KYIV, Ukraine — A top official in the Kursk region of Russia that borders Ukraine said Thursday that fighting is continuing in an area where Ukrainian forces made a significant incursion this week, AP reported.
Ukrainian officials haven’t commented on the scope of the operation around the town of Sudzha. But Kursk’s acting deputy governor, Andrei Belostotsky, said that Russian forces are fighting to prevent Ukrainians from advancing further into the region.
“The enemy has not advanced a single meter, on the contrary, it is retreating. The enemy’s equipment and combat forces are being actively destroyed. We hope that in the near future … the enemy will be stopped,” Belostotsky said, according to state news agency RIA-Novosti.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday described the incursion as a “large-scale provocation.”
Putin met with his top defense and security officials to discuss what he called the “indiscriminate shelling of civilian buildings, residential houses, ambulances with different types of weapons.” He instructed the Cabinet to coordinate assistance to the Kursk region. The fighting is about 500 kilometres (320 miles) from Moscow.
Army chief of staff Valery Gerasimov told Putin at the meeting via video link that about 100 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the battle and more than 200 others were wounded, Russian news agencies reported.
The Ukrainian shelling, meanwhile, killed at least two people — a paramedic and an ambulance driver — and wounded 24 others, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a statement Wednesday.
It wasn’t possible to independently verify the Russian claims. Disinformation and propaganda have played a central role in the war, now in its third year. John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, declined to comment on the operation and said the Biden administration has reached out to the Ukrainians to better understand what happened.
