Russian President Vladimir Putin says Ukraine is trying to undermine Russian stability with its incursion into the south of the country and warns that Ukraine will receive “a worthy response.”
Last week, Ukrainian forces breached the Russian border and ravaged western parts of the Kursk region. It is Ukraine's largest incursion across the border since the start of Russia's war in the country in 2022.
Moscow, apparently taken by surprise, responded militarily by deploying its own troops to suppress the incursion. The Russian Defense Ministry said Monday that additional forces and resources had arrived in Kursk, without giving further details on the numbers.
“Heavy tracked vehicles are being loaded onto car trailers for prompt delivery to areas where formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are blocked and to ensure the safety of the road surface,” the military said.
On Monday, Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyii said kyiv controls about 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Kursk, according to a video excerpt of his briefing shared by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Telegram.
Monday was also the first time that Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukrainian military forces are operating inside Kursk. In his evening speech, the president said the war was returning to Russia after Moscow had taken the fighting to other countries.
Earlier in the day, Kursk Governor Alexei Smirnov told Putin that six days of Ukrainian ground attacks on his region had resulted in the loss of 28 settlements, and that the incursion was about 12 kilometers deep and 40 kilometers wide.
According to the spokesman, 12 civilians have been killed and 121,000 people have been evacuated or left the areas affected by the fighting on their own. The total number of planned evacuations is 180,000.
False accusations?
On Monday, a new evacuation order was also issued in Russia's Belgorod region as its Krasnaya Yaruga district feared an incursion by Ukrainian forces, according to Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regional governor.
Krasnaya Yaruga is located in the north-west of Belgorod and borders Kursk.
Putin said in a televised briefing: “Losses of the Ukrainian armed forces are increasing dramatically for them, even among the most combat-ready units, the units that the enemy is transferring to our border.”
“The enemy will undoubtedly receive a worthy response and all the objectives we have ahead of us will undoubtedly be achieved,” the president added.
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) said Russia was trying to falsely accuse kyiv's military of war crimes.
The SBU said on Telegram that it had gathered information showing that Russia could perpetrate crimes that it would then attribute to Ukraine.
Moscow and kyiv regularly accuse each other of planning so-called false flag operations.
Military analyst Sean Bell told Al Jazeera that while critics called Ukraine's surprise attack reckless, “momentum and initiative are everything in war. This took everyone by surprise.”
Is Kyiv prepared for retaliation?
Ukraine has also been preparing for more Russian attacks in retaliation for its recent cross-border incursion.
On Sunday, at least two people were killed and three wounded in a Russian airstrike outside Kiev. Ukraine also announced it had evacuated 20,000 people from the Sumy region, which lies across the border from Kursk, as fighting intensified in the area.
Moscow and kyiv also accused each other of starting a fire on Sunday at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest and now occupied by Russia, in Ukraine, with both sides reporting no signs of elevated radiation.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy has reiterated his calls to Ukraine's allies for a “comprehensive air shield that can protect all our cities and communities.”
“Ukrainians see the prospect of a long war, a difficult war, a bloody war,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera.
Ukraine needs two things: better supplies of weapons and ammunition and a massive nationwide mobilization that goes beyond recent and highly unpopular measures to enlist tens of thousands of men, he added.
Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Ministry has urged Russia and Ukraine to follow “three principles to de-escalate the situation.”
“There must be no expansion of the battlefield, no escalation of fighting and no fanning of the flames by any side,” a ministry spokesman said in a statement, adding that China “will play a constructive role in promoting a political solution to the crisis.”
China portrays itself as a neutral party in the war and says it is not sending lethal assistance to either side, unlike the United States and other Western nations. But it is also a close political and economic ally of Russia, and NATO members have called Beijing a “decisive facilitator” of the war, which it has never condemned.
