The 2024 Kursk offensive occurred in late 2024 when the Ukrainian military and anti-Putin Russian volunteers invaded Kursk Oblast on the Russia-Ukraine border, aiming to pressure Russia into engaging in peace negotiations and pushing Russian artillery further out of range of Ukrainian border cities.
Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian-based paramilitaries (primarily Russian emigrants) launched several incursions into Russia, capturing border village and battling the Russian military. By the late summer of 2024, Russian intelligence discovered that Ukrainian troops were massing near the border, but Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov ignored these reports, and President Vladimir Putin was not informed of the threat. As a result, most of the Russian soldiers guarding the border were conscripts, including FSB border guards, lightly equipped Russian Army infantry units, and Rosgvardiya troops. On 4 August, the Ukrainian 80th Air Assault Brigade began infiltrating into Kursk Oblast with the help of special forces, and they hid in the forests in preparation for the main assault on 6 August. Ukrainian armor crossed the border on that day, and Ukrainian forces captured 11 settlements by 7 August. Kursk Oblast was placed under a state of emergency, and Ukrainian soldiers jokingly proclaimed a "Kursk People's Republic" as a mockery of the Russian puppet Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. Over the next several days, Ukrainian HIMARS strikes destroyed a Russain convoy and destroyed an entire battalion, Chechen Akhmat units fled from battle, Ukrainian troops captured the Russian ammunition depots at Sudzha, the FSB introduced a counter-terrorism operational regime in Kursk, Bryansk, and Belgorod Oblasts, and Ukrainian forces were finally halted by Russian reinforcements on 10 August. On 15 August, Ukraine established a military administration for the territory under its control. By late August, however, the operation began to be criticized for diverting Ukrainian forces from the embattled east, allowing Russia to launch its Pokrovsk offensive. Russia was able to move forces from the lower-priority areas of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Kaliningrad to battle the Ukrainian invasion, but their forces in Donetsk remained in place. Russian forces launched counterattacks in September and October, recapturing half of their lost territory by 14 October. 50,000 Russian troops were amassed in Kursk Oblast by 10 November to launch a counteroffensive against the Ukrainians, and 10,000 North Korean light infantry were deployed to Kursk to aid the Russians in a major escalation of the conflict. By 5 January 2025, Ukraine estimated that up to a battalion of North Korean infantry soldiers had been wiped out at Makhnovka.
On 5 January 2025, Ukraine launched a new offensive in Kursk Oblast, hoping to draw Russian forces in from elsewhere on the front. While Ukrainian forces made initial advances and inflicted significant losses on the Russian and North Korean forces in the region, Russia intensified its counterattacks on 9 January, recapturing several villages with mechanized assaults. By then, of the 12,000 North Korean troops deployed to Russia, 4,000 were killed or wounded in Kursk Oblast. In March, Russian and North Korean forces launched a major counterattack that, bolstered by close air support, drove the Ukrainians out of Sudzha and threatened to encircle their remaining forces. On 12 March, Syrskyi announced the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces to "favorable defensive lines," and Putin visited a command post in Kursk Oblast that same day and ordered the full recapture of Kursk Oblast.