A portion of the residents evacuated from Russia’s Kursk region amid the continuing Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) incursion into Russian territory are to be temporarily housed in Russian-occupied Ukraine, acting Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov announced on Tuesday.
According to Smirnov, the Russian-appointed governor of southeastern Ukraine’s partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region, Yevgeny Balitsky, had himself proposed using sanatoriums and boarding houses on the region’s coastline to accommodate civilians evacuated from the Kursk region.
“The Zaporizhzhia region is one living under martial law, fighting Ukrainian Nazism every day, and has extensive experience in both military operations and volunteer work, which can be of great assistance to us.” Smirnov wrote.
Smirnov said that the first flights to the region would be arranged “in the near future”, adding that volunteer workers from Zaporizhzhia had already arrived in Kursk to assist with the evacuation.
However, some Kursk residents didn’t appear pleased with the announcement, with some leaving angry comments under Smirnov’s post on Russian social media site VK. One user noted that, given the declaration of martial law in Zaporizhzhia, “it would be more logical to evacuate people to areas beyond the Ural Mountains”.
Another wrote: “Why didn’t you deal with this in the past 2.5 years? I personally wrote to you and asked for help for Sudzha and the Sudzhansky district, where people have been shelled for the third year in a row.”
On Tuesday, Russia’s Defence Ministry reported that the Russian army had thwarted an AFU attempt to penetrate deeper into Russian territory around the villages of Kauchuk, Obshchy Kolodez, Snagost, and Alekseyevsky, all situated approximately 26–28 kilometres from the Ukrainian border in the Kursk region’s Korenevsky district.