Kyiv, Ukraine — While Ukrainian forces are in Russia’s western Kursk region, they are encountering a new enemy, North Korea’s elite soldiers.

On Sunday, the Ukrainian infantry and armored cars resumed an offensive in 3 instructions in Kursk, to close the toe in the center of the Southzha district that they had seized in August.

By Tuesday, they occupied at least three villages northeast of Sudzha – and inflicted losses on the North Koreans that fight in separate units under Russian command.

“We thinned their ranks – they have losses, although Kim didn’t just send ordinary servicemen,” a Ukrainian soldier told Al Jazeera, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

He revealed his name, the main points and his precise position of battles according to the times of war.

South Korean and US officials have said Kim deployed more than 10,000 elite soldiers to Kursk. Hundreds are understood to have been killed there already.

More than 450 km (280 miles) south of Kursk, the Ukrainian soldier continues to repel waves from Russian squadrons near the key southeast of Pokrovsk.

“It seems they are sending a new brigade every day,” the soldier told Al Jazeera.

The Russians continue to advance despite the lack of tanks and armored vehicles.

“They stay pushing. The only challenge they have is their team, they can’t launch it as they did 3 or 4 months ago,” he said.

But the biggest challenge his unit, like all of Ukraine’s armed forces, is a disastrous shortage of work.

Last week, Ukrainian troops retreated from the eastern town of Kurakhove, which Russian troops claimed control of on Monday.

kyiv’s forces have also lost a key coal mine near Pokrovsk and can be about to lose the largest lithium tank in Ukraine in Shevchenkove.

“Kurakhove’s defense comforts were taken just because we had no one there,” said the soldier. “Maximum motivated infantry men have been killed, the new ones lack and motivation. “

He also cited bad decisions made through commanders, claiming that they sought to appease their superiors and did not appreciate the lives of the military.

“The stupidity of the commanders has injured me so many times,” he said.

Russian forces seizing Kurakhove ransacked deserted apartments, a woman alleged.

“They’re breaking into apartments that haven’t been damaged by shelling, they steal everything they can carry away,” Olena Basenko, a former sales clerk from Kurakhove who is looking for her elderly aunt who refused to leave the town, told Al Jazeera.

“Some ‘liberators’ they are,” she said sarcastically referring to Moscow’s pledge to “liberate” Ukraine from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “neo-Nazi junta” – Russian claims that have been debunked throughout the war.

Ukraine’s shortage of manpower has led some analysts to doubt Kyiv’s push to resume the Kursk offensive.

“Zelenskyy’s strategy is composed of breeding brigades with apparatus in the back to solemnly lose it in the country of Kursk to gain 1. 5 km [1 mile] of agricultural land,” Al Jazeera Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at the German University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera.

The sets that advance in Kursk may have been used to protect Kurakhove, he said.

However, others see Kursk’s offensive as a possibility to ensure a vital negotiation problem.

Ukraine may try to seize a Russian nuclear power plant in the town of Kurchatov that lies about 70km (45 miles) northeast of Sudzha and could attempt to seize Kursk’s regional capital 30km (20 miles) farther away.

If successful, the takeover of Kurchatov may become a significant strategic gain, according to the former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces.

“We didn’t want to make things worse, but we need to,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko told Al Jazeera.

Kyiv may also invade the nearby Russian region of Bryansk, dealing a heavy blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s domestic reputation, he said.

“It will be painful in Putin, and if there is an offensive somewhere in Bryansk or in regions, it will make him think,” said Romanenko.

Some Russians ridicule Putin who led to the first foreign invasion of Western Russia since World War II.

“If the grandpa from the bunker is so wise, why do we have Ukrainians on Russian land? Something must be wrong,” Roman, a 48-year-old Muscovite who served in a tank unit in the 1990s, told Al Jazeera, deriding the Russian president.

Bryansk borders Ukraine and has been attacked through two Ukrainian army sets made up of pro-Ukrainian Russian fighters.

Romanenko called Putin’s resolve to bolster Russia’s offensive in southeastern Ukraine a “fiasco” of Trump’s “peace plan. “

“This ended in Fiasco because Putin rejected the proposed edition through the Trump team,” he said.

Trump has offered few details of the plan, but, according to his team, it may include the establishment of a “demilitarised zone” along the current front line, Kyiv’s ceding of Russia-occupied areas and a delay of Ukraine’s NATO membership.

At the end of last year, Ukraine scored a small victory that may herald huge losses in Russian navy bases and civilian seaports.

On December 31, the Ukrainian sea drones or unleashed ships armed with small missiles, attacked Russian helicopters in the Bay of Sébastopol, the naval base of the Crimea Annexed.

Ukraine said he had shot two helicopters, killing team members.

Moscow acknowledged any loss even said its forces had destroyed 4 Ukrainian aircraft and two marine drones.

The attack has shown that marine drones can wreak havoc on the infrastructure of the Russian and Naval port along the Black Sea, Mitrokhin said of the University of Bremen.

Furthermore, Kyiv could use sea drones for attacks on the Russian navy in the Baltic, Barents and White Seas and in the Pacific.

“There is so much infrastructure there that it will be hard to cover it even with boom barriers, let alone protect them from all sides like in Sevastopol or [the Crimean port of] Feodosiya,” he said.

Meanwhile, the ongoing war of attrition tests Ukraine and Russia’s economies.

The Russian economy has “partially adapted to the pressure from [Western] sanctions, but it currently enters the inflation shock of overheating and slower growth” because of the Central Bank’s high percentage rates, Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kusch said.

The Ukrainian economy is “in shock” because of severely damaged energy infrastructure and a lack of labour force, he said.

But hydrocarbon exports help Russia’s economy recover from the shock, while Ukraine is kept afloat by Western financial aid.

“It creates a certain parity effect amid resistance to war,” Kushch told Al Jazeera.