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Ukraine has been widely expelled from Kurakhove, a battered but strategic city in Donbas, Russia said. Kyiv’s forces urged a renewed offensive in southern Russia.

By Marc Santora

Kyiv reports, Ukraine

Five months after assaulting the border in the Kursk region, in southern Russia, Ukrainian forces increased Monday to drive more deeply in Russia, even if they seem to have lost a strategic city in eastern Ukraine.

While the scale of the renewed Ukrainian offensive in Kursk remains unclear, both Russian and Ukrainian officials reported heavy fighting on Sunday night. Combat footage geolocated by military analysts indicated that Ukraine was trying to break through Russian defenses in at least three directions.

It is the first significant attempt by Ukrainian troops to advance in Kursk since the original incursion in August. Since then, Russia has regained roughly half of the territory it lost.

At the same time, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on Monday that its forces had seized control of Kurakhove, an important but shattered industrial town, further closing in on Ukrainian forces in the southern Donbas region after more than two months of withering bombardments and heavy fighting.

The Ukrainian military command in the east did not comment on the Russian claim that Kurakhove had fallen. Soldiers fighting in the area, and a local Ukrainian military official, said when reached by phone that while there were pockets of resistance in the factories on the outskirts, the town was essentially lost. They requested anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.

In a statement, the Kremlin said that its defense minister Andrei Belosov had congratulated Russian infantry soldiers to capture the city on Monday,

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