Russia Claims Control of Key Town as Ukraine Renews Push in Kursk

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.