KYIV — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the capture of another Russian village as he visited a border area from which Ukrainian forces entered Russia over two weeks ago, but Moscow said its troops had taken a village in east Ukraine.
Kyiv also said it had mounted a drone strike on an air base in southern Russia, its latest counterattack as Russian forces slowly advanced in eastern Ukraine 2-1/2 years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Russia said its troops had beaten back an attempt by a Ukrainian force to infiltrate its border in a different region to Kyiv’s initial incursion into Russia on Aug. 6.
The raid took place about 240 km (150 miles) from the site of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk region in western Russia, suggesting that the Kyiv government may be aiming to take the war to more border areas.
Authorities in Kursk said they had begun installing concrete shelters to help protect civilians amid the Ukrainian incursion.
Ukrainian troops piled through the Russian border into Kursk on Aug. 6 in a surprise assault after its troops had failed to make any significant gains on their own territory since late 2022.
Kyiv has announced a string of battlefield successes since mounting the action, but Moscow has been inching forward in eastern Ukraine for months, pressuring troops worn down by hard years of fighting following Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
The Russian defense ministry said on Thursday its forces had captured the village of Mezhove in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
Reuters could not independently verify the latest battlefield reports by Kyiv or Moscow.
Russia has repeatedly said the Ukrainian offensive on its soil has been halted. Ukraine has continued to tout advances.
Zelenskiy said he had met his top commander, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, during his visit to the border region of Sumy. Official video footage showed them shaking hands and embracing but did not make clear when the visit took place.
Zelenskiy said in a statement there had been a decrease in shelling and in civilian casualties in Sumy since the Kursk operation. Ukrainian forces had also captured one more Russian village, he said. Ukrainian officials have previously said Kyiv controls more than 90 settlements there.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov told a visiting delegation of US congressmen on Wednesday that Kyiv’s attack on Kursk was intended to protect Ukraine.
Umerov said in a statement: “Our goals there [in Kursk] are to clear the border from Russian military threats and make enemy shelling and attacks on our towns and villages impossible.”
The incursion has boosted morale among Ukrainians as they prepare to mark 33 years since independence from the Soviet Union on Saturday. The US Embassy in Kyiv however warned on Thursday there was a heightened risk of Russian missile and drone attacks throughout Ukraine in the coming days connected to Independence Day.
Drone swarms
The governor of Russia’s Bryansk region, Alexander Bogomaz, said an attack on Wednesday by a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance team had been thwarted by Russian border guards and military units.
A security source in Kyiv said Ukraine had also carried out a drone attack on Russia’s Marinovka military airfield in the southern Russian region of Volgograd, striking a storage site for fuel and glide bombs.
Earlier, Volgograd governor Andrei Bocharov had said a fire broke out at a military facility after a Ukrainian drone crashed into it on Thursday. Bocharov, posting on Telegram, said no one had been hurt and the attack focused on the area of Marinovka village. He did not specify what facility had been attacked.
Russia’s defense ministry said it had shot down 28 drones over Russian territory.
The Ukrainian military’s General Staff said the fighting on the eastern front remained intense and that Russian troops had launched 53 assaults and offensive actions on the front to the east of the transport hub of Pokrovsk in the last 24 hours.
The Ukrainian navy said its forces conducted an attack on a Russian ammunition and fuel storage site on the Moscow-held Kinburn Spit that juts out into the Black Sea in occupied southern Ukraine.
Ukraine has closely guarded its main aims in the Kursk region but said it has carved out a buffer zone from an area Russia has used to pound targets in Ukraine with cross-border strikes. — Reuters
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