The acting governor of Kursk, Russia – a border region Ukraine launched an invasion into last week – told Russian strongman Vladimir Putin on Monday he has evacuated 121,000 people from their homes and plans to move another 59,000 out of threatened areas as soon as possible.
Reports began surfacing on August 6 of Ukrainian troops crossing the border and seizing territory in Kursk, which Ukrainian officials have long identified as a launchpad for attacks into their territory. The attacks mark the first time since Putin launched a “special operation” to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2022 that Ukraine pushes Russian forces back into uncontested Russian territory and seizes Russian land. It is also the first time since World War II that Russia has lost land to a foreign invader.
The operation was preceded by an odd declaration by Zelensky in January branding Kursk and five other Russian territories “historically” Ukrainian.
Putin has colonized five regions of Ukraine arguing that they are rightfully Russian territory: Crimea in 2014 and the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia in 2022.
Governor Alexei Smirnov made the shocking revelation of the size of the evacuation operation in Kursk on Monday evening during a meeting with Putin that also featured the governors of two other border regions, Belgorod and Bryansk.
“Currently, the enemy controls 28 communities. They have penetrated 12 kilometres deep into the territory of the Kursk Region, with a 40-kilometre-wide frontline,” Smirnov said during the meeting, according to a Kremlin translation of his remarks. Putin then interrupted Smirnov, urging him to let military leaders discuss the territory taken over and instead focus on the humanitarian conditions in his regions.
The evacuation operation, Smirnov said, “affects 180,000 people.”
“As of today, 121,000 have been evacuated, and work continues for the remaining 59,000,” the governor said.
Smirnov added that he believed a major security challenge regarding the evacuation operations is petty crimes.
“The issue we are facing right now is that communities and district centres have become deserted. Of course, there are military units stepping in right now, and not everyone has left,” he noted. “The evacuation order was not mandatory, so shops are still open. We had to ban alcohol sales, and have been keeping a close eye on the situation in order to prevent looting.”
The governor also admitted the military frontline situation was “quite blurry,” to the point that “we sometimes struggle to local our combat units.”
Putin took the opportunity of the meeting to address the Russian public, explaining that the situation on the border, in his estimation, was intended to turn the Russian people against his regime.
“It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future,” Putin noted, “Another clear objective of the enemy is to create discord and division within our society, to instil fear, and to undermine the unity and cohesion of the Russian people. They aim to disrupt the domestic political landscape.”
Putin warned that the incursion into Kursk could expand into other border regions, namely Bryansk, whose governor said he was not evacuating anyone at the time.
In Belgorod, where reports indicated on Monday that officials were beginning to plan for the evacuation of as many as 11,000 people, local authorities told Putin that “the number of destroyed and damaged housing in general has grown sharply in 2024.”
“Over 30,000 houses and apartments have been damaged during 2.5 years, and we have now restored 25,000,” Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov told Putin. “Unfortunately, the situation along the border does not allow us to work efficiently. The most difficult situation is now in Shebekino, with 38,000 people living in the city and 85,000 in the area.”
The Ukrainian government has mostly avoided openly discussing Kursk in the past week. Zelensky himself offered some vague comments on Thursday that Russia should “feel what it has done to his country.” That changed on Monday night, when Zelensky used his evening national address to discuss Kursk.
Zelensky referred to Kursk as “the disaster of his war.”
“This always happens to those who despise people and any rules. Russia brought war to others, and now it is coming home [to Russia],” he declared, according to the state news outlet Ukrinform.
Zelensky assured affected populations in Russia that he did not intend to annex Russian land, as Russia had done to Ukraine, but rather was targeting Russian areas used to launch long-range attacks in his country.
“These are, in particular, the areas from which the Russian army launched strikes on our Sumy region. For today and since June 1, there have been almost 2,100 shelling attacks on the Sumy region’s territory,” Zelensky said. “Therefore, our operations are purely a security matter for Ukraine, the liberation of the border area from the Russian military.”
The Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry also addressed the situation on Tuesday, suggesting an invasion was necessary because Western powers, notably the United States, has discouraged Ukraine using long-range missiles to target Russian civilian areas.
“Unfortunately, Ukraine has no sufficient capabilities to launch long-range strikes with the available weapons to protect itself from this terror – there are no suitable solutions yet, which we insist on,” spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi said. “So there is a need to liberate these border areas from Russian troops attacking Ukraine or providing cover for terror against Ukrainians. We will continue to do so the way it is deemed necessary for ensuring security and protecting Ukraine.”
“The sooner Russia agrees to restoring a just peace, in particular based on the Peace Formula, which leads to this peace, the sooner the raids of Ukraine’s Defense Forces on Russian territory will stop,” Tykhyi concluded.
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