The Russian military announced today that fighting is still ongoing in the Kursk region, which borders Ukraine, where the Ukrainian army entered on Tuesday, leading to the evacuation of thousands of people on both sides of the border.
According to Moscow, Ukrainian forces entered the region on Tuesday with up to a thousand soldiers and dozens of tanks and armored vehicles. Until now, Kiev has been mostly silent about the operation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the "large-scale provocation", accusing Ukrainian troops of "indiscriminately firing various weapons, including rockets, at civilian buildings, homes and ambulances".
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The Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, Valery Gerasimov, assured Putin that "the advance of the enemy deep into the territory was stopped by air and artillery attacks", broadcast the television.
Fighting is still going on "in the areas right next to the border," according to him. "The operation will end with the defeat of the enemy," he said.
According to the "Telegram Rybar" channel, which is followed by more than a million people and is close to the Russian army, Ukrainian soldiers occupied three villages in the Kursk region.
A source in the Ukrainian security services (SBU) claims to AFP that in flight a small drone destroyed a Russian Mi-28 helicopter "for the first time in the history of war".
Clashes and bombings led to the evacuation of civilians on both sides of the border.
In Russia, authorities said "several thousand" people had fled the border areas, where five civilians were killed and 28 wounded, including children.
In Ukraine, in Sumy Oblast, across from the Kursk Region, authorities ordered the "forced evacuation" of 23 localities with 6.000 people, including 425 children, according to Governor Vladimir Artyuk.
"The situation in the Sumy region is very tense" because of the attack, he said on Ukrainian television.
The acting governor of Russia's Kursk region, Alexei Smirnov, announced the cancellation of all public gatherings and called on the population to donate blood to replenish supplies.
The Ukrainian authorities have been almost completely silent on the situation since Tuesday. Several senior Ukrainian officials interviewed by AFP declined to comment.
Ukrainian military expert Sergiy Zgurec assessed that with this incursion, the Ukrainian army tried to divert Russian forces from other sectors of the front, where they have been advancing for several months.
"I think one of (Kiev's) goals is to attract (Russian) reserves, to ease the action of our army in the Kharkiv sector (northeast) and maybe in other regions," he told AFP.
The geography of this area in Russia makes it possible to "effectively implement this type of deterrence against the enemy with smaller forces, and this is what the Ukrainian military is probably doing," Zgurec added.
Today, Ukrainian drones targeted residential buildings in two more Russian regions bordering Ukraine, Voronezh and Belgorod, their authorities announced.
Since the beginning of the conflict in February 2022, there have been several incursions of fighters from Ukraine into Russia.
The Russian military has claimed to have repulsed them each time, but some attacks have led it to resort to artillery and aviation, as with the new operation that began on Tuesday.
Russian soldiers have been gradually advancing in eastern Ukraine for months, and the Ukrainian army is short of recruits and ammunition.
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