The AFU Lost Positions in Kursk Oblast Due to a Lack of Intelligence Data From the U.S.

Over the past few days, the Russian military has seized the settlements of Malaya Loknya, Cherkasskoye Porechnoye and Martynivka to the north of Sudzha in Kursk Oblast, which is controlled by the AFU. This is reported by Russian blogger Rybar and the Russian Defense Ministry; these territories are also marked as a “gray zone” on the map of the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState.

In addition, Rybar writes that the Russian Armed Forces, having snuck along a branch of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod gas pipeline, captured Kubatkin near Kazachya Lokny (less than 7 kilometers from Sudzha), and also advanced beyond Cherkasskoye Porechnoye, bypassing Pravda and Ivashkovskiy by forests. To the southeast of Sudzha, the Russian military advanced near Makhnovka, he said.

Another group of Russian soldiers came through the forest belt from the direction of Nikolskoye, resulting in the formation of a “fairly large cauldron” in the north of Sudzhansky district, Rybar reported. That the Russian Armed Forces tried to split the Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region into at least two parts is also reported by other Z-channels — in particular, the “war correspondent” Kotenok.

On Saturday evening, the AFU General Staff said that Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance units had detected sabotage and assault groups of the Russian Armed Forces moving along the gas pipeline towards Sudzha and attacked them with missiles, artillery and UAVs “The forces of Russian special forces are turned out, blocked and destroyed. The enemy’s losses in the Sudzha area are very high,” the staff reported.

Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov and actor Miroslav Gai, who fights in the AFU, said that about 100 Russian soldiers were involved in the operation with the gas pipeline, 80% of whom were killed, according to Gai.

At the same time, the RBC-Ukraine source said that the situation in the Kursk Oblast had indeed become more complicated for the AFU, but the Ukrainian command has no plans to withdraw its troops from there.

The lack of intelligence from the United States has proved “particularly problematic” in Kursk Oblast, the New York Times reported, citing an AFU soldier and a U.S. official. The suspension of intelligence sharing has damaged Ukraine’s ability to detect and attack Russian forces in the region and hampered its ability to strike key targets.

The Ukrainians have also lost the ability to detect the approach of Russian bombers and other warplanes as they take off from Russian territory, a Ukrainian government source told TIME.