Moscow says Ukrainian forces are now 30km inside Russia’s Kursk region

Ukrainian forces have advanced 30 kilometers into Russia, in what has become the deepest and most significant incursion since Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces clashed with Ukrainian forces near the villages of Tolbino and Opshi-Kolodz, as the offensive in the Kursk region entered its sixth day.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Kiev of “terrorizing the peaceful population of Russia.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who directly acknowledged the attack for the first time in a speech last night, said Russia had launched 2,000 cross-border attacks from Kursk this summer.

“Artillery, mortars, drones. We also record missile strikes, and every such strike deserves a fair response,” Zelensky said in his evening address from Kyiv.

A senior Ukrainian official told AFP that thousands of soldiers were involved in the operation, a much larger number than the small incursion initially reported by Russian border guards.

While Ukrainian-backed sabotage groups have launched sporadic cross-border incursions, the Kursk offensive represents the largest coordinated assault on Russian territory by Kyiv’s conventional forces.

“We are on the offensive. The goal is to expand the enemy’s positions, inflict maximum losses on him and destabilize the situation in Russia because it is unable to protect its borders,” the official said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that its forces “thwarted attempts by enemy mobile groups with armored vehicles to break deep into Russian territory.”

But in an apparent admission that Kyiv’s forces have now advanced deep into the Kursk border region, the defence ministry said it had clashed with Ukrainian forces near the villages of Tolbino and Opshi Kolodz – which lie about 25km and 30km from the Russia-Ukraine border.

Footage circulating online, and verified by the BBC, also showed a Russian airstrike near the village of Levshinka, about 25 kilometres from the border.

Ukrainian forces claimed to have taken control of a number of settlements in the Kursk region. In the village of Goyevo, about 3 kilometers inside Russian territory, soldiers filmed themselves removing the Russian flag from an administrative building.

Videos have also emerged showing Ukrainian forces taking control of administrative buildings in the towns of Sverdlikovo and Borozh, while heavy clashes were reported in Sudzha – a town of about 5,000 people.

Ukrainian soldiers have already filmed themselves outside the town of Sudzha at a large gas facility involved in the transit of natural gas from Russia to the European Union via Ukraine, which has continued despite the war.

In the Sumy region, which borders the Kursk region, BBC correspondents saw a steady stream of armoured personnel carriers and tanks heading towards Russia.

The armoured convoys bear white triangular insignia, apparently to distinguish them from equipment used inside Ukraine itself. Meanwhile, aerial photos have shown Ukrainian tanks engaged in combat inside Russia.

Images analysed by BBC Verify also showed Russia building new defensive lines near the Kursk nuclear power plant. Ukrainian forces engaged in the battle for Obshche Kolodz were 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the facility.

Satellite images of the same site taken yesterday, compared with images taken a few days earlier, show several newly built trench lines in the area, the closest of which is about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the plant.

Russia said 76,000 people had been evacuated from border areas in the Kursk region, where local authorities had declared a state of emergency.

Acting regional governor Alexei Smirnov said 15 people were injured late Saturday when debris from a Ukrainian missile fell on a multi-storey building in Kursk, the capital of the Kursk region.

Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko praised the process, saying it “brings us closer to peace than a hundred peace summits.”

“When Russia needs to respond on its territory, when the Russian people run, when people care, this is the only way to show them that this war must stop,” he told the BBC.

The Kursk offensive comes after weeks of Russian advances in the east, where Kremlin forces have captured a string of villages.

Some analysts have suggested that the Kursk offensive is part of an effort to force Russia to redeploy its forces away from eastern Ukraine and relieve pressure on besieged Ukrainian defenses.

But the Ukrainian official told AFP that Russian operations in the east had so far seen little sign of a pullback.

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attack was a “major provocation.”

Meanwhile, emergency services in the Kyiv region said a man and his four-year-old son were killed in a rocket attack near the capital overnight.

Air force officials said air defenses also destroyed 53 of 57 Russian drones launched during the airstrikes on Tuesday night. They added that four North Korean-made missiles were also fired as part of the strikes.

Russia has been forced to turn to the isolated Asian state to replenish its munitions stockpile, with the United States claiming Pyongyang has sent massive amounts of military equipment.

Elsewhere, Russian officials in the occupied Zaporizhia region said a fire broke out at a nuclear power plant in the region on Sunday.

Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor of Zaporizhia, claimed the fire broke out after shelling by Ukrainian forces. He said there was no spike in radiation around the plant.

The main fire at the station was extinguished in the early hours of Monday morning, Russia’s TASS news agency reported.

In a statement published by the United Nations’ nuclear agency, the agency said its inspectors at the site had observed “dense dark smoke” coming from the north of the facility, but stressed that “no impact” on nuclear safety had been reported.

President Zelensky said in a social media post that Russian forces had set fire to the plant’s grounds.

The site has been under the control of Russian forces and officials since 2022. It has not produced power in more than two years, and all six reactors have been cold shut since April.

With additional reporting by Benedict Jarman.