Ukraine-Russia war: Top general says Kursk offensive is working

Ukraine’s top military commander defended Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, claiming it deterred Russia from advancing on a key area of the eastern front in Ukraine.

Col Gen Oleksandr Syrski told CNN that the offensive has been effective and the strategy was working.

“Over the past six days, the enemy hasn’t advanced a single metre in the Pokrovsk direction,” he said. “In other words, our strategy is working.”

“We’ve taken away their ability to maneuver and to deploy their reinforcement forces from other directions … and this weakening has definitely been felt in other areas.”

Syrskyi said his forces control nearly 1,300sq km and about 100 settlements in the Kursk region after Ukraine launched a surprise offensive on 6 August.

The death toll from a Russian missile strike on a military institute in the east central Ukrainian town of Poltava rose to 55, the emergency service said yesterday.

Russian troops struck the educational facility with two extremely hard-to-intercept ballistic missiles, barely giving people time to seek shelter.

The deadliest single attack of this year wounded 328 others, with 27 of them being in intensive care.

The rescue operation continued for three days but had to be stopped due to new air raid alerts, officials added.

Russia must “respond appropriately” to restrictions on its media imposed by the West, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said today.

This week the US justice department filed money-laundering charges against two employees of Russian state broadcaster RT over what it called a scheme to hire a US company to produce online content to influence the November presidential election.

“We criticise the West for pursuing the path of destroying our media abroad, they obstruct the dissemination of information, they obstruct the work of our journalists,” Mr Peskov was quoted by TASS news agency as saying.

“And, of course, in this situation of heated confrontation there needs to be reciprocity. Therefore we must respond appropriately.”

The US justice department has charged Virginia-based Russian television contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife Anastasia Simes with two separate schemes to violate American sanctions.

In one of two indictments, Mr Simes and his wife are accused of laundering funds and violating US sanctions for the benefit of Channel One Russia, a Russian broadcasting station sanctioned in May 2022.

In exchange for providing services as a presenter and producer, prosecutors alleged that Simes and his wife received over $1m (£758,800), a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow and a team of 10 employees from Channel One Russia.

In a second indictment, Anastasia Simes is charged with violating sanctions to benefit Aleksandr Yevgenyevich Udodov, a Russian oligarch sanctioned in February 2023. She is accused of purchasing art and other antiques for Udodov from various galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe.

A father has lost his entire family after his house was destroyed during Russia’s attack on the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.

Yaroslav Bazylevych’s wife Eugenia and the couple’s three daughters, Yarya, 21, Daria, 18 and Emilia, seven, were all killed on Wednesday morning.

The attack led Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi to accuse Russia of “eliminating Ukrainians by (killing off) entire families”.

Ukrainian emergency services said his daughters – Daryna, 18, her sisters Yaryna, 21, and Emilia, 7, and their 43-year-old mother Yevhenia were killed while sheltering in the staircase of their residential building.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will likely visit the US air base in western Germany today to request increased Western military support, according to German magazine Der Spiegel.

Ukraine’s allies face renewed calls from Mr Zelensky for additional air defences and loosened restrictions on how far into Russia Ukraine can fire American-provided munitions.

“Air defence systems and missiles are needed in Ukraine, not in a warehouse somewhere,” Mr Zelensky said this week. “Long-range strikes that can protect us from Russian terror are needed now.”

Top US military leaders, including defence secretary Lloyd Austin, will be in Germany to discuss Ukraine’s wartime needs after Russia conducted one of its deadliest airstrikes in the conflict and Ukraine continued its offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.

The British government will send 650 lightweight multi-role missiles worth £162m to help protect the country from Russian drones and bombing.

The new supply of missiles was announced as British defence minister John Healey attended the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, an ad-hoc coalition of some 50 nations, at a US air base in Germany.

“This new commitment will give an important boost to Ukraine’s air defences,” Mr Healey said.

The Ministry of Defence said the missiles made by Thales have a range of more than 6km and can be fired from a variety of platforms on land, sea and air.

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, the Belarus Air Force has shot down two attack drones launched by its ally Russia – suggesting they had flown off course, a monitoring group claimed.

Belaruski Hajun, a monitoring group in Minsk, said multiple Belarusian fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the drones near the city of Gomel around 1.30am local time. Gomel lies within about 30km of the Ukraine-Belarus border.

This is the first reported incident involving Belarusian Air Force plane successfully downing Russian drones meant for Ukraine.

A third Russian attack drone was also downed around 2.30am in Belarusian air space, the group said but shared no additional information.

Russia launched another large-scale drone attack on Ukraine overnight, targeting multiple regions of the country, Ukraine’s Air Force said.