UK trained Ukrainian soldiers ahead of Kursk attack – Times

Ukrainian troops involved in the incursion by Kiev’s forces into Russia’s Kursk Region, were trained by British military specialists in the weeks before the surprise attack, The Times has reported.

On August 6, Ukrainian forces launched their largest attack on Russian territory since the conflict escalated in February 2022. The advance into Kursk Region was swiftly halted by the Russian military, but Kiev’s troops still hold a number of settlements.

Kiev “utilized some of Ukraine’s most battle-hardened fighters” taken from other parts of the front line during the incursion, the British paper claimed in an article on Friday.

A Ukrainian serviceman, who spoke to the Times from a hospital bed after being wounded in clashes in the Russian border town of Sudzha, said his unit had been defending Volchansk in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region when he was told that “today they were going to invade Russia.”

According to the article, the members of this formation were already “specialists in street fighting,” having being involved in “some of the bloodiest battles” of the conflict, including the fight for the strategic settlement of Avdeevka in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic, which Ukrainian troops relinquished in February.

The Times reported that, “a month before they were dispatched into Kursk, some of the unit were sent to England where they underwent a few days of training alongside British soldiers.” The major focus of this training course was “raids on high-rise buildings,” it revealed.

Western officials have celebrated and voiced support for the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Region, but denied any prior knowledge of the operation or involvement in it. However, Mikhail Podoliak, the top adviser to Ukrainian leader, Vladimir Zelensky, claimed earlier this week that “there were discussions between partner forces, just not on the public level,” of the attack on Russian territory.

Adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Security Council secretary, Nikolay Patrushev, told Izvestia newspaper on Friday that Kiev’s incursion was “planned with the involvement of NATO and Western special services.” It was the US and its allies who “put the criminal junta at the head of Ukraine,” while “NATO countries have supplied Kiev with weapons, military instructors, and continuous intelligence while controlling the actions of neo-Nazis,” Patrushev added.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday that, since the start of the incursion, Ukraine had lost up to 2,860 servicemen and several hundred units of military hardware, including 41 tanks, 40 APCs, and three US-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launchers.