Russia faces "difficult fight" to retake Ukraine-held area, says top US spy

BETHESDA, Maryland (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin will mount a counteroffensive to try to retake territory in the Kursk region captured by Ukrainian troops, but Russian forces will encounter “a difficult fight,” Deputy CIA Director David Cohen said on Wednesday.

Cohen told a national security industry conference that the significance of the Ukrainian incursion, which has overrun some 300 square miles (777 square km) of the Russian province, remained to be seen.

Ukrainian forces crashed through Russia’s western border into the Kursk region on Aug. 6 in a surprise offensive that is continuing.

While Kyiv has said it has no intention of annexing the area it has captured, Ukrainian troops are building defensive lines and it appears that they intend to retain “some of that territory for some period of time,” Cohen told the Intelligence and National Security Summit.

“We can be certain that Putin will mount a counteroffensive to try to reclaim that territory,” Cohen said. “I think our expectation is that that will be a difficult fight for the Russians.”

Putin, he said, “is not only going to have to face the fact that there is a front line now within Russian territory that he’s going to have to deal with, he has to deal with reverberations back in his own society that they have lost a piece of Russian territory.”

Ukraine’s success in Kursk “has the potential to change the dynamic” of the conflict “a little bit going forward,” he continued without elaborating.

Ukraine has claimed the capture of 100 settlements in its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, while Russian forces continue to inch forward in the eastern Donetsk region.

Cohen said that Russia has been making those gains “at extraordinary cost” in troops and equipment and “may or may not” capture the key Ukrainian logistics hub city of Pokrovsk.

“But at the end of the day, none of it is a game changer in a strategic sense” for the Russians, he continued.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the war with Russia would eventually end in dialogue, but that Kyiv had to be in a strong position and that he would present a plan to U.S. President Joe Biden and his two potential successors.

Putin has said any deal needs to start with Ukraine’s acceptance of “realities on the ground,” that would leave Russia with possession of substantial chunks of four Ukrainian regions as well as Crimea.

Ukraine says it controls more than 1,200 square km (463 square miles) of the Kursk region.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Franklin Paul and Jonathan Oatis)