At a meeting with senior officials to discuss the situation in Russia’s Kursk region on Monday, Vladimir Putin called on the Russian Defence Ministry to “squeeze out” and “dislodge the enemy” from Russian territory, stressing the importance of reliable border protection once that was achieved, state-owned news agency TASS reported.
At the meeting, which was attended by Security Council chairman Sergei Shoigu, FSB head Alexander Bortnikov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, and the heads of various security agencies, Putin accused the “Kiev regime” of carrying out the will of its “Western masters” as its incursion into southwestern Russia continued into its seventh day.
Putin, who chaired the meeting via video link from his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, speculated that the objective of the incursion was to improve Ukraine’s negotiating position in any future peace talks.
“What kind of negotiations can we even talk about with people who indiscriminately strike civilians, civil infrastructure, or attempt to threaten nuclear power facilities,” Putin asked, “What is there to talk with them about?”
Predicting that Kyiv would continue its “attempts to destabilise" Russia’s border regions, Putin also said that by entering Russian territory, Kyiv had “embarked on a pathway of extermination for the Ukrainian people” citing rising Ukrainian battlefield losses.
During the meeting, acting Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov reported that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) had so far captured 28 Russian villages, killing a total of 12 civilians and wounding a further 121, before saying that the Kursk authorities had so far only managed to evacuate 121,000 of the total 180,000 civilians slated for evacuation.