Russian troops regained control of a monastery in the last village of the southwestern Kursk region still held by Ukrainian forces, state media reported Tuesday, citing anonymous security sources.
“Our soldiers liberated the St. Nicholas Belogorsky Monastery in Gornal during fighting,” one of the sources was quoted as saying by the state-run TASS news agency.
The 17th-century monastery is located on the northeastern edge of Gornal and less than 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) northeast of the Ukrainian city of Sumy. According to the security source, the operation to liberate the monastery took “more than a week.”
“The resistance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been broken,” the source was quoted as saying, claiming that Ukrainian troops had treated the monastery as a “military facility.”
The Moscow Times could not independently verify the report. Russia’s Defense Ministry has not commented on the monastery’s liberation as of Tuesday morning.
On Saturday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces recaptured Oleshnya, the second-to-last village in the Kursk region still under Ukrainian control.
In recent weeks, Russian troops have slowly clawed away at Ukraine’s hold over parts of the Kursk region, coming months after Ukrainian forces first launched their surprise incursion into the border region, the largest ground offensive against Russia since WWII.
According to DeepState, a battlefield tracker, the Ukrainian army still holds almost 31 square kilometers (20 square miles) of territory in the Kursk region as of early Tuesday, after initially seizing 1,376 square kilometers (531 square miles) of land in the surprise offensive.
Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov told President Vladimir Putin on Saturday that 99.5% of the Kursk region had been “liberated,” with Russian forces continuing counteroffensive operations to clear the border region of Ukrainian forces.
Konstantin Remchukov, the editor of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, wrote Sunday that Putin was “obviously” seeking the full liberation of the Kursk region before agreeing to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire to avoid negotiating an exchange of territory.
“As soon as the last 0.5% is liberated, then the troops can stop where this news finds them,” said Remchukov, who is widely believed to have high-placed sources in the Russian government.
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