Russia said it had evacuated more than 133,000 people from border areas on Monday as Ukraine pressed on with its surprise incursion, which Kyiv claimed has now taken over 1,000sq km of territory.
Ukraine’s offensive, the first ground invasion of Russia since the second World War, has caught out Moscow’s forces since it began a week ago.
On Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin vowed an “adequate response” at a meeting with officials and hinted at consequences for the failure to anticipate the incursion.
“An assessment of the ongoing events must certainly be made, and it will be,” Mr Putin told his security cabinet and the governors of three Russian border regions. “But the main thing now is solving the tasks at hand [ ...] to push out and beat back the enemy from our territory and ensure the state border is well protected.”
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He suggested the conflict could spread to other Russian regions: “If things are relatively calm in Bryansk region today, that does not mean the situation will stay that way tomorrow.”
Mr Putin, who faces the prospect of losing control of parts of Russia’s internationally recognised territory for the first time since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, claimed Kyiv was trying to stop Russia’s advance along the frontline and improve its negotiating position in future peace talks.
The Russian president also claimed his forces had stepped up their advance elsewhere along the front line. He said Moscow would not participate in any potential peace talks with Kyiv.
In his first full acknowledgment of the incursion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday called it a “defensive action” and said he had asked the security services and interior ministry to prepare a “humanitarian plan” for the area held by Ukrainian forces.
Analysts have said Ukraine may be using the push into Russian territory as leverage in potential peace talks, as well as diverting Moscow’s forces from the front line in Ukraine.
Oleksandr Syrsky, the top commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, said in a video posted by Mr Zelenskiy on Monday: “At this point in time, we have nearly 1,000sq km of Russian territory under our control.”
Ukrainian war analysis site Deep State, which has links to Ukraine’s military, said on Monday that Kyiv’s forces held about 800sq km of territory.
As battles raged on Monday and the fighting appeared to spill over into districts neighbouring those first assaulted by Ukrainian troops, local officials stepped up efforts to evacuate residents.
Moscow’s defence ministry said its troops were “continuing to beat back the attempt by Ukraine’s armed forces to invade Russian territory”, but did not claim to have retaken any of the land lost as Ukraine advanced more than 30km past the border.
Most of the fighting has been concentrated in the Kursk region, where acting governor Alexei Smirnov told Mr Putin that Ukraine now controlled 28 settlements.
In that region, about 121,000 residents had already fled the area, while 12 had died and the fate of a further 2,000 remained unknown, Mr Smirnov said. A further 59,000 may soon be displaced, he said.
The chaos of Ukraine’s initial assault had failed to give way to a clearly defined frontline, Mr Smirnov added, complicating Russia’s efforts to drive back the offensive.
Russia also evacuated about 11,000 people from the neighbouring Krasnoyaruzhsky district in the southern Belgorod region after governor Vyacheslav Gladkov warned early on Monday that there was “enemy activity on the border”.
Mr Gladkov said Ukrainian forces had shelled the area, damaging a house and a power line, but later added that he expected most residents to be able to return on Tuesday.
He told Mr Putin that “50 to 70 per cent” of residents in Shebekino, a town with a pre-war population of 40,000 that has been hard hit by cross-border fire, had also left the area. The rouble fell 2.9 per cent on Monday to trade at Rbs91.2 to the dollar, its weakest level since May.
The Ukrainian counter-incursion, in its seventh day on Monday, comes as Kyiv’s forces struggle to hold the line in the eastern Donbas region, where Russian troops have made some territorial gains.
Alexander Kots, a war reporter for pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, said that a small number of Ukrainian forces had attempted to cross the border at the Kolotilovka checkpoint in Krasnoyaruzhsky district, and the Bezymeno checkpoint in Grayvoronskyi, but had been pushed back. He said Ukrainian forces were looking for other places where they could push through.
Separately, Ukraine claimed Russia had started a fire at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been under Russian occupation since March 2022.
Mr Zelenskiy said radiation levels were normal but warned there was a threat as long as Russia controlled the plant.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has access to the plant, said it had been told there had been a drone attack on one of the cooling towers. “No impact has been reported for nuclear safety,” the agency said in a statement on X.
Rosatom, the Russian state-owned company that operates the plant, said the “main fire” had been extinguished shortly before midnight on Sunday. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024