Russia has already evacuated more than 130,000 people from two regions bordering Ukraine since kyiv launched an offensive that has penetrated into its territory. On Monday, it displaced 11,000 inhabitants from the Belgorod region, in addition to the nearly 120,000 from the Kursk area, where Kiev crossed the border last Tuesday in the first incursion into Russian soil since the war began. Ukrainian forces control 28 towns and have advanced a dozen kilometers, while the combat front reaches 40 kilometers, said the governor of Kursk, Alexei Smirnov, when giving the data of those displaced by the fighting. Kiev’s offensive has taken the Kremlin by surprise, which has imposed a state of emergency in three regions (Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk). Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that the attackers “must be expelled” and accused Ukraine of wanting to “intimidate Russian society” and sow instability in Russia. For the Russian leader, kyiv is seeking to gain an advantage in the event of peace negotiations.
“Losses in the Ukrainian armed forces are increasing sharply, even among the most combat-ready units, units that the enemy is moving to our border,” Putin said in a televised meeting with senior security officials and regional governors. “The enemy will receive a worthy response, and all the objectives we face will undoubtedly be hit,” he continued. According to the Russian president, kyiv also aims with its incursion to halt Russian advances on other fronts in Ukraine.
Belgorod, which has already suffered attacks before, has displaced around 11,000 people from the Krasnoyaruzhsky district, which is just over 20 kilometres south of the area where the Ukrainian army stormed last Tuesday in the neighbouring Russian region of Kursk. “We have an alarming morning. Enemy activity on the border. (…) In order to protect the life and health of our population, we are starting to move people living in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district to safer places,” said the head of the local administration of Belgorod, Andrei Miskov, on his Telegram channel. As of Sunday, the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations had estimated that 84,000 people had been evacuated from the Kursk region.
Moscow claimed on Sunday to have stabilized the front in the Kursk region, although Ukraine had entered a strip of Russian territory where fighting continued on Monday, according to Russian war bloggers. The Russian Defense Ministry said its troops had repelled multiple attacks by Ukrainian forces in at least eight different locations in the area and that intense fighting with aircraft, artillery, drones and ground forces was continuing, in which kyiv had lost 32 tanks, it said.
The Ukrainian government has not given details of its movements or losses. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that Russia has launched nearly 2,000 cross-border attacks from Kursk this summer, which he said deserved a “fair” response.
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Fire at Zaporizhia power plant
As the armies of Moscow and kyiv continued their confrontation on Russia’s southern border, alarm bells were raised on Sunday by a video shared by Zelensky showing a fire at the base of one of the cooling towers of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. “Only Ukrainian control of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant can guarantee a return to normality and complete safety,” the president said on his Telegram account, where he also accused Moscow of “blackmailing Ukraine, all of Europe and the world.”
Although the fire at the plant was extinguished in the early hours of Monday and radioactivity indicators are at normal levels, Ukraine continues to urge the international community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to react and hold Russia accountable for using the occupied plant in the early stages of the invasion that began in February 2022.
According to military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko, the fire is directly related to Russia’s “complete failure” at Kursk. “Russia is trying to blackmail the world, demonstrating how unpredictable it is and pointing out its readiness to blow up the plant if its war plans do not go as it wants,” the expert wrote, as quoted by EFE.
The IAEA said that despite multiple explosions at the Zaporizhia plant, there was no threat to nuclear safety, it said in a message on social media. The agency’s director general, Argentine Rafael Grossi, stressed in a later statement that there was no immediate risk to the safety of the plant’s six reactors, which have long been shut down. IAEA teams on site independently verified radiation levels in the area and confirmed that they had not changed due to the incident.
Grossi, however, reiterated his concern about the risks posed by military attacks in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, which could affect areas that are important for the plant’s security. “These reckless attacks endanger nuclear safety at the plant and increase the risk of a nuclear accident. They must be stopped now,” Grossi demanded.
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