Amid truce talks, why is Ukraine focused on attacking western Russia?

Small groups of infantrymen backed by armoured vehicles, multiple rocket launchers, drones and fighter jets are trying to seize a village.

They have been attacking it for days despite heavy counterattacks, shelling and drone strikes, spring rains, wet ground and the lack of life-saving foliage on the trees around the village that hides camouflage-clad soldiers.“The situation remains tense,” a war correspondent concludes.

What sounds like a bland, repetitive report from eastern Ukraine is in fact a dispatch of pro-Kremlin war correspondent Yuri Kotyonok from the Russia-Ukraine war’s brand new front line.

The region is Belgorod in western Russia, a pancake-flat area of oak groves and iron ore mines 700 kilometres (435 miles) south of Moscow.

The village is Demidovka, an unremarkable backwater of fewer than 300 inhabitants, where Soviet forces clashed with Nazi Germans during World War II.

Demidovka is a stone’s throw away from the border with the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, where Russian forces failed to advance and retreated three years ago.The village is also about 50km (31 miles) north of Sudzha, another forgettable town in the neighbouring Russian region of Kursk that was retaken earlier this month after more than six months of Ukrainian occupation.