Russian troops are advancing along the entire line of contact with Ukrainian forces, President Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying by Interfax. He added that the main task of the Defense Ministry now is to drive Ukrainian forces out of Russian territory. Putin was quoted as saying by TASS that Ukraine had attacked Russian territory “with the help of the West” in order to improve its position in the light of future negotiations.
Meanwhile, local authorities in Russia’s Kursk region have decided to expand the evacuation zone for civilians in the face of the advance of Ukrainian forces.In fact, Governor Alexei Smirnov announced that residents of the Belovsky district would also have to leave their homes. Moscow announced on Saturday the evacuation of 76,000 civilians, while Ukrainian authorities in the Sumy region on the other side of the border called on 20,000 people to leave.
Twenty-eight towns in the Kursk region have fallen to Ukrainian forces, who have advanced 12 kilometres (7 miles) into Russian territory on a 40-kilometre-wide front, the governor was quoted as saying by TASS.
The fire that broke out yesterday at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia has been completely extinguished. Pro-Russian authorities in the region confirmed this overnight. Earlier, Russian nuclear power company Rosatom said the plant’s cooling tower had been “seriously damaged” by “two attacks by Ukrainian military drones”. The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, confirmed that “there is no impact on nuclear safety” after the incident in Zaporizhia. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the fire at the plant was set by “Russian occupiers”. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Moscow, Maria Zakharova, accused Ukraine of “nuclear terrorism” over yesterday’s fire in the cooling towers of the Zaporizhia power plant, which Russia says was caused by Russian shelling in Kyiv. Moscow said it would ask the IAEA to “identify who was responsible for the shelling”, because “further silence on this issue will only amplify Kyiv’s sense of impunity”.
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