Ukrainian forces are now up to 30km inside Russia’s Kursk region, Moscow said

Ukrainian troops have advanced 30km inside Russia, in what has become the deepest and most significant offensive since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its troops engaged Ukrainian forces near the villages of Tolpino and Obshchy Kolodez, as the offensive in the Kursk region entered its sixth day.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Kyiv of “intimidating the peaceful people of Russia”.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who acknowledged the attack for the first time in a speech last night, said Russia had launched 2,000 cross-border attacks from Kursk this summer.

“Weapons, mortars, drones. We also record missile attacks, and each strike deserves a proper response,” Mr Zelensky told the country in his late-night speech from Kyiv.

A senior Ukrainian official told AFP news agency that thousands of soldiers were involved in the operation, far more than the small incident reported by Russian border guards.

While Ukrainian-backed sabotage groups have made occasional incursions across the border, the Kursk attack marks the largest coordinated attack on Russian territory by Kyiv’s regular forces.

“We attack. The aim is to extend the enemy’s positions, to suffer heavy losses and to destabilize the situation in Russia as they cannot protect their border,” said the official.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that its forces had “thwarted the attempts of enemy groups with armored vehicles to penetrate deep into Russian territory”.

But in an apparent admission that Kyiv troops have entered the Kursk border, the Defense Ministry reported that it had engaged Ukrainian troops near the villages of Tolpino and Obshchy Kolodez – 25km and 30km from the Russia-Ukraine border.

Images circulating online and confirmed by the BBC also appeared to show a Russian strike near the village of Levshinka, which is 25 kilometers from the border.

Ukrainian forces say they captured several settlements in the Kursk region. In Guevo, a town three kilometers inside Russia, soldiers filmed themselves removing the Russian flag from an administrative building.

Footage also emerged of Ukrainian troops seizing administrative buildings in Sverdlikovo and Poroz, while heavy fighting was reported in Sudzha – a town of around 5,000 people.

The Ukrainian military has already taken pictures outside of Sudzha in a large gas field involved in the transport of natural gas from Russia to the EU through Ukraine, which has continued despite the war.

In the Sumy region, which borders the Kursk region, BBC journalists saw a large number of people carrying weapons and tanks heading towards Russia.

The armored convoys have white triangular insignia, which seem to distinguish them from the hardware used within Ukraine itself. Meanwhile, aerial footage appeared to show Ukrainian tanks fighting inside Russia.

Images analyzed by BBC Verify also appear to show Russia building new defense lines around the Kursk nuclear power plant. The Ukrainian forces involved in Obshchy Kolodez were within 50km (31 miles) of the site.

Comparing a satellite image of the same area taken yesterday with an image from a few days ago, the images show several new lines that have recently been built in the area, which are about 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.

Deputy regional governor Aleksei Smirnov also said 15 people were injured Saturday when debris from a downed Ukrainian missile fell on a multi-story building in the Kursk regional capital, Kursk.

Oleksiy Goncharenko – a member of the Ukrainian Parliament – praised this project and said that it “brings us closer to peace than a hundred peace conferences”.

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

The attack on Kursk comes after weeks of Russian advances in the east, in which a succession of towns were captured by Kremlin forces.

Some analysts have suggested that the Kursk attack is part of an effort to force Russia to redeploy troops further into eastern Ukraine and reduce pressure on Ukraine’s already overwhelmed defenses.

But a Ukrainian official told AFP there had been little concession so far on Russia’s operations in the east.

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the move was “a huge outrage”.

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 defenses also destroyed 53 of the 57 attack planes launched by Russia during the overnight airstrikes, air force officials said. Four North Korean-made missiles were also fired as part of the attack, they said.

Russia has been forced to turn to the remote Asian country to restock its weapons, while the US suspects that a large number of military equipment has been sent by Pyongyang.

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

Yevgeny Balitsky, the governor of Zaporizhzhia who is installed in the Kremlin, said that the fire broke out after being fired upon by Ukrainian soldiers. He said there was no outbreak of radiation in the factory, and said that the teams are controlling the fire.

In a statement sent to X, the UN’s nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency – said its local inspectors saw “heavy black smoke” coming from the north of the facility, but insisted that “no impact was reported” on nuclear safety.

President Zelensky said in his post on social media that Russian soldiers started fire in the area of ​​this plant.

The area has been under the control of the Russian military and officials since 2022. It has not produced power in more than two years and all six reactors have been shut down since April.

With additional reporting by Benedict Garman.