Ukrainian Troops Advance Up to 30km Inside Russia Amid Escalating Conflict

Ukrainian troops have already filmed themselves outside Sudzha at a major gas facility involved in the transit of natural gas from Russia to the EU via Ukraine, which has continued despite the war.

In Sumy region, which borders the Kursk region, BBC reporters witnessed a steady stream of armoured personnel carriers and tanks moving towards Russia.

The armoured convoys are sporting white triangular insignias, seemingly to distinguish them from hardware used within Ukraine itself. Meanwhile, aerial photos have appeared to show Ukrainian tanks engaged in combat inside Russia.

Photos analysed by BBC Verify also appeared to show Russia constructing new defensive lines near the Kursk nuclear power plant. Ukrainian forces engaged at Obshchy Kolodez were within 50km (31 miles) of the facility.

Contrasting satellite imagery of the same location captured yesterday with imagery from a few days earlier, images show several newly constructed trench lines in the vicinity, with the nearest roughly 8km (5 miles) from the plant.

Russia says 76,000 people have been evacuated from border areas in the Kursk region, where a state of emergency has been declared by local authorities.

Acting regional governor Aleksei Smirnov also said 15 people were injured late on Saturday when the wreckage of a downed Ukrainian missile fell on a multi-storey building in Kursk’s regional capital, Kursk.

Oleksiy Goncharenko – a Ukrainian MP – hailed the operation and said it was “taking us much closer to peace than one hundred peace summits”.

“When Russia needs to fight back on their own territory, when Russian people are running, when people care, that’s the only way to show them stop this war,” he told the BBC.

The Kursk offensive comes after weeks of Russian advances in the east, where a succession of villages have been captured by the Kremlin’s forces.

Some analysts have suggested that the Kursk attack is part of an effort to force Russia to redeploy forces away from eastern Ukraine and relieve pressure on the beleaguered Ukrainian defences.

But the Ukrainian official told AFP there had been little let-up to date in Russian operations in the east.

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the offensive was a “major provocation”.

Meanwhile, emergency services in the Kyiv region said a man and his four-year-old son were killed in a missile strike near the capital overnight.

Air defences also destroyed 53 out of 57 attack drones launched by Russia during its overnight airstrikes, air force officials said. Four North Korean-manufactured missiles were also fired as part of the barrage, they said.

Russia has been forced to turn to the isolated Asian state to re-stock its munitions, with the US alleging that vast amounts of military hardware have been shipped by Pyongyang.

Elsewhere, Russian officials in the occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast said a fire broke out at the region’s nuclear power plant on Sunday.

Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia, claimed the fire erupted after shelling by Ukrainian forces. He said there had been no radiation spike around the plant.

Russia’s state Tass news agency reported that the main fire at the plant was extinguished in the early hours of Monday.

In a statement posted to X, the UN’s nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency – said its on-site inspectors had witnessed “strong dark smoke” coming from the north of the facility, but emphasised that there was “no impact reported” for nuclear safety.

President Zelensky said in a post to social media that Russian forces had started a fire on the territory of the plant.

The site has been under the control of Russian troops and officials since 2022. It has not produced power in more than two years and all six reactors have been in cold shutdown since April.

(BBC News)