Russian forces have recaptured Sudzha, the largest town that Ukraine once occupied in the Kursk region, according to Moscow, threatening Kyiv\u2019s sole territorial bargaining chip amid pressure to negotiate an end to the war. <\/p>\n
\u201cIn the course of the offensive operations, units of the North military group liberated the settlements of Melovoy, Podol and Sudzha,\u201d the Russian defense ministry said Thursday. <\/p>\n
Wearing military uniform in video broadcast by Russian state television, Putin told frontline troops that Moscow\u2019s goal is to \u201ccompletely liberate\u201d Kursk as soon as possible, during his first trip to the western region since Ukraine\u2019s unexpected incursion there last year. <\/p>\n
Putin\u2019s carefully choreographed visit appeared designed to boost morale as Russian forces advance on the final remnants of Ukraine\u2019s holdouts inside Russia, a day after peace talks between US and Ukrainian officials resulted in Kyiv accepting a 30-day US-backed ceasefire covering the entire frontline. <\/p>\n
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the ball is now in Putin\u2019s court as US representatives headed to Russia \u201cright now as we speak,\u201d to discuss the ceasefire proposal. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to see. It\u2019s up to Russia now,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, as he declined to comment on whether he has a meeting scheduled with the Russian leader. <\/p>\n
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that Putin was \u201ccarefully studying\u201d the proposal, as Moscow waits to be briefed by US officials in the coming days. <\/p>\n
This is a developing story and will be updated.<\/i> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Russian forces have recaptured Sudzha, the largest town that Ukraine once occupied in the Kursk…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}