What happened
Seven months after the August 2024 incursion, Ukrainian forces withdrew from most of the ground they held in Russia's Kursk region. Russian forces, with North Korean troops committed on the axis, retook Sudzha around 13 March 2025 as Ukraine's supply lines through the salient came under sustained drone interdiction; Russia's chief of the General Staff reported the region fully retaken on 26 April 2025, a claim Ukraine disputed while acknowledging the loss of nearly all of the salient. The withdrawal coincided with the pause in United States intelligence sharing.
The end of the one Ukrainian operation that had taken the war onto Russian soil, and of the bargaining chip Kyiv had described it as. It also closed the axis on which North Korean troops first fought, and it is the last genuinely new axis on this module's record before the front settled back into the eastern attritional pattern.
Confidence: High
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