The Kremlin has vowed that it intends to do “everything” to stop Ukrainian bombing of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has been the target of numerous attacks by the Ukrainian army following Russian bombing of targets in Ukraine, a Ukrainian attack on a similar thing happened on Tuesday in the Kursk region, which also borders Ukraine, reports France Presse.

According to the governor of the Kursk region, the woman died from shrapnel from a Ukrainian projectile fired at the border village. Also, two Ukrainian drones hit an oil rig in the same region, causing a fire and injuring three, Agerpres cites.

Commenting on military operations in Ukraine in Moscow, Russian Defense Minister Serhiy Shoigu said at a meeting with the senior officers of the Russian army that it had once again taken the “strategic initiative on the entire front line”, despite the lack of major territorial gains after the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

“The Russian grouping of troops is methodically reducing the combat potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Last year, the enemy lost more than 215,000 people and 28,000 weapons,” said the Russian minister. He said about Kyiv politicians that they send soldiers to their deaths at the insistence of their “western patrons” and seek to replenish the ranks of the Ukrainian army by any means. “Despite the exhaustion of the human resources of the Ukrainian formations and the lack of results on the battlefield, the US is trying to realize its ambitions of world leadership with royal blood at the cost of Ukrainian lives,” the Russian minister accused.

For his part, the press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmytro Peskov, accused Kyiv at his daily press briefing of deliberately targeting the civilian population with Western weapons, recalling the terrorist attack on December 30, which killed 25 people and injured more than a hundred in the region. the capital of the Russian province of Belgorod.

“Our army will do everything in its power to first minimize the risk, and then completely eliminate it,” Peskov said, referring to the intensification of Ukraine’s shelling of border areas with the increase and strengthening of the intensity of Russian drone and missile attacks. for purposes in different parts of Ukraine.

The front line has not changed much since the fall of 2022

After the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the tone in Moscow became more optimistic, despite significant losses at the front, which the US estimates at about 315,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded. The Russian army went back on the offensive last fall, mostly around the city of Avdiyivka in Donetsk region, but its progress has been slight and Kyiv says it is inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy.

Thus, the front line has practically not changed since the fall of 2022, when Ukraine retook most of the northeastern Kharkiv region during a counteroffensive, and the threat of a new counteroffensive in the south prompted Russian troops to withdraw beyond the Dnipro from the north of Kherson region.

There is now a heated internal debate in Ukraine about a new wave of mobilization to compensate for losses at the front and some veterans exhausted after almost two years of war. Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi announced that the army, which has suffered heavy casualties and is struggling to find volunteers, offered to mobilize an additional 450,000 to 500,000 soldiers to fight the roughly 600,000 Russian soldiers stationed in occupied Ukrainian territories.

Ukraine’s former interior minister and ex-prosecutor general Yurii Lutsenko said this week that the government in Kyiv must reveal to the public the loss of lives of the Ukrainian army, even if it causes “shock”.

____

• Follow the latest events of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HotNews.ro