Russian troops are battling to push back Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region on the third day of one of the largest cross-border incursions of the war, the Russian Defense Ministry has said.
A ministry statement on Thursday said the Russian military and border guards have blocked Ukrainian forces from pushing deeper into the region in southwestern Russia.
It added that the army is attacking Ukrainian fighters trying to advance into the area from Ukraine’s Sumy region.
“Attempts by individual units to break through deep into the territory in the Kursk direction are being suppressed,” the ministry said.
Ukrainian troops had advanced as much as 15 kilometers (nine miles) into Russian territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. The data that has not been officially confirmed.
Kyiv has not commented on the incursion. In a video address to the nation late on Thursday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky did not mention the fighting in the Kursk region but emphasised that “Russia brought the war to our land, and it should feel what it has done.”
“Ukrainians know how to achieve their goals,” Mr Zelensky said, adding that he received three “productive reports, exactly the kind our country needs now” on Thursday from the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi.
Ukraine’s audacious attack on Russia has forced Moscow to call in reserves, and is one of the biggest Ukrainian attacks on Russia of the two-year-old war.
Around 1,000 Ukrainian troops rammed through the Russian border in the early hours of Tuesday (August 6) with tanks and armoured vehicles, covered in the air by drones and artillery, according to Russian officials.
Heavy fighting was reported near the town of Sudzha, where Russian natural gas flows into Ukraine, raising concerns about a possible sudden stop to transit flows to Europe.
The incursion has come as a shock to Russia, nearly two-and-a-half years since President Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine in February 2022.
Putin has cast the Ukrainian offensive as a "major provocation". Sergei Mironov, leader of a Kremlin-loyal political party, called it a "terrorist attack" and "the invasion of an internationally recognised foreign territory".
Kursk's regional acting governor, Alexei Smirnov, said that thousands of residents had been evacuated.
The White House said the United States - Ukraine's biggest backer - had no prior knowledge of the attack. Washington has asked Ukraine for details on their military objectives, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, on Thursday.
"They are operating within the area north of the border where we have told them they can use US-provided weapons to defend themselves against Russian attacks," the official noted.
Russia's defence ministry said on Thursday 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.
Some Russian bloggers said Ukraine's forces were pushing towards the Kursk nuclear power station, which lies about 60 km (37 miles) northeast of Sudzha.
Yuri Podolyaka, a popular Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, said that there were intense battles about 30 km (20 miles) from the Soviet-era nuclear plant, which supplies a large swathe of southern Russia with power.
