Russia evacuates tens of thousands amid Ukraine incursion

MOSCOW: Struggling to contain a major Ukrainian incursion, Russia on Saturday said it had evacuated tens of thousands of people from its border region and launched a “counter-terror operation”.

At the same time, Moscow warned that the fighting in Russia’s western Kursk region was endangering a nuclear power plant.

Ukrainian units stormed across the border on Tuesday morning in what so far has been the largest and most successful such offensive by Kyiv in the two-and-a-half-year conflict.

Its troops have advanced several kilometres forcing Russia’s army to rush in reserves and extra equipment — though neither side has given precise details on the forces committed.

Local officials detailed the scale of civilian evacuations from towns and villages close to the combat zone.

“More than 76,000 people have been temporarily relocated to safe places,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted an official from the regional emergency situations ministry as saying at a press briefing on Saturday.

Emergency aid has been ferried into the border area and extra trains to the capital Moscow have been put on for people fleeing the fighting.

“The war has come to us,” one woman — who declined to give her name — told AFP after arriving at a Moscow train station on Friday.

Kyiv has maintained a strict operational silence on the offensive and for several days Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made only oblique references to the fighting there.

But in Saturday’s evening address, Zelensky referred to army chief Oleksandr Syrsky’s briefings “on the frontline and our actions and pushing the war into the aggressor’s territory”.

Thanking the soldiers involved, he added: “Ukraine is proving that it can really bring justice and guarantees exactly the kind of pressure that is needed — pressure on the aggressor.”

Russia’s army on Saturday confirmed it was still fighting the Ukrainian incursion for a fifth day.

It said Kyiv’s forces had initially crossed the border with around 1,000 troops, 20 armoured vehicles and 11 tanks, though it claimed on Saturday to have destroyed five times that much military hardware so far.