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Ukrainian President Zelensky

On the evening of August 10, Ukrainian President Zelensky personally confirmed that Kiev’s army was fighting within Russian territory.

In the early hours of August 6, Ukrainian troops unexpectedly crossed the border and invaded Russia's southern Kursk region, causing major embarrassment to the Kremlin.

But it was not until the fifth day of the Ukrainian army's launch of the Kursk Campaign that Zelensky said in a speech to the nation last Saturday night: "Ukraine is proving that we know how to restore justice and guarantee the necessary pressure - pressure on the aggressor." He thanked every Ukrainian army's raiding force for making it possible to "push the war into the territory of the aggressor."

US and Western media commented that Zelensky's statement marked the first time that Ukrainian officials officially acknowledged the invasion of Russian sovereign territory, which surprised both Russia and Ukraine's Western allies.

Ukrainian officials have remained tight-lipped about the cross-border raid for the past five days, even as photos, videos and first-hand reports of Ukrainian soldiers fighting inside Russia began to appear on the international Internet in recent days.

Russian-Ukrainian war map

Meanwhile, Moscow has been struggling to contain the attacks. Russian authorities have launched a full-scale anti-terrorist operation in Kursk and two other border regions (Bryansk Oblast and Belgorod Oblast), and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from Kursk.

The Ukrainian assault on Kursk entered its seventh day on August 12, a major development in the third year of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The Battle of Kursk marked the first time that Ukrainian regular and special operations forces entered Russian territory, although Ukrainian forces had repeatedly carried out air strikes against the Belgorod border region in southern Russia using drones or artillery fire, and pro-Ukrainian sabotage groups formed by Russians had also carried out limited cross-border attacks that were small and short-lived.

The results were also surprising: as of Sunday (August 11), it seemed difficult for the Russian army to stop the Ukrainian offensive, let alone repel the Kiev army.

The situation on the sixth day of the Kursk Campaign launched by the Ukrainian Army

The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based conflict monitoring group, said in its latest assessment on Sunday that geolocation monitoring and Russian reporting indicated that Ukrainian forces maintained their positions in the region and made slight advances.

According to several independent analyses, Russian authorities have lost control of at least 350 square kilometers of territory.

The governor of Russia's Kursk region urged local officials on Sunday to organize residents to speed up evacuations. As of Saturday, more than 76,000 people in the Kursk border region had left their homes, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the surprise attack on Kursk a "major provocation," but it was a major victory for Kiev as it will retain territory along its 1,000-kilometer northern border.

On the eastern front of the Ukrainian battlefield, Moscow's troops continue to advance a slow and arduous offensive, with Russian troops gradually approaching several strategically important towns and roads in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks.

Moscow launched drone and missile attacks on the Kiev region early Sunday, according to local Ukrainian officials. A four-year-old boy and his father were killed and another child was seriously injured in the Russian attack in Brovary, east of the capital, Kiev.

According to Ukrainian authorities, before the attack, a supermarket in Kostyanivka, a small town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, was attacked by Russian troops, killing at least 11 people and injuring 37.

"This week alone, Russian forces have launched more than 30 missiles and more than 800 guided missiles into Ukrainian territory," Zelensky said in a video statement released late Sunday.Aerial bomb”。

Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk said Russia attacked Ukraine using weapons such as North Korean-made KN-23 ballistic missiles and Iranian-made Shahid drones.

It has been a deadly summer for the Ukrainian people, with July being the deadliest month for civilians since October 2022, UN human rights observers say.

The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMO) said Russia's "wave of deadly missile attacks on densely populated areas of Ukraine" had killed at least 219 civilians and injured 1,018.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on August 10 that its defense forces were "thwarting attempts by enemy mobile formations to penetrate deep into Russian territory" near Ivashkovsky, Malayaloknia and Olgovka in the Kursk region. Olgovka is 20 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

Russian President Vladimir Putin listened to the report of the Russian Chief of General Staff with a grim look on his face

Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said that even if Ukrainian troops eventually need to withdraw from the occupied Kursk region, the action "exposed Russia's vulnerability" and brought the war to Russian land. The Ukrainian army's launch of the Kursk campaign also showed the United States and its Western allies thatNATOThe aid gives Ukraine the ability and imagination to take action that would surprise its enemies and embarrass the Kremlin. This would expose Russia to the prospect of a costly war and force Putin to accept peace talks in November or December of this year - a critical time for the US presidential election.

Friedman, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, said that the Ukrainian raid, by showing Russia's failure in border defense and intelligence reconnaissance, punctured the Kremlin's rhetoric that "Ukrainian resistance is useless and Western support for Ukraine is futile," and forced the Russian Ministry of Defense to make some difficult choices, because the existing forces in the Kursk region seem unable to fight the Ukrainians.

Analysts believe that no matter how the Russians respond, it cannot change the humiliating nature of this attack. After all, this is the first time that Russia's sovereign territory has been invaded on a large scale by foreign troops since the end of World War II.

If Ukrainian troops enter Russia and move north, they will threaten Moscow

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