Ukraine has said its forces are still advancing a week into its largest cross-border attack into Russia so far – but officials say that it has no interest in permanently keeping hold of the swathes of territory it has taken.
Ukraine blindsided Moscow by pouring troops into the western Russian region of Kursk last week in a surprise operation that Kyiv says has seen its forces take 1,000 sq km (390 sq miles) of land.
Ukraine said on Tuesday afternoon that its forces had taken control of 74 settlements in Kursk during its week-long assault, and that they had advanced about a mile over the previous 24 hours.
Briefing the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky by video link, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi said Kyiv’s military had seized 40 sq m of new territory over the past 24 hours. War monitors have put the total amount of captured land at closer to 800 sq km of territory. The substantial amount of land seized by Ukraine, made the more significant by the fact that it is in Russia rather than formerly occupied Ukrainian territory, amounts to more than double the area it took during the three-month counteroffensive last summer, according to estimates.
Verified footage has shown Ukrainian forces continuing to push in a westward and northwestward direction into Kursk, despite claims by Major General Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat special forces unit reportedly at the centre of Russia’s defence in Kursk, that the Ukrainian advance had been “halted”.
Mr Zelensky has said that Ukrainian forces have taken control of areas that Russia has used to launch more than 2,000 cross-border strikes on Ukraine since June.
“Unlike Russia, Ukraine does not need other people’s property. Ukraine is not interested in taking the territory of the Kursk region, but we want to protect the lives of our people,” said a spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry.
“It should be emphasised that the operation … helps the front line, because it does not allow Russia to transfer additional units to [Ukraine’s] Donetsk region, [and] complicates its military logistics,” the spokesperson, Heorhii Tykhyi, added.
Russian forces have been trying to advance for months on multiple fronts in the Donetsk region, taking advantage of their greater troop numbers to inch steadily forward towards cities like the Kyiv-held logistics hub of Pokrovsk.
In a sign that Russia was trying to avoid pulling troops from Donetsk, its military pulled some troops out of southern Ukraine to defend Kursk, Dmytro Lykhoviy, a Ukrainian army spokesperson, told Politico.
Russia’s defence ministry published extensive footage of fighter jets hitting Ukrainian positions across the Kursk front, and claimed to have repelled many of the Ukrainian attacks.
Kremlin-approved Russian war bloggers also reported intense battles across the Kursk front as Ukrainian forces tried to expand their control, though they said Russia was bringing in soldiers and heavy weaponry.
The Ukrainian military has advanced more than 10 miles into the region that borders the Sumy area of Ukraine, forcing almost 200,000 Russian civilians to evacuate their homes and relocate to temporary residence centres, where they are experiencing for the first time the kind of displacement that tens of millions of Ukrainians have suffered for more than two and half years.
But Ukrainian civilians living near to the fighting have not been left unscathed.
Ukraine’s military announced that a 12-mile border region in Sumy had now been put under lockdown over concerns that Russian sabotage groups could infiltrate the area and undermine the cross-border offensive.
Many of those in Sumy had already had to relocate to temporary shelters after Russia began retaliating with aerial strikes last week.
Mr Zelensky announced in his nightly address that the areas the military have seized are “from where the Russian forces launched strikes on the Sumy region”. In a sign that this tactic may be working, the governor of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian region immediately south of Sumy, also claimed that Kharkiv was experiencing fewer missile attacks than previously.
Mr Zelensky added that the war was “coming home” to Russia after years of fighting taking place almost exclusively in Ukraine.
“Russia brought war to others, and now it is coming home,” he wrote. “Ukraine has always wished only for peace, and we will definitely ensure peace.”