The United States remains reluctant to allow Ukraine to deploy ATACMS missiles in Russia’s Kursk region, believing that they would be better suited to continue attacking Russian-occupied Crimea.
According to CNN, this happened citing US government officials, reports Ukrinform.
The reason for this lack of preparedness is not the risk of escalation, but the fact that the United States has only limited stocks of long-range missiles.
Some politicians also expressed fears that Ukraine – which, according to one Western politician, sent some of its more experienced troops to Kursk – may have created weaknesses on its own front lines that Russia could exploit to gain more ground inside Ukraine.
“From a military perspective, this is impressive,” the official said of the Kursk operation. But Ukraine “is deploying very experienced troops for this and cannot afford to lose those troops.”
Two senior U.S. officials say Russia appears to have withdrawn several thousand troops from occupied areas of Ukraine to counter a surprisingly successful Ukrainian offensive inside Russian borders, a move that could weaken Moscow’s war effort.
The development has drawn US attention and US authorities are currently trying to determine the exact number of troops deployed by Russia. However, sources say several brigades, each with at least 1,000 troops, appear to have been deployed to the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched an operation last week.
The withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine “does not mean that Putin has abandoned his military operations in northeastern Ukraine or even further south, toward Zaporizhia,” said John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council. “There is still active fighting on that front.”
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