Reports corroborate the Russian Federation's de facto annexation of four frontier hamlets within Ukraine's Sumy Oblast, a contiguous zone bordering Russia's Kursk Oblast, where Ukrainian contingents had previously wrested control of discrete territories; this incursion transpires in the wake of President Vladimir Putin's pronouncements regarding the prospective demarcation of a cordon sanitaire along the border to preempt further Ukrainian cross-border offensives, and notwithstanding a marginal abatement in the recent Russian aerial bombardment campaign, Moscow's protracted invasion persists unabated, with extant peace parleys proving sterile and yielding no substantive dénouement beyond a large-scale reciprocal repatriation of prisoners of war, whilst the anticipated Putin memorandum outlining a tentative peace accord framework remains undelivered to Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy to Ukraine, and, concomitant with the extensive aerial assaults, a marked diminution in Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployments was registered between Monday and Tuesday, amidst the ongoing operational imperative for Russian forces to consolidate territorial gains within Sumy and Ukrainian forces' attendant endeavors to maintain their defensive perimeters.