KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday defended his country’s shock incursion into Russia’s northeastern Kursk region.

“Russia brought war to others. Now it is coming home,” President Zelenskyy said in a video posted on the social media platform Telegram.

In his nightly televised address, Zelenskyy described the incursion as a national security issue, saying Russian forces had launched numerous strikes from Kursk on Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, which borders Kursk. 

Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Monday in a video posted on Zelenskyy’s Telegram channel that Kyiv controls about 1,000 square kilometers of the Kursk region. 

The Ukrainian operation is taking place under tight secrecy, and its goals — especially whether Kyiv’s forces aim to hold territory or are staging hit-and-run raids — remain unclear. 

 

The Kyiv government, including President Zelenskyy, has said little directly about the attack that began on August 6, when Ukrainian forces swiftly rolled into the town of Sudzha, located about 10 kilometers across the border. The forces reportedly still hold the western part of the town, the site of an important natural gas transit station.

During a televised meeting earlier Monday between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top security officials and regional governors, acting Kursk governor Alexei Smirnov said Ukrainian forces had pushed at least 12 kilometers into Kursk and established a 40-kilometer long front, and captured about 28 villages. Smirnov said 12 civilians have been killed and 121 others wounded, while 121,000 people have evacuated the area, with another 59,000 ordered to leave.

The governor of the Belgorod region adjacent to Kursk announced the evacuation of people from a district near the Ukrainian border.

President Putin described the Ukrainian incursion as a “provocation” and ordered the military to drive the Ukrainian forces out of Russia.

Putin said the incursion is an attempt to divert attention from Moscow’s offensive in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and eventually gain a better negotiating position to end the 2½-year war. 

Putin said that Kyiv, in attacking southwest Russia, may have sought to destabilize Russian life but had failed. He said the number of volunteers to join the Russian military has increased and vowed that Russia would achieve its military goals.  

The Ukrainian incursion marks the largest attack on Russian soil since World War II.

Washington, Kyiv’s top supporter, responded with stern warnings to Moscow over its use of Iranian munitions in the over two-year-long conflict, but said little when asked whether Ukrainian forces might be using U.S.-supplied weapons to hit Russia. 

“We’re continuing to speak to our Ukrainian counterparts about these operations,” John Kirby, White House national security adviser, said when asked by reporters Monday.

State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said, “As we and our partners have made clear — both at the G7 and at the NATO summit this summer — together we are prepared to deliver a swift and severe response if Iran were to move forward with the transfer of ballistic missiles, which would, in our view, represent a dramatic escalation in Iran’s support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” 

Patel added: “Iranian officials also continue to deny providing any UAVs to Russia when evidence is plain for the world to see.”

The assault that caught the Kremlin’s forces by surprise came as Russia continued its attempt to gain ground in eastern Ukraine. 

The Ukrainian incursion delivered a blow to Putin’s efforts to pretend that life in Russia has largely remained unaffected by the war. State propaganda has tried to play down the attack, emphasizing the authorities’ efforts to help residents of the region and seeking to distract attention from the military’s failure to prepare for the attack and quickly repel it.   

Kursk residents recorded videos lamenting that they had to flee the border area, leaving behind their belongings, and pleading with Putin for help. But Russia’s state-controlled media kept a tight lid on any expression of discontent. 

Nonetheless, retired General Andrei Gurulev, a member of the lower house of the Russian parliament, criticized the military for failing to properly protect the border. 

He noted that while the military had set up minefields in the border region, it had failed to deploy enough troops to block enemy raids. 

“Regrettably, the group of forces protecting the border didn’t have its own intelligence assets,” he said on his messaging app channel. “No one likes to see the truth in reports. Everybody just wants to hear that all is good.” 

Analysts say Ukraine’s move comes as a surprise, and that they see it as a tactic to wear down Moscow.

“I think the Ukrainians wanted to bring the war home to the Russians, to say to the Russian people, no, you are not immune from this war,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “You are going to feel it on a day-to-day basis.”

Analysts are now watching keenly for Putin’s response, and fear that he may use this as an excuse to attack a NATO nation that borders Russia.

“Putin now has something in hand,” said Leon Aron, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “He now has evidence that Ukrainians who are armed – and, he claims, trained and egged on – by the West are now attacking Russia itself. So, here he is, and the real question is, having climbed up that tree, how he’s going to come down on this, how he’s going to explain to the Russians that this happened, and he has done nothing. So, I’m thinking that, yes, I think it is going to be [a] pretty dangerous few days.”

Ukraine’s progress on Russian territory “is challenging the operational and strategic assumptions” of the Kremlin’s forces, according to an assessment late Sunday by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. 

It described the Russian forces responding to the incursion as “hastily assembled and disparate.” 

VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell and VOA’s Kim Lewis contributed to this article. Some material in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France Presse and Reuters.
…