Russia claims full control of Kursk region from Ukraine

Bloomberg News on Apr 26, 2025

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Russia claims it has completed its efforts to remove Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region, indicating that Ukraine may have lost an important bargaining chip with Moscow after seven months of holding Russian territory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated the army on Saturday in a video address shown by state media following a report from Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Ukraine’s pullout from Kursk region opens the way for further Russian advances, Putin said.

Moscow’s claim could not be independently verified. However, Ukraine’s military denied it had been fully ejected from the Russian region, telling Bloomberg News that its forces held their positions in the area and “continue to hold off attacks in the Kursk direction.”

The announcement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine were “very close” to an accord after his special envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin in Moscow as part of high-level talks between the two countries to bring an end to the war.

Trump, who met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Rome on Saturday during the funeral of Pope Francis, has dialed up pressure on Kyiv in order to reach a peace accord that critics fear may favor Russia.

By ceding its foothold in the Kursk region, Kyiv loses Russian territory which Zelenskyy said could have been traded for Ukrainian land in a peace deal with Moscow. Ukraine once more faces the risk of Russian attacks on its neighboring Sumy region — a threat which incursion into Kursk was supposed to preempt.

Ukraine’s move last summer caught the Kremlin off guard and prompted tens of thousands of residents to flee the first foreign military offensive inside Russia since World War II. Moscow was forced to relocate thousands of soldiers and reinforcements from North Korea, whom Gerasimov thanked in his address on Saturday.

Russian troops had tried to dislodge Ukraine’s army from the area for months, intensifying their pressure in recent weeks.

But by the end of February 2025 the area under Ukrainian control in Kursk had shrunk by nearly one-fifth, based on data from DeepState. Most of Ukraine’s logistics routes into Kursk increasingly came under threat from Russian attack, jeopardizing Ukrainian troops in the area.

By mid-April, the area of Kursk marked as Ukrainian-held on the DeepState’s open-source mapping service amounted to three small sections, which stretched no more than 2 kilometers (1 mile) into Russian territory. Despite the Russian announcement on Saturday, DeepState still showed several small areas of the Kursk region under Ukrainian control.

Separately, Kyiv’s troops have also advanced in Russia’s Belgorod region, Zelenskyy said April 19. Russia didn’t confirm the claim.