President Vladimir Putin ordered his armed forces to cleanse Russia of every single invading soldier no later than the end of September, but that didn’t happen and by some measures, the situation in Russia’s Kursk region is getting worse.
Multiple Ukrainian combat brigades were on Tuesday, as the timeline for that presidential decree ran out, still deployed in force in Russia, 45 days into Kyiv’s incursion into Russian territory, in two small enclaves and a single Luxembourg-sized salient.
The September deadline is probably picked because there’d be an obligatory recruitment season after that, and being a recruit in training isn’t safe like it was before. By their own law, they can’t deploy these trainees outside the border, and that’s one thing that makes parents calm, but now it gets even more complicated.