is basically conserving hostage 1000’s of Ukrainians in Kursk. “I’ve strongly asked to President Putin that their lives be spared,” Trump wrote.
However there aren’t 1000’s of Ukrainian troops in Kursk any more. They left days in the past, regardless of what Putin would possibly declare. “It’s sensible to depend on intelligence,” Tatarigami suggested, “now not Putin’s phrase.”
