Thousands evacuated as Russia battles major Ukrainian border incursion

MOSCOW - Russian forces were battling Ukrainian troops for a third day on Aug 8 after they smashed through the Russian border in the Kursk region, an audacious attack on the world’s biggest nuclear power that has forced Moscow to call in reserves.

In one of the biggest Ukrainian attacks on Russia of the two-year war, around 1,000 Ukrainian troops

rammed through the Russian border

in the early hours of Aug 6 with tanks and armoured vehicles, covered in the air by swarms of drones and pounding artillery, according to Russian officials.

Ukrainian forces swept through the fields and forests of the border towards the north of Sudzha, a town of around 5,000 inhabitants located 8km from the Ukrainian border.

It is the last operational trans-shipping point for Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin cast the attack as a “major provocation”.

The White House said the United States – Ukraine’s biggest backer – had no prior knowledge of the attack and would seek more details from Kyiv.

Russia’s most senior general, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, told Mr Putin on Aug 7 that the Ukrainian offensive had been halted in the border area.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Aug 8 that the army and the Federal Security Service (FSB) had halted the Ukrainian advance and were battling Ukrainian units in the Kursk region.

“Units of the Northern group of forces, together with the FSB of Russia, continue to destroy armed formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Sudzhensky and Korenevsky districts of the Kursk region, directly adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian border,” the ministry said.

It said Ukraine had lost 82 armoured vehicles, including eight tanks in the attack.

The Ukrainian army has remained silent on the Kursk offensive. But an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow was to blame for the incursion.

“The root cause of any escalation, shelling, military actions, forced evacuations and destruction of normal life forms – including within the Russian Federation’s own territories like Kursk and Belgorod regions – is solely Russia’s unequivocal aggression,” presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said on Aug 8 on social media.

Without mentioning the Kursk attacks, Mr Zelensky said on Aug 7: “The more pressure we put on Russia... the closer we will get to peace. A just peace through just force.”

Some Russian bloggers criticised the state of border defences in the Kursk region, saying it had been far too easy for Ukrainian forces to slice through them.

“The enemy passed through our line of defence quite easily,” said Mr Yuri Podolyaka, a popular Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, adding that no complete defensive work had been prepared in the Kursk region despite the ongoing conflict.

“Sudzha has been completely lost,” he said.

The battles around Sudzha come at a crucial juncture in the conflict, the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. Kyiv is concerned that US support could drop off if Republican Donald Trump wins the November presidential election.

Trump has said he would end the war, and both Russia and Ukraine are keen to gain the strongest possible bargaining position on the battlefield.

Ukraine wants to pin down Russian forces, which control 18 per cent of its territory, though the strategic significance of the border offensive was not immediately clear.

Several thousand people were being evacuated from the Kursk region, according to Russian media.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said the Ukrainian attack was an attempt to force Russia to divert resources from the front and to show the West that Ukraine could still fight.

As a result of the Kursk attack, Mr Medvedev said, Russia should expand its war aims to include taking all of Ukraine.

“From this moment on, the SVO (Special Military Operation) should acquire an openly extraterritorial character,” Mr Medvedev said, adding that Russian forces should go to Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Mykolayiv, Kyiv “and beyond”.

“We will stop only when we consider it acceptable and profitable for ourselves.”

Russia has advanced in 2024 after the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive to achieve major gains, and has taken 420 sq km of territory from Ukrainian forces since June 14, Russian officials say.

Gas was still flowing through Sudzha.

Russia’s National Guard said it had beefed up security around the Kursk nuclear power station, which lies about 60km north-east of the town. 

A priest in the town, Mr Evgeny Shestopalov, said in a video shared on Aug 7 by Russian media that Sudzha was “on fire” and that residents unable to evacuate were sheltering at his church.

“Our church is full of people, children. Not everyone has shelter, not everyone can leave,” he said.

A local Russian TV station broadcast images from the centre of the city showing destroyed buildings, debris strewn across the street and large craters in the ground from artillery hits.

Mr Putin in May launched a major new offensive into north-east Ukraine in a bid to create what he called a security buffer to protect Russian border regions.

That offensive was focused on Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, to the south-east of the Sumy region, from where the Aug 6 cross-border raid was mounted.

However, the attacks on Russian territory have continued, with Russia’s Belgorod region declaring more than a dozen villages near the border no-go zones due to bombardment in July.

Ukraine has repeatedly said it sees attacks on military and energy infrastructure inside Russian territory as a justified response to Moscow’s full-scale military offensive.

In Washington, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said the US was seeking an understanding from Ukraine of the incursion, and said it had no advance knowledge of it.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said US rules on Ukrainian use of US weapons – authorised in areas over the Russian border – remained in effect, but that Ukraine’s actions were “not a violation of our policy”.

The Russian Ambassador to Washington, Mr Anatoly Antonov, said on Telegram that US statements on the Ukrainian action were “outrageous... not a word criticising their clients, not a regret about the victims of the tragedy”.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Russian shelling and aerial bomb attacks killed at least five civilians in front-line Ukrainian regions on Aug 8.

Guided aerial bombs killed a 22-year-old man and his six-year-old sister in a school playground in the border village of Mogritsya in the northern Sumy region, Mr Volodymyr Artiukh, head of the regional military administration, said on national television.

In the eastern Donetsk region, “two people were killed by shelling” in Kostiantynivka, near the battleground town of Chasiv Yar, said the head of the region’s military administration, Mr Vadym Filashkin.

He said artillery attacks had hit private houses and posted a picture of shrapnel holes through a garden wall.

In the south-eastern city of Nikopol, located on the Dnipro River across from Russian-controlled areas, Russians “aimed artillery at a hospital”, killing a 50-year-old man, said Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration chief Sergiy Lysak.

Ukraine’s police said they were evacuating children from the most dangerous areas of the Donetsk region, and had brought out over 1,000 in three days, with 3,723 more needing to be moved.

Mr Pavlo Dyachenko, head of communications for Donetsk regional police, said that 756 families with 1,010 children were evacuated.

In a video released by the police, an officer driving an evacuation vehicle with a cracked windscreen past a house hit by shelling said: “Yesterday, we brought out people. Today, their house isn’t there any more, it’s burnt down.”

According to the video, children from 28 settlements in various districts were to be evacuated.

It showed children being dressed in body armour and helmets before boarding vehicles. REUTERS, AFP