Russia said it had evacuated more than 133,000 people from border areas on Monday as Ukraine pressed on with its surprise incursion and President Vladimir Putin warned that the conflict could spread.
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, 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,” 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.”
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.”
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 vowed an “appropriate response” to Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region and 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.
As battles raged on Monday and the fighting appeared to spill over into districts neighbouring those first assaulted by Ukrainian forces, 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 reclaimed 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 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, 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, 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”.
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 Putin that “50 to 70 per cent” of residents in Shebekino, a town with a prewar population of 40,000 that has been hard hit by cross-border fire, had also left the area.
Despite Russia deploying reinforcements to the two areas, Kyiv has succeeded in occupying at least 140 sq km of territory, according to Ukrainian war analysis site Deepstate, which has links to the military.
Smirnov told Putin that the area under Ukraine’s control was about 12km deep and 40km wide, prompting Russia to set up anti-tank defences in the region.
The rouble fell 2.3 per cent on Monday to trade at Rbs90.6 to the dollar, its weakest level since May.
The Ukrainian counter-incursion, now in its seventh day, comes as Kyiv’s forces struggle to hold the line in the eastern Donbas region, where Russian troops have made some territorial gains.
Ukrainian officials have been tight-lipped about the operations but analysts say that they could be aimed at diverting Russian forces and using the captured territory as leverage in any potential talks.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday — in a thinly veiled reference to the Kursk operation — that Kyiv wanted to “push the war on to the aggressor’s territory” and put “pressure” on Russia to “restore justice”.
Russia’s defence ministry had asked local authorities to cut electricity to several settlements in Belgorod’s Grayvoronskyi district, which also borders Ukraine, said Gladkov, the governor.
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.
Kots said that Ukrainian forces were looking for other places where they could push through. The Financial Times could not verify the claims.
Separately, Ukraine claimed Russia had started a fire at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been under Russian occupation since March 2022.
Zelenskyy said that radiation levels were normal but warned that 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 IAEA said in a statement posted on X.
Rosatom, the Russian state-owned company that operates the plant, said the “main fire” had been extinguished shortly before midnight on Sunday.
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