Russia called on more civilians to flee a escalating Ukrainian onslaught Monday after a stunning idea This allowed Kiev’s troops to advance some 20 miles and regain the initiative in the two-and-a-half-year war.
Fighting on Russian territory continued for a seventh day after the invasion of the Kursk border regionwith residents in parts of neighbouring Belgorod also urged to flee their homes in the latest sign that the Kremlin had failed to fend off the Ukrainian threat. Meanwhile, the two sides accused each other of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant after a major fire broke out at the location.
To draw attention back to southern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said shared a video Smoke appeared to be coming from one of the towers of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Sunday, he said, suggesting Russian forces, who have occupied the site since the first weeks of the invasion in February 2022, had started the fire.
Moscow blamed Ukraine for Sunday’s incident.
The Kremlin-installed governor of the Zaporizhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, said on Telegram that the plant’s cooling facility was on fire as a result of Ukrainian shelling of the nearby town of Enerhodar. He later said that one of the cooling towers had been hit by a Ukrainian drone, but that the fire had since been extinguished.
Both Ukrainian and Russian officials have said radiation levels at the plant remained normal. Nuclear experts have repeatedly expressed concerns about the plant’s safety during the war.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, said in a statement about X On Sunday, experts reported seeing “strong dark smoke” rising from the northern part of the nuclear plant “following several explosions heard in the evening,” but that this had no implications for nuclear safety.
As smoke rose from the nuclear power plant site in southern Ukraine, smoke also rose from the new battlefield in southern Russia.
Zelenskyy confirmed the raid for the first time on Saturday after Kiev had remained largely silent about the operation.
And the Russian Ministry of Defense recognized sunday it was still fighting Ukrainian forces with troops stationed in Kursk and newly arrived reserves. It said it was attacking Ukrainians near the villages of Tolpino, Obshchy Kolodez and Zhuravli, which are within 13 to 17 miles of the nearest stretch of the Ukrainian border.
The Kremlin quickly sent reinforcements to the area last week, and Moscow’s Defense Ministry shared videos it said showed Russian forces destroying Ukrainian units and their weapons in Kursk using helicopters, drones and rocket launchers.
The ministry said Ukraine has now lost more than 1,300 troops in the operation, more than the number Russian military leader General Valery Gerasimov said last week had attempted the raid.
The ongoing fighting, however, is a major source of embarrassment for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The country’s influential military bloggers suggested Monday that fighting in Russia is continuing and that regions bordering Kursk are also at risk.
NBC News could not confirm details. Ukraine has not commented on the number of troops involved in the Kursk region.
The raid has led to tens of thousands of people being evacuated from border communities in Kursk amid reports of civilian casualties and destruction, with a national emergency declared there last week.
New evacuations were announced on Monday in the Belovsky district, where Ukrainians had attempted to break through on Sunday, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the neighboring Belgorod region, warned of an increase in “enemy activity” in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district of his region, right on the border with Ukraine.
He called it a “scary morning” in a Telegram post early Monday and said officials had proactively begun evacuating people from the district.
District officials reported later Monday that 11,000 people had been evacuated.
Putin last week called the invasion a “major provocation” by Kiev, but has since made no comments about the rapidly changing events on Russian soil.
The country’s new Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, who replaced Putin’s ally Sergei Shoigu in May, broke the silence on Monday but did not elaborate on the raid. At a military forum outside Moscow, Belousov called the Kremlin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine “an armed confrontation between Russia and the collective West,” a term the Kremlin uses to describe Ukraine’s allies.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
