Russia readying to attack Sumy as Donbas front stabilizes, Zelensky says

Russian soldiers are amassing at the border to prepare to launch an attack on Ukraine's northeastern Sumy region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on March 15.

Zelensky said in a post on Telegram that Ukraine has observed areas along its eastern border where the Russian army is amassing force. "This speaks to a desire to deliver a strike to our Sumy Oblast," Zelensky wrote. "We understand this and will take countermeasures."

The Ukrainian president also wrote that he hopes foreign leaders would note "that in Moscow they are preparing to ignore diplomacy."

U.S. diplomats were in Moscow this week to hash out a ceasefire deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains maximalist in his public demands for concessions from Ukraine. After talks in Saudi Arabia between the U.S. and Ukraine, Kyiv said it was ready to move forward with a ceasefire, provided Russia did the same.

Zelensky also wrote that "the situation on the Pokrovsk front has stabilized" after several months during which the city in Donetsk Oblast had been at the center of fighting and periodic threats of Russian encirclement.

More recently, Russia has made major advances in Kursk Oblast, a territory in Russia that Ukrainian forces took in August and which Zelensky's administration had hoped to use as leverage in negotiations.

Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief has refuted recent reports that Ukrainian troops were under threat of encirclement in Kursk Oblast as Russia pushed further into Ukrainian-held Russian territory.

"Thanks to our Ukrainian forces, a significant quantity of Russian forces were pulled away from other fronts to Kursk Oblast," Zelensky wrote.