Up to 1,000 Ukrainian troops, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, were already more than 10km inside Russia’s Kursk region by the fourth day of the push. The RNZ report of 10 August 2024 called it the deepest cross-border advance by Kyiv since the full-scale invasion of February 2022.
Kyiv had not formally claimed the operation. President Volodymyr Zelensky came close. “Russia has brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” he said. Moscow’s defense ministry insisted it was “continuing to repel” the attackers and put Ukrainian losses at over 280 personnel in 24 hours, a figure nobody could verify.
Sudzha falls
The Associated Press reported that Ukrainian troops had been in Kursk since August 6, with the stated aim of pulling Russian forces away from the main front. On Thursday they took Sudzha, 10 kilometers from the border and the largest town the operation had seized. Its prewar population was about 5,000. Zelensky announced the capture himself.
AP journalists who visited on Friday found artillery damage to a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the central square and scorch marks and bullet holes across the yellow facade of the local administration building.
Supply lines and strikes
Ukraine’s military said it hit the Lipetsk air base, more than 350km from the border, and destroyed a warehouse holding hundreds of glide bombs. BBC Verify confirmed footage of a 15-vehicle Russian convoy left damaged and abandoned near Oktyabr’skoe, about 38km from the border.
A bridge over the Seim River in the Glushkovsky district was also down. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blamed U.S.-made HIMARS rockets, and the Institute for the Study of War said geolocated footage from August 16 showed the span had collapsed. Alexander Kots, a military correspondent for the pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda, played down the effect. “No one has canceled the pontoons. And there are still smaller bridges,” he wrote.
Civilians and the nuclear plant
Russia declared a “federal state of emergency” in the region. Russian authorities said more than 120,000 civilians had been evacuated, and the Emergency Situations Ministry reported about 10,000 evacuees, 3,000 of them children, housed in 171 temporary centers nationwide.
Yan Furtsev, an activist with the opposition Yabloko party, told the AP the shock was total. “No one expected that this kind of conflict was even possible in the Kursk region. That is why there is such confusion and panic,” he said.
The fighting also edged toward the Kursk nuclear power plant. IAEA chief Rafael Grossi urged both sides to avoid “a nuclear accident with some potential for serious radiological consequences.”
Western analysts put the Ukrainian force at up to 10,000 troops. Even Kots conceded the front was not static: it had stabilized in its main sections, he said, but “there are areas where the enemy continues to try to expand its bridgehead.” Western allies, RNZ noted, mostly treated the operation as within Ukraine’s right to self-defense.
Sources
- Russia struggles to repel Ukraine's deep Kursk incursion
- Russian missile sparks blaze in Ukraine as Kyiv's troops push into Russia's Kursk region (AP)
- Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv troops captured Russian town of Sudzha in Kursk region (AP)
