Russia and Ukraine both reported new battlefield gains on Thursday, with Kyiv hailing the capture of another village on Russian soil but hundreds of Ukrainians fleeing the eastern city of Pokrovsk as Russian forces advance on it.
Visiting the border area from where his troops entered the Kursk region in western Russia on Aug. 6, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the seizure of a new village that he did not name, and said the incursion had helped reduce Russian shelling of the northeastern Sumy region.
Russian authorities said a Russian ferry sank after a Ukrainian attack that struck southern Russia’s Port Kavkaz, which supplies fuel to the occupied peninsula of Crimea. Kyiv said it had mounted a drone strike on an air base in southern Russia and carried out a raid about 240 km (150 miles) from the site of its push into Kursk region.
After returning to Kyiv, Zelenskiy said the latest Ukrainian military action was part of an effort to put an end to the war on Ukraine’s terms instead of Russia’s.
“This is all our systematic defence path, the path to end this war on the terms of an independent Ukraine,” he said in an address to veterans.
He said that to force Russian troops out of Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainian military should “create as many problems as possible” on Russian territory.
But although the incursion is an embarrassment for Russia, Moscow’s forces have continued their gradual advances of the past few months against tired Ukrainian troops in eastern Ukraine worn down by 2-1/2 years of heavy fighting.
Moscow said its troops had taken control of the village of Mezhove in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, and that they had beaten back an attempt by a Ukrainian force to infiltrate its border in a different region to Kyiv’s Aug. 6 incursion.
Ukrainian authorities say Russian troops are now just 10 km (six miles) outside Pokrovsk, an important transport hub in eastern Ukraine, and this week started evacuating elderly residents and children.
