Ukraine launched a rare assault into Russian territory this week, pushing into the Kursk oblast with infantry and armored vehicles on Tuesday.
The Russian region’s acting governor, Alexey Smirnov, announced a state of emergency on Wednesday in response to the incursion.
Ukraine has announced nothing officially about the attack, which Russian officials said involved 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that Ukraine had also sent 11 tanks and dozens of armored vehicles.
The exact scale of the resources committed by Ukraine to this attack is still unclear.
However, Kyiv appears to be pushing hard into Kursk in the last two days. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said it had geolocated videos that showed Ukrainian armored vehicles fighting at least six miles from the border on Wednesday.
Notably, two of these instances found by the ISW occurred on roads behind Russian field fortifications which were set several miles behind the border.
The Ukrainian attack has also been reported to have stretched further east to the border town of Sudzha, where Smirnov said people were injured and buildings were damaged.
Kursk is a southwestern Russian region bordering Ukraine, and the fighting there sits just to the west of Belgorod and Kharkiv, where Russia made its own attempted incursion in May.
Authorities have begun sending doctors from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the region.
As local officials ordered the evacuation of nearby cities, Smirnov projected calm on Tuesday, saying that the “situation is under control.”
But leaders in Moscow have called the incursion a “large-scale provocation” from Ukraine, and Russian leader Vladimir Putin called a meeting on Wednesday with his security heads to discuss the issue.
“The Kiev regime has undertaken another large-scale provocation, firing indiscriminately from different types of weapons, including rockets, at civilian buildings, residential houses, ambulances,” he said, per state media.
Smirnov, in one of his statements on Tuesday, wrote that Putin is personally involved in dealing with the Kursk attack.
Russia’s military chief, Valery Gerasimov, claimed on Wednesday that Ukraine’s advance had been halted in Kursk, and said Russian forces now aimed to regain control up to the border.
Some reports from Russian military bloggers, several of which are known to be closely connected with security forces, appear to contradict Gerasimov’s claims that the fighting had come to a standstill.
At least two military bloggers wrote on Wednesday that Ukraine had seized control of a Sudzha facility used by Gazprom to pump gas to Europe.
Rybar, a Telegram channel run by military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, reported that Ukrainian units were advancing in the northeast and seizing villages. The channel added that a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit had broken through to almost reach Korenevo, a town about 14 miles from the border.
“The enemy’s long preparation for the attack, alas, has borne fruit,” the channel wrote, adding that fighting had become “difficult.”
Ukraine has not said why it is attacking Kursk. Some observers speculate that the incursion was meant to draw Moscow’s attention and resources away from the eastern front, where fighting in the Donbas has been brutal and heavy.
The Ukrainian and Russian defense ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
