Ukraine said on Wednesday it had captured a total of 717 Russian prisoners of war since the start of its offensive in the Russian border region of Kursk, launched in early August.
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The number of Russian soldiers taken prisoner is one of the claimed successes of this Ukrainian operation, which, however, did not make it possible to relax Russian pressure on the eastern front, as the Kyiv authorities hoped.
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Oleksandr Syrsky, reported on Facebook that “717 Russian soldiers” have been taken prisoner since the launch of this offensive on August 6.
This operation, the largest offensive on Russian territory since the end of the Second World War, took Moscow’s forces by surprise in a weakly defended region, and was a humiliating setback for the Kremlin.
The Ukrainian authorities had cited several reasons for this incursion: bringing hostilities to Russian territory, preventing a Russian offensive in the Ukrainian region of Sumy, forcing Moscow to strip the other fronts and taking prisoners with a view to exchanging them for captive Ukrainians. .
Several prisoner exchanges have taken place in recent months, involving several hundred people on each side.
If Ukraine had claimed to have rapidly advanced over more than 1,000 square kilometers in the Kursk region, Russian forces have since claimed to have recaptured almost half of this area.
According to Mr. Syrsky, Russia has massed around 45,000 troops to push back Ukrainian forces in this area.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 11,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to the region to support the Russian army.
Most of the fighting is still taking place in Donbass, the industrial east of Ukraine, where Moscow’s forces have been advancing for months.
