The Ukrainian leader says his country’s daring operation is evidence that its army maintains the ability to seize the initiative.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukrainian forces are now in control of 74 Russian settlements in the Kursk region, the result of a Ukrainian cross-border operation.
In an evening address on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces continue to advance into the Kursk region and take Russian prisoners.
“There are 74 settlements under the control of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian leader has presented the daring operation as evidence that his country maintains the ability to seize the initiative and direct events, more than two years after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday, the Kursk region’s Governor Alexei Smirnov put the number of Russian settlements controlled by Ukraine at 28.
Ukraine began its incursion into the Kursk border province last week, with the country’s top military commander General Oleksandr Syrskii stating that Ukrainian forces now control 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Russian territory.
“The troops are fulfilling their tasks. Fighting continues actually along the entire front line. The situation is under our control,” Syrskii said in a video posted on Monday.
Russia on Tuesday said its forces checked an effort by Ukrainian troops to expand their weeklong incursion into the Kursk region.
Russian army units, including fresh reserves, aircraft, drone teams and artillery forces, stopped Ukrainian armoured mobile groups from moving deeper into the Kursk settlements of Obshchy Kolodez, Snagost, Kauchuk and Alexeyevsky, a Russian defence ministry statement said.
More than two years into the war, with Ukrainian forces exhausted and support from Western allies coming under growing political scrutiny, the raid could also be an effort to inflict a greater price on Russia for continuing the war.
Speaking on national TV on Tuesday, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said the move was meant to exert pressure on Russia to participate in peace talks.
“Simple calls to Russia do not work,” he said. “Only a set of coercive tools works.”
The raid has been an embarrassing setback for Russia, with more than 100,000 people displaced by the fighting as the country’s forces rush to repel the Ukrainian attack.
Russia, which has promised reprisals for the incursion, has long held allies of Ukraine such as the United States responsible for Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, accusing the US of enabling such strikes with the provision of long-range weapons.
The US has countered that it is providing Ukraine with weapons to repel an invasion launched by Russia, but has distanced itself from the cross-border operation.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, US Department of State deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters that the US played no role in planning Ukraine’s raid.