Kyiv kept up air attacks on Russia’s Kursk border region on Wednesday, with defence systems destroying at least five drones overnight, its acting governor said, a day after Moscow accused Ukraine of targeting the area with an armoured assault.
The Russian defence ministry said it had sent reserves to help repel hundreds of Ukrainian fighters backed by tanks, in a ground incursion shaping as one the largest into Russian territory during the war now more than two years old.
In posts on the Telegram messaging app, Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the southwestern Russian region, said the situation was “controllable.”
Ukraine launched several waves of drones, prompting at least a dozen air raid alerts over the past 24 hours, Smirnov’s posts showed.
Five people were killed, including two ambulance crew, with at least 20 wounded, among them six children, in the fighting that erupted on Tuesday, Russian officials said.
Ukraine made no official comment, though there was evidence of some military action from its side of the border. Both Kyiv and Moscow say their attacks do not target civilians.
Ukraine regularly fires artillery and missiles into Russian territory, and has hit targets deep inside Russia with long-range attack drones, but infantry raids are rare.
Forces describing themselves as voluntary paramilitaries fighting on Ukraine’s side inflicted minimal damage in a major incursion into parts of Belgorod and Kursk region this year, but the purpose of the raids remains unclear.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s general staff made no mention of any Ukrainian offensive operation inside Russia.
Official Russian social media accounts said up to 300 Ukrainian fighters, backed by tanks, had attacked border units in two localities in Kursk – Nikolayevo-Daryino and Oleshnya.
Reuters was unable to verify the battlefield accounts of either side.
