Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has revealed his strategic plan for ordering the risky Kursk offensive which began last August, and has resulted in Ukraine forces holding hundreds of square kilometers of Russian territory for the past six months.
Zelensky said in comments published Tuesday that he's ready to swap territory with Russia as part of a deal to end the war. He described that if President Trump gets the warring sides to the negotiating table, "We will swap one territory for another."
The Ukrainian leader when asked in The Guardian interview precisely which territories Kiev would demand back, he responded: "I don’t know, we will see. But all our territories are important, there is no priority." Obviously he has the four annexed eastern territories in mind.
In September 2022, Russia declared the annexation of the four eastern Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. In some of these areas, front line war zones are still being fought over, but the consensus is that Russian forces will soon conquer them fully as the Ukrainian army has been in slow but steady retreat.
Moscow considers to four territories to now be part of the Russian Federation, and they have been key to Putin's war aims, given also they have are largely Russian-speaking from the start. Putin has stressed he will never give them up.
Ukraine's cross-border offensive into Kursk was always meant to force the Kremlin to divide its forces in order to defend its land, but this by and large has not happened - or in other words Putin has not taken the bait.
Instead, there have long been reports that thousands of North Korean troops have assisted Russian forces in seeking to take it back. But Moscow hasn't appeared in a hurry, and has not sacrificed its gains in Donetsk to make it happen.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova responded in a Telegram post on Tuesday, "In the Kursk region, the neo-Nazis operating there ... [control] an area of approximately two meters and a depth of one and a half meters" - in apparent sarcasm.
She said, "Zelensky makes similar statements in order to hide the true scale of the disaster for the Armed Forces in this direction."
Russia's defense ministry has made frequent statements highlighting Ukraine's immense losses trying to hold the seized Kursk territory over the last several weeks, stressing that it is Zelensky who has gotten the worse end of the gambit. Some Russian sources have claimed Ukraine has lost some 50,000 troops during the invasion of Russian territory.
While somewhat of an embarrassing blow for Moscow in the beginning, events in Kursk have not cause Kremlin leadership to panic, instead officials have constantly downplayed its strategic importance in the bigger context of the war.
For this reason, Moscow is shrugging off Zelensky's offer of a territory swap, which means Kiev doesn't have the leverage it thought it had in taking dozens of Kursk towns and villages, which have long been evacuated of the Russian population at this point.