MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that his army was rapidly advancing in eastern Ukraine, citing this as proof that Kyiv’s cross-border incursion into the Kursk region was failing. His comments came just before he left Russia for a visit to Mongolia, a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) — a trip seen as a show of defiance following the court’s issuance of an arrest warrant for him last year.

Moscow’s forces have been notching up territorial gains on the sprawling frontline in eastern Ukraine even as Ukraine launched a shock border incursion onto its own territory. Putin acknowledged the difficulties Ukraine’s counteroffensive — the largest attack by a foreign army on Russia since World War II — was putting on Russian border regions, but struck a defiant tone.

“People are experiencing and undergoing severe hardship, especially in the Kursk region,” Putin said in a speech to schoolchildren at a televised event in Siberia. “But the enemy did not achieve the main task that they set themselves: to stop our offensive in the Donbas ... We have not had such a pace of offensive in the Donbas for a long time,” he said. The Donbas refers to a large area of eastern Ukraine covering the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which Moscow claims to have annexed.

‘Bandits’

Analysis of troop positions showed that Russia’s advance in the east gained ground in August, with its forces homing in on the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Russia advanced on 477 square kilometers (184 square miles) of Ukrainian territory in August, Moscow’s biggest monthly increase since October 2022, according to data supplied by the Institute for the Study of War and analyzed by AFP.

Ukraine meanwhile made its own rapid gains in early August, advancing more than 1,100 square kilometers into Russia’s Kursk region in two weeks, though its progress has slowed recently as the situation there has stabilized. Kyiv said the aim of the offensive was to draw Russian troops away from eastern Ukraine and stretch Moscow’s forces. Around 130,000 people have fled the Russian border region since the start of the fighting. “We have to, of course, deal with these bandits that entered the territory of the Russian Federation, specifically the Kursk region, attempting to destabilize the situation in the border areas,” Putin said, in some of his strongest comments yet on the Ukrainian counterattack.

‘No progress’

Russia claims to have captured a string of villages and settlements in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks, inching towards the city of Pokrovsk. Pokrovsk lies on the intersection of a key road that supplies Ukrainian troops and towns across the eastern front and has long been a target for Moscow’s army.

Ukraine has rushed to evacuate families from the city, which was home to around 60,000 people before Moscow launched its 2022 attack. Around 30,500 people remain despite repeated calls to leave, Mayor Serhii Dobriak said Monday. The Russian defense ministry said in a briefing Monday that it had captured the Donetsk village of Skuchne, without providing further details.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted the frontline had not moved. “In the Pokrovsk direction, no matter how difficult it is, there has been no progress for two days. This is what the Commander-in-Chief told me,” he said. He added that Ukraine forces had captured more than 600 Russian soldiers in its Kursk offensive, which Kyiv hopes to swap for Ukrainian fighters held by Russia.

Missiles

Russia continued its campaign of aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities overnight, firing 35 missiles and 23 drones, Zelensky said earlier Monday. Loud explosions were heard in the capital around 5:30 am (0230 GMT), AFP journalists in Kyiv said. Zelensky said a mosque there had been “severely damaged” and condemned Russia for its “destruction campaign against the Ukrainian people”. Three people were wounded in the capital, and the office of a Danish NGO was damaged. Ukraine shot down nine ballistic missiles, 13 cruise missiles and 20 drones in the attack, the air force said. Separately, Russian shelling on Monday killed a woman in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, Governor Oleg Synegubov said. — AFP