Reuters:
MOSCOW, Aug 15 – A senior Russian commander said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had been pushed out of one village in Russia’s border region but that Kyiv’s forces were still probing along the front more than nine days since the lightning incursion into Russia.
The biggest foreign attack on sovereign Russian territory since World War Two unfurled on Aug. 6 when thousands of Ukrainian troops smashed through Russia’s western border in an embarrassment for the Russian top military brass.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that his forces had advanced a few kilometers and that the goal of replenishing an ‘exchange fund’ of prisoners of war was being achieved. One Ukrainian official said Kyiv was carving out a buffer zone to protect its population against attack.
Major General Apti Alaudinov, who commands Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces who are fighting in Kursk, said that Russian forces had forced out Ukraine from Martynovka about 18 km (11 miles) from the border.
“We have burned everything that moves, everything that we have been able to find,” Alaudinov told Russian state television from Kursk region, reminding viewers of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia.
Alaudinov, a close ally of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, said that Ukraine was sending in more forces into the Russian region but that the shift in resources was weakening Ukrainian forces at other parts of the front.
