Russia said on Thursday it would beef up border defences, improve command and control and send in additional forces nearly 10 days after Ukraine made the biggest attack on Russian sovereign territory since the Second World War.
The incursion into Russia unfurled on Aug. 6 when thousands of Ukrainian troops smashed through Russia’s Western border, in an embarrassment for President Vladimir Putin and his top military brass.
Supported by swarms of drones, heavy artillery and tanks, Ukrainian units have since carved out a sliver of the world’s biggest nuclear power. On Thursday, battles were ongoing along a front about 18 kilometres inside Russian territory.
Putin’s defence minister, Andrei Belousov, said the general staff had prepared a series of measures to defend Russia’s border regions of Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod — which cover an area the size of Portugal.
“First of all, we are talking about improving the effectiveness of the command-and-control system in co-operation with other law enforcement agencies,” Belousov was shown telling top generals and officials from the Belgorod region.
Belousov, appointed by Putin in May to replace Sergei Shoigu, said Russia was “allocating additional forces and funds” to ensure the integrity and inviolability of Russian territory.
While the Ukrainian attack has embarrassed Moscow, revealed the weakness of its border defences and changed the public narrative of the war, Russian officials said what they cast as a Ukrainian “invasion” would not change the course of the war.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, has been advancing for most of the year along the 1,000-kilometre front in Ukraine. It has vast numerical superiority and controls 18 per cent of Ukraine.
Competing claims of success
On the ground in the Kursk region, where Ukraine has carved out at least 450 square kilometres of Russian territory, both Ukraine and Russia claimed successes.
Russia said it had regained control of the Kursk settlement of Krupets.
“We have burned everything that moves, everything that we have been able to find,” said Maj.-Gen. Apti Alaudinov, commander of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces, who are fighting in Kursk.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that its forces had shot down Ukrainian drones over the neighbouring Belgorod region of Russia and that Sukhoi-34 bombers had pummelled Ukrainian positions in Kursk.
Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Ukraine had advanced 1.5 kilometres over the past 24 hours and had set up a military commandant’s office to ensure order.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that the country’s troops have full control of the Russian town of Sudzha in the Kursk region.
The town, the largest that Ukraine has reportedly seized so far, had a pre-war population of around 5,000 people. It holds a measuring station for Russian natural gas that flows through Ukrainian pipelines to Europe.
By bringing the war to Russia, Zelenskyy risks weakening Kyiv’s defences along the front in Ukraine, while Russia has already sent thousands of reserves in a bid to expel the Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukraine said there was no sign Russian military pressure was receding, and reported the heaviest fighting in weeks near Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. Russia said it had taken control of a village just 16 kilometres from the city, which sits abreast of major roads that supply Ukrainian forces in the area.
Britain OKs use of most of its weapons inside Russia
Putin has rejected claims from the U.S. and Western allies that they knew nothing of the Ukrainian plans to attack Russia.
Russian officials have warned that if Western weapons were used on Russian territory, then Moscow would consider that a grave escalation.
Russia’s defence ministry published footage which it said showed a Russian drone destroying a U.S.-made Stryker.
British weapons can be used by Ukrainian forces in operations on Russian territory, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said on Thursday, but restrictions on the use of long-range Storm Shadow missiles remain.
Setting out the use of its weapons in some of the most explicit terms to date, a spokesperson for the ministry said that Ukraine had a “clear right of self-defence against Russia’s illegal attacks” and “that does not preclude operations inside Russia.”
“We make clear during the gifting process that equipment is to be used in line with international law,” the spokesperson said.
The policy means that British tanks, anti-tank missiles and other military equipment given to Ukraine can be used.