(Reuters) – Kiev continued airstrikes in the Russian border region of Kursk on Wednesday, with defense systems destroying four drones overnight, the Russian Defense Ministry said, a day after Moscow accused Ukraine of attacking the area with an armored attack.
The ministry sent reserves on Tuesday to help repel hundreds of Ukrainian fighters backed by tanks from Kursk, in a ground incursion that became one of the largest into Russian territory during the more than two-year war.
The situation was “controllable,” Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of Russia’s southwest region, said in posts on the messaging app Telegram.
All emergency services were on “high alert”, he said on Wednesday, urging people to donate blood to replenish medical supplies.
The region has been under a dozen air raid warnings in the past 24 hours, Smirnov’s posts showed. As of Wednesday morning, there were no reports of new fighting on the ground.
Five people were killed, including two ambulance crew, and at least 20 were injured, including six children, in the fighting that broke out on Tuesday, Russian officials said.
Ukraine made no official comment, although there was evidence of some military action on its side of the border. Both Kiev 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 attacks are rare.
Forces calling themselves volunteer paramilitaries fighting on Ukraine’s side inflicted minimal damage in a major incursion into parts of the Belgorod and Kursk region this year, but the aim of the attacks remains unclear.
On Tuesday, Ukraine’s General Staff made no mention of any Ukrainian offensive operations inside Russia.
Official Russian social media reports said that up to 300 Ukrainian fighters, supported by tanks, attacked border units in two Kursk locations – Nikolayevo-Daryino and Oleshnya.
Reuters was unable to verify battlefield accounts from either side.
ATTACK ON AMBULANCE
Officials said the border town of Sudzha was also attacked and Smirnov said a Ukrainian attack drone hit an ambulance outside the town, killing the driver and a paramedic and injuring a doctor.
A leading Orthodox cleric said Ukrainian shelling burned down a cathedral and other buildings inside a large monastery on the outskirts of Sudzha, but no one was injured.
The Kursk region is also home to the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, but Smirnov said the facility was operating without incident.
Russia’s air defense systems also destroyed three drones that Ukraine launched in the Belgorod region and two over the Voronezh and Rostov regions, the Defense Ministry said.
In the Voronezh region – several hundred kilometers south of Moscow – drones damaged several residential buildings and cars, the region’s governor said on Telegram.
Ukraine’s main military effort focuses on pushing back Russian military forces that control almost a fifth of its territory. Russian troops have made a series of gradual gains over the past six months.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
