Russia kept up its assault on Ukraine on Saturday even as Ukrainian forces pushed into Russia’s Kursk border region.
A Russian missile sparked a blaze in the city of Sumy that injured two people and also damaged cars and nearby buildings, said Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. It said that the hit had involved an Iskander-K cruise missile and an aerial bomb.
Ukraine’s air force also said it had shot down 14 Russian drones overnight, including over the Kyiv region.
Meanwhile, fighting continued in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops have been deployed since August 6 in a bid to divert the Kremlin’s military focus away from the front line in Ukraine.
On Thursday, Ukrainian forces said they had seized the town of Sudzha, six miles from the border. With a pre-war population of roughly 5,000, it is the biggest town to fall to Ukraine’s troops since the incursion began.
Artillery fire had blown chunks out of a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin in the town’s central square, while the bright yellow facade of a local administration building was scorched and pockmarked with bullet holes.
Alexander Kots, military correspondent with the pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, said that Ukrainian pressure in Kursk “is not weakening yet”.
“In the main sections of the ragged front, the situation has stabilised. But there are areas where the enemy continues to try to expand its bridgehead,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday that Ukraine had destroyed a bridge across the Seim River in the Glushkovsky district with US-made HIMARS rockets, marking their first use in the Kursk region.
Ms Zakharova’s statement could not be independently confirmed, although the Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War said that geo-located footage published on August 16 showed that the bridge had collapsed following the strike.
Russian military bloggers said that the destruction of bridges would impede deliveries of supplies to Russian forces, but not cut them off completely.
“No one has cancelled the pontoons,” said Mr Kots, stressing that the Seim River is smaller than Ukrainian waterways such as the Dnieper River. “And there are still smaller bridges.”
Russia has seen previous raids on its territory in the war, but the Kursk incursion is notable for its size, speed, the reported involvement of battle-hardened Ukrainian brigades and the length of time they have stayed inside Russia. As many as 10,000 Ukrainian troops are involved, according to Western military analysts.
The incursion, which Russian authorities say has led to the evacuation of more than 120,000 civilians, came as a shock to many, Yan Furtsev, an activist and member of local opposition party Yabloko, told the AP.
“No one expected that this kind of conflict was even possible in the Kursk region. That is why there is such confusion and panic, because citizens are arriving (from frontline areas) and they’re scared, very scared,” he said.
Ukrainian forces have also captured a number of Russian troops as they have moved across the region.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked soldiers and commanders for capturing Russian military personnel and said the country’s “exchange fund” that it would use to bargain for the return of Ukrainian prisoners of war was being replenished.
“I thank all our soldiers and commanders who are capturing Russian military personnel, thereby advancing the release of our warriors and civilians held by Russia,” Mr Zelensky said in a post on X.
