President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of trying to surround Kyiv’s forces in Russia’s Kursk region to improve his position amid cease-fire talks with Washington, but said that Ukraine’s forces had not been trapped.
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Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces had retaken two villages outside Sudzha, the main Russian town that Ukraine occupied in the Kursk region. The Ukrainian general staff has not publicly commented on Russia’s capture of Sudzha. But on Saturday morning, it released a map of the battlefield showing the town outside Ukrainian-controlled territory in the Kursk region.
Fighting is raging in and around the part of the Kursk region that Ukraine seized in a surprise offensive into Russian territory last summer. The Kremlin is pressing an advancing offensive to take back its land there, while prolonging negotiations over a cease-fire that Washington and Kyiv proposed this week.
Mr. Putin on Friday called on Ukrainian forces still fighting in the Kursk region to lay down their arms and said he would spare their lives if they surrendered. He also said Ukrainian forces were encircled there, an assertion that President Trump repeated in a message on Truth Social.
Mr. Zelensky, speaking to journalists in Kyiv, called the claim untrue.
“There are Ukrainian troops in Kursk region,” he said. “Their encirclement is Putin’s lie.”
Russia’s forces, however, are attempting to cut off and trap Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region by pushing into the neighboring Sumy region in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky said, adding that Kyiv was countering the threat.
He said the Russian military’s actions demonstrated that Moscow was not interested in peace.
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Russia’s increasing ability to strike the road coming out of Sudzha into Ukraine has made withdrawals from the Kursk region perilous for Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian officials said on condition of anonymity to discuss the battlefield situation. They noted, however, that the troops were not fully surrounded.
It was not clear how many Ukrainian forces remained in the Kursk region as of Saturday, with many of them having withdrawn in recent weeks.
Moscow has been incensed for months by Ukraine’s occupation of parts of the Kursk region, the first time Russian land has been seized by a foreign power since World War II. At one point last year, Russian officials said negotiations with Ukraine were out of the question while Kyiv’s forces were still occupying the land.
Mr. Putin previously rejected the idea of a truce or cease-fire, presenting any temporary pause in fighting as a battlefield benefit to Ukraine’s beleaguered forces.But when President Trump’s administration brokered a 30-day cease-fire with Ukrainian officials and proposed it to Mr. Putin this week, the Russian leader soft-pedaled his rejection.
Mr. Putin, in the apparent hope of continuing Moscow’s rapid rapprochement with Washington while also pursuing his battlefield aims, said that “the idea itself is the right one, and we definitely support it, but there are questions we need to discuss.”
The Russian leader then proceeded to lay out conditions for a cease-fire known to be unacceptable to Kyiv, including demands that Ukraine cease mobilizing new soldiers, training troops or importing weapons for the duration of any pause in fighting.
Mr. Trump, in his Truth Social post on Friday, said his administration had held “very good and productive discussions” with Mr. Putin, “and there is a very good chance that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end.”
The two leaders are expected to speak over the phone, after Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow and met with Mr. Putin to discuss the cease-fire proposal this week.
In the meantime, Russia is escalating on the battlefield.
Russia is accumulating forces along the Ukrainian border between the Kursk and Sumy regions in advance of what Ukrainian officials expect to be a major offensive effort to drive across the border and cut off Ukrainian troops in Kursk.
In recent days, Russia has sent small assault and sabotage groups to do reconnaissance, test Ukrainian defenses and try and set the stage for a bigger push, Ukrainian officials said. Mr. Zelensky’s comments underscored the threat.
As Ukraine reeled from a temporary cutoff of U.S. military aid and intelligence assistance last week, Moscow stepped up its efforts to retake Kursk. The Russians are pushing in from multiple directions, as the Ukrainians retreat to more defensible positions, Ukrainian officials and analysts said.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, reiterated Mr. Putin’s offer to Ukrainian soldiers to surrender and save their lives in comments to the state news agency Tass on Saturday.
“It’s still valid,” Mr. Peskov said, although he added that “time was running out.”
The mere mention of encirclement hits a nerve for many Ukrainians. Efforts to save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers who were surrounded have twice before played key roles in negotiations with Russia — in 2014, in the city of Ilovaisk, and in 2015, in the city of Debaltseve.
Both are remembered in Ukraine as searing experiences, with concessions offered only to have, in Ukraine’s view, Russia renege and open fire anyway.
In 2015, Russian forces attacked several thousand Ukrainian soldiers in a precarious position in the town of Debaltseve, which had a single access road for retreat and resupply. Cease-fire negotiations that led to the agreement known as Minsk 2 — an unsuccessful earlier effort to resolve fighting in eastern Ukraine — began when this road was under direct line of fire from Russian tanks but was not physically controlled by Russian soldiers.
This circumstance left ambiguous whether the town was surrounded. In negotiations, Mr. Putin had argued that the situation equated to surrounding the troops.
Ukraine granted political concessions in the Minsk 2 agreement to save the surrounded soldiers. Russia later took the position that the cease-fire applied to the front line but not to soldiers who were already encircled. The Ukrainian contingent retreated under fire in a pre-dawn dash several days later and more than a hundred soldiers were killed.
The fighting comes amid an increase in diplomatic activity aimed at addressing the conflict.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain warned Saturday that the West cannot allow Mr. Putin to “play games with President Trump’s deal,” as the British leader convened a virtual summit of global leaders committed to aiding Ukraine.
“The Kremlin’s complete disregard for President Trump’s cease-fire proposal only serves to demonstrate that Putin is not serious about peace,” the British leader said.
Even as attention focused on the Kursk region, attacks continued elsewhere on the front.
Overnight, Russia launched two Iskander-M ballistic missiles and 178 drones at Ukrainian cities, the Ukrainian authorities said. The missiles struck a residential district in Kryvyi Rih, Mr. Zelensky’s hometown in central Ukraine, injuring 14 people, including two children, according to the local authorities.
Andrew E. Kramer, Constant Méheut and Marc Santora in Kyiv contributed reporting.
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