The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported on 21 May that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely staged a 20 May meeting with Kursk Oblast officials to justify renewed plans to seize Sumy City and annex Sumy Oblast. Despite this, ISW says Russian forces are unlikely to capture the city soon, given their struggles to take even smaller Ukrainian towns in the last three years.
Putin likely orchestrated a meeting with officials in Kursk Oblast on 20 May to build justification for renewed Russian efforts to seize Sumy City and annex Sumy Oblast. During the meeting, held with municipal leaders, the head of Glushkovsky Raion, Pavel Zolotarev, asked Putin to create a buffer zone in Sumy Oblast. In response, Putin asked how many kilometers deep this zone should be. Zolotarev then claimed Russia should seize “at least Sumy (City)” and hinted that “Russia should be bigger.”
Acting Kursk Oblast Governor Alexander Khinshtein later commented on the exchange via his Telegram channel, noting that his grandfather was from Sumy Oblast, adding, “this land is not foreign to [him].”
Sumy City lies approximately 25 kilometers from the Russian border, and capturing it would theoretically prevent Ukrainian forces from conducting tube artillery and drone strikes into Russian territory.
According to ISW, this meeting is part of broader Kremlin efforts to present Putin as a responsive and capable wartime leader. The interaction may have been deliberately arranged to signal Russia’s intent to assert further claims over Ukrainian territory. The think tank also pointed to recent reports from Western and Ukrainian sources that members of the Russian delegation at the 16 May Istanbul talks threatened to seize Sumy Oblast to form a “security zone.”
“ISW continues to assess that Russia has territorial aims beyond the oblasts that Russia has already illegally occupied or annexed and that Putin may intend to leverage further advances in Sumy Oblast to demand that Ukraine cede part of Sumy Oblast to Russia during future peace negotiations,” the think tank wrote.
Despite Russia’s claims, Ukrainian forces reportedly maintain a limited presence inside Kursk Oblast, adjacent to Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff stated on 21 May that active combat operations are still underway in the oblast. ISW has also observed reports suggesting that fighting continues in some areas, contradicting Moscow’s assertion that Ukrainian forces have been fully expelled from Russian territory.
Russian military limitations in Sumy
According to ISW, Russia is “highly unlikely to be able to seize Sumy City in the near- to medium-term.”
Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported on 19 May that the Russian 18th Motorized Rifle Division (11th Army Corps, Leningrad Military District), the 72nd Motorized Rifle Division (44th Army Corps, LMD), and likely the 83rd Separate Airborne Brigade are leading operations in the Sumy direction. He also stated that four to five motorized rifle and rifle regiments from the Russian mobilization reserve are active in the area.
However, ISW emphasized that these limited elements are not sufficient to capture a city of Sumy’s size, with a pre-war population of 256,000. Russian forces have not managed to seize a Ukrainian city with a population over 100,000 since Lysychansk, Luhansk Oblast in July 2022. That operation was a slow, attritional advance rather than a swift maneuver, and further attempts have seen even smaller settlements prove resistant despite larger Russian deployments.
