Moscow says the destruction of a bridge in western Russia will hamper the evacuation of civilians amid the Ukrainian incursion.
Russia has accused Ukraine of using Western rockets, probably made in the United States, to attack a strategic bridge over the Seym River in the Kursk region, killing volunteers trying to evacuate civilians.
Ukrainian forces attacked the bridge in the Glushkovsky district of Kursk on Friday as they pushed forward with their incursion into western Russian territory.
“For the first time, the Kursk region was attacked by Western-made rocket launchers, most likely American HIMARS,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said on the Telegram messaging app on Friday evening.
“As a result of the attack, the bridge… was completely destroyed and volunteers who were helping the evacuated civilian population were killed.”
Russian news agency TASS published the names of two volunteers it said were “killed” in the attack.
Russian officials have also said the destruction of the bridge will make it difficult to evacuate civilians from the area.
Ukraine's incursion into Kursk comes just months after the United States and several of its NATO allies said in May they had authorized Kiev to use its weapons to attack targets inside Russia.
Al Jazeera's defence editor Alex Gatopoulos said Friday's bombing of the bridge would make it harder for Russian forces to defend the area against Ukrainian advances and access supplies.
“The Russian units there [are] “They are caught between a rock and a hard place; there are not many places they can go right now,” he said.
“Now the Russians will have a problem because if they cannot supply these units with the ammunition they need (and fuel), these units will be forced to retreat across the river.”
The Ukrainian military, which has been fighting off a Russian invasion since February 2022, launched the Kursk offensive earlier this month, a campaign that has been described as the first incursion by a foreign army into Russia since World War II.
On Thursday, Ukraine said it had captured the Russian town of Sudzha, a strategic natural gas hub in the Kursk region.
kyiv says it has taken control of 82 settlements in Russia covering an area of 1,150 square kilometres (440 square miles) since August 6.
Ukrainian officials have said the country has no intention of retaining Russian territory. On Thursday, a Ukrainian presidential adviser said the Kursk incursion could be “used to convince the Russian Federation to start a fair negotiation process.”
Marina Miron, a military analyst at King's College London, told Al Jazeera that politically, Ukraine hopes to use its Kursk operation “as a bargaining chip” in negotiations with Russia.
“It is important [that] “Ukraine says it will not occupy that land,” Miron said.
He said the raid – and the use of Western equipment on Russian oil – “has raised some concerns, even if one accepts that Ukraine is carrying out this operation to defend itself.”
kyiv is also trying to “relieve pressure” on the Donbass region by drawing Russian troops to Kursk, Miron added.
“That doesn’t seem to be working yet, but it’s clear that Ukrainian forces are trying to entrench themselves in that region,” he said.
For its part, Moscow has insisted that it is managing to repel the Ukrainian offensive and inflicting heavy losses on kyiv's forces.
On Saturday, TASS reported, citing the Russian Defense Ministry, that Russian forces shot down 10 HIMARS rockets and 35 Ukrainian drones and killed 420 “enemy servicemen” in the past 24 hours.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera's Dorsa Jabbari noted that both sides are publishing conflicting accounts of what is happening.
“Of course, it is very difficult to independently verify what is happening on the ground,” Jabbari said. “We are receiving different versions of what is happening from the Ukrainian side, as well as the counternarrative coming out of the Russian Ministry of Defense.”
