Russian dictator Vladimir Putin organized a meeting with officials of the Kursk region of the Russian Federation to coordinate plans to seize the Ukrainian city of Sumy and annex the Sumy region. This is stated in the material of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), reports UNN.
Details
It is noted that on May 20, Putin met with the leadership of the municipalities of the Kursk region, during which the head of the Glushkovsky district, Pavel Zolotaryov, appealed to Putin to create a buffer zone in the Sumy region.
Putin asked how many kilometers deep the buffer zone should be, to which Zolotaryov replied that Russia should seize "at least Sumy" and hinted that Russia should be "bigger." Acting Governor of the Kursk region Alexander Khinshtein noted in his Telegram channel that his grandfather was from the Sumy region, so "this land is not alien to him"
They believe that Russia has territorial goals beyond the regions it has already illegally occupied or annexed, and that Putin may intend to use further progress in the Sumy region to demand that Ukraine cede part of the Sumy region during future peace negotiations.
"Russian forces are unlikely to be able to capture the city of Sumy in the near or medium term, given Russia's demonstrated inability to quickly capture even much smaller settlements in Ukraine over the past three years," ISW concludes.
Recall
According to The Economist, representatives of the Russian delegation during the negotiations in Istanbul threatened to seize the Kharkiv and Sumy regions if Ukraine did not withdraw its troops from the territories of the Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Luhansk and Kherson regions, which the Kremlin partially occupied and included in the constitution of the Russian Federation back in 2022.