MOSCOW: Russia said on Thursday it will strengthen border defences, improve command and control and send additional forces nearly 10 days after Ukraine carried out the biggest attack on sovereign Russian territory since World War Two.
The lightning incursion into Russia came on August 6, when thousands of Ukrainian troops stormed across Russia's western border, a major embarrassment for President Vladimir Putin's top military brass.
The Russian military has yet to publicly explain how Ukrainian forces managed to seize a slice of the world's largest nuclear power.
Putin's Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said the General Staff had prepared a series of measures to defend Russia's border regions of Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod, which cover an area the size of Portugal.
“First of all, we are talking about improving the effectiveness of the command and control system in cooperation with other law enforcement agencies,” Belousov told generals and senior officials of the Belgorod region.
While the Ukrainian attack revealed weaknesses in Russia's border defenses and changed the public narrative of the conflict, Russian officials said what they called a Ukrainian “terrorist invasion” would not change the course of the war.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, has been advancing for most of the year along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front in Ukraine and has massive numerical superiority: it controls 18% of Ukrainian territory.
War
On the ground, in the Kursk region, where Ukraine has seized at least 450 square kilometres of Russian territory, both Ukraine and Russia claimed successes.
Russia said it had regained control of the settlement of Krupets in the Kursk region.
“We burned everything that moved, everything we could find,” said Major General Apti Alaudinov, who commands Chechnya's Akhmat special forces fighting in Kursk.
Ukraine's Supreme Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said Ukraine had advanced 1.5 kilometers in the past 24 hours and had set up a military commandant's office to ensure order.
A source in Ukraine's Security Service said a group of more than 100 Russian soldiers had been captured. A Ukrainian minister said kyiv was creating a buffer zone to protect its population from attack.
Ukraine said there were no signs of Russian military pressure easing on the eastern front, reporting the heaviest fighting in weeks near Pokrovsk.
Russia said it had taken control of a village just 16 kilometres (10 miles) from the town, which lies next to the main roads supplying Ukrainian forces in the area.
