Russian military vehicles in Kursk region, 13 August 2024. Photo: Russian Defence Ministry
The governor of Russia’s southwestern Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, declared a regional-level emergency on Wednesday amid the Armed Forces Ukraine (AFU) continued attacks on the border region, and said that he would be appealing to the Kremlin to declare a federal-level emergency due to the “extremely difficult and tense” situation in the region.
The regional state of emergency was declared to provide “additional protection to the population” and “additional support measures to victims” amid “daily shelling by the AFU”, Gladkov said, adding that Ukrainian attacks had left civilians dead and injured and destroyed houses.
On Tuesday, Gladkov said that over 11,000 people had been evacuated from the Belgorod region’s Krasnoyaruzhsky district on the border with Ukraine, where the AFU had reportedly begun using tanks to attack Russian defensive positions around the village of Kolotilovka.
Authorities in the neighbouring Kursk region declared a federal-level emergency on 7 August, a day after the AFU launched the first foreign incursion into Russia territory since World War II. By Friday, a “counter-terror operation” was launched in the Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk regions as the AFU continued to advance.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had repelled a massive Ukrainian aerial attack overnight, intercepting a total of 117 drones and four missiles over eight Russian regions. 37 drones and the four missiles were shot down over the Kursk region, it said, as well as 37 drones over the neighbouring Voronezh region and 17 drones over the Belgorod region, among others.
Following a meeting with the AFU’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram that 74 settlements in the Kursk region were under AFU control and that Kyiv was working on “humanitarian solutions” for residents of the affected areas as “difficult, intense fighting” continued.
