Ukrainian forces in major cross-border attack on Russian village, claims Moscow

In a powerful response to Moscow’s invasion, Kyiv kept up air attacks on Russia’s Kursk border region this morning, according to the Russian defence ministry.

Official Russian social media accounts said up to 300 Ukrainian fighters, backed by tanks, had attacked border units in two localities in Kursk – Nikolayevo-Daryino and Oleshnya.

Russian defence systems destroying four drones overnight, the ministry claimed, just a day after Moscow accused Ukraine of targeting the area with an armoured assault.

The ministry had sent reserves on Tuesday to help repel hundreds of Ukrainian fighters backed by tanks from Kursk, in a ground incursion shaping as one the largest into Russian territory during the war, now more than two years old.

The situation was “controllable”, claimed Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the southwestern Russian region.

All emergency services were on “high alert”, he said on Wednesday, calling for people to donate blood to replenish medical supplies.

The region was under a dozen air raid alerts over the past 24 hours, Smirnov’s posts showed. By this morning, there were no reports of fresh ground fighting.

Five people were killed, including two ambulance crew, with at least 20 wounded, among them six children, in the fighting that erupted yesterday, Russian officials said.

Ukraine made no official comment, though there was evidence of some military action from its side of the border. Both Kyiv and Moscow say their attacks do not target civilians.

Ukraine regularly fires artillery and missiles into Russian territory, and has hit targets deep inside Russia with long-range attack drones, but infantry raids are rare.

Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 11 drones that Ukraine launched overnight targeting Russia’s Kursk, Voronezh, Belgorod and Rostov regions, the Russia’s defence ministry said.

The European Union’s Ukraine Facility, the financial assistance programme for Ukraine, will soon deliver the next €4.2 billion tranche of assistance.

Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine’s Prime Minister, announced the next batch of funding, one part of what will be a €16 billion total from the Ukraine Facility in 2024.

“Our partner countries and international financial institutions have assured us that all of our external funding needs will be met this year,” Shmyhal said.

The money is intended for non-military expenditures, allowing Ukraine to “meet its social obligations, pay salaries to state employees, and implement economic and humanitarian projects”.

He added: “Ukraine’s security and defence sector is funded internally. All of our private citizens’ and business taxes are used exclusively to fund the Ukrainian army.”

The EU has allocated €50 billion euros to the programme for the period 2024 to 2027.

From September this year, Russian schools will teach children about the soldiers sent to war in Ukraine.

Putin’s education ministry has published a list of “war heroes” who are involved in its belligerent and illegal invasion of Ukraine – which Russia describes as a “special military operation”.

The programme will teach children about Russian soldiers from the pre-revolution, Soviet, and modern eras.

This includes Vladimir Zhoga and Olga Kachura, Russian-Ukrainian pro-separatists who Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda describe as “terrorists and militants”.

Pro-Russian propaganda outlets celebrated Zhoga as a war hero following his death in battle in March 2022.

Olga Kachura was killed by a Ukrainian missile in July 2022.

Ukrainian forces have used more drones in July than fired by Russia, president Volodymyr Zelensky said, as he lauded Kyiv’s good progress in manufacturing and deploying drones.

Zelensky thanked all Ukrainian servicemen for their efforts in combat “in particular, all those soldiers and commanders who make good use of our possibilities with drones” in his nightly video address.

“Our Ukrainian defence forces are already leading the way in this regard, and in July our forces used more drones than did the occupiers,” he said. “This must become a sustainable trend at the front – across all types of drones that are in our units.” He said drones, including long-range versions, “are already affecting the war in strategic terms”.

Ukraine is boosting its production capacity with help from its Western partners and the country’s manufacturers will exceed over the course of 2024 contractual plans to produce one million drones, the president said.

A Russian pianist and anti-war activist has died in prison after going on hunger strike, his mother said, in what the European Union called a shocking case of political repression.

The death of Pavel Kushnir was first reported by a Russian news site last Friday and confirmed to independent outlet Mediazona yesterday by his mother, Irina Levina.

A Telegram channel with links to Russia’s security services reported in May that Kushnir had been arrested and accused of inciting terrorist activity after posting anti-war material online.

Levina told Mediazona that an investigator from the FSB security service had told her that Kushnir died on 28 July while in pre-trial detention in Birobidzhan in Russia’s far east.

It was not clear how long he had been on hunger strike. Levina said she had been told that he was hooked up to an intravenous drip “but apparently this was not enough” to save him.

Kushnir was an accomplished concert pianist who had studied at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky conservatory.

EU external affairs spokesperson Peter Stano posted on X that the case was a “shocking reminder of (the) Kremlin’s ongoing repression” and urged Russia to “respect its Constitution, release all prisoners of conscience and stop repression against anti-war protesters”.

An independent Siberian politician, Svetlana Kaverzina, said Kushnir had been left isolated and without support because there was no local network of dissidents, and people had not known about his case.

“We couldn’t chip in and send him a lawyer – we didn’t know. We didn’t write him letters of support – we didn’t know. We didn’t talk him out of sacrificing himself – we didn’t know. He was alone,” she wrote on Telegram.

Matthew Miller, the spokesperson for the US Department of State, was asked about President Zelensky’s order for Ukrainian diplomats to work on creating a coalition of states to help shoot down Russian missiles over Ukrainian territory.

But Mr Miller said that it is a “discussion to be had among NATO members” and a decision which the alliance needs to “reach collectively”.

When pushed on whether Ukraine will be authoritised to launch western weapons deeper into Russian territory than they are currently allowed, Miller said Ukraine’s requirements are constantly being assessed.

“We make those determinations both when it comes to these specific weapons that we provide Ukraine and the restrictions, if any, that we put on the use of those weapons,” he said.

Ukraine was first permitted to fire western weapons into Russian territory two months ago, following a change in policy from allies who had previously feared escalation.

Russian forces have captured the village of Tymofiivka in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine, a Russian news agency quoted the defence ministry as saying.

Interfax, the Russian agency headquartered in Moscow, made the claim which was unable to be independently verified by Reuters.

It follows Ukrainian media reports last week based on DeepState – an online map that shows the updated course of military actions in Ukraine – which showed Russia had taken the village.

Russian troops continue to advance towards Pokrovsk, a strategic city on the Ukrainian front, 70km northwest of Donetsk city.

Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine conducted a major attack involving some 300 soldiers across the border into Russia’s southern Kursk region on Tuesday.

Russian reports earlier noted the incursion and said it had moved in reserves to help repel hundreds of fighters backed by tanks. The regional governor said three people were killed.

“The enemy today launched another attempt to break into the territory of Russia’s Kursk region,” the latest defence ministry statement said. “Artillery fire, army aviation strikes and drone strikes are being inflicted on the enemy.”

Kursk regional governor Alexei Smirnov, writing on Telegram late in the evening, said Ukrainian forces had shelled a border area, injuring two children. Local officials said the border town of Sudzha had also come under attack. Smirnov also posted a video on Telegram telling residents: “I ask you to remain calm and not to be subject to the enemy’s information provocations. The situation is controllable.”

Ukraine’s military authorities in Sumy region – on the other side of the border from Russia’s Kursk region – said Ukrainian forces had destroyed a Russian ballistic missile, two drones and a helicopter in the region.

Unofficial Ukrainian military blogs showed pictures of what they described as the destroyed helicopter and other equipment. Russian ministry appeared to have deleted an earlier account of the attack in which it said a “Ukrainian sabotage group” had suffered heavy losses and retreated into Ukrainian territory.