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Kyiv’s forces continued their incursion into Russian territory overnight, sending a barrage of missiles and drones into the Kursk region, and triggering a state of emergency in the entire Belgorod region.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement Wednesday morning that dozens of Ukrainian drones were shot down across the southwest of the country over the regions of Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, Volgograd, Bryansk, Orel, Rostov and Nizhny Novgorod.
Moscow also claimed its forces had halted Ukraine’s advance in the Kursk region and were pushing it back, but there were conflicting reports from some Russian war bloggers and Kyiv. Ukraine claims to now control at least 74 villages in the Kursk region alone.
U.S. President Joe Biden addressed Kyiv’s incursion overnight, telling reporters that the operation was “creating a real dilemma” for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He added that his team was in “constant contact” with Ukrainian officials.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly address on Tuesday, said “hundreds of Russian servicemen have already surrendered” to Kyiv’s forces, replenishing the “exchange fund” of prisoners of war.
Belgorod regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in a video posted to Telegram early Wednesday that the situation remained “extremely difficult and tense” amid sustained shelling from Ukraine’s forces.
He said more people had been evacuated overnight, and that he had declared a regional state of emergency for the entirety of the region, adding that authorities were planning to request a federal state of emergency.
Alexei Smirnov, Russia’s acting regional governor of Kursk, said on Telegram late Tuesday that a volunteer squad had been working to evacuate people from the areas that were under attack, adding that for the past week since Ukraine’s surprise incursion, “they work under shelling, practically without sleep or rest.” Four Ukrainian missiles had been destroyed over Kursk, the governor said.
The Kremlin pulled some troops out of southern Ukraine and back into its own territory to try to fend off the escalating incursion, Dmytro Lykhoviy, a Ukrainian army spokesman, told POLITICO on Tuesday.
