Russia urged more civilians to flee an intensifying Ukrainian assault Monday after a stunning incursion that has seen Kyiv’s forces advance some 20 miles and seize back the initiative in the two-and-a-half-year war.
Fighting continued inside Russian territory for a seventh day following the incursion into the Kursk border region, with residents in parts of neighboring Belgorod also urged to flee their homes in the latest sign that the Kremlin had failed to repel the Ukrainian threat. Meanwhile, the two sides accused each other of endangering Europe’s largest nuclear plant after a major fire broke out at the site.
Refocusing some attention on southern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared a video Sunday appearing to show smoke billowing from one of the towers at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. He said that Russian forces, who have occupied the site since the early weeks of the Feb. 2022 invasion, had started the fire.
Moscow blamed the Sunday incident on Ukraine.
The Kremlin-installed governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, said on Telegram that the plant’s cooling facility was on fire as a result of the shelling of the nearby city of Enerhodar by Ukraine. He later said one of the cooling towers was hit by a Ukrainian drone, but that the fire had since been put out.
Both Ukrainian and Russian officials have said radiation levels at the plant remained normal. Nuclear experts have raised repeated concerns about the safety of the plant throughout the war.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said in a statement on X Sunday that its experts witnessed “strong dark smoke” coming from the plant’s northern area “following multiple explosions heard in the evening” but that there was no impact on nuclear safety.
While smoke billowed from the site of the nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, it was also rising from the new battlefield in southern Russia.
Zelenskyy confirmed the incursion for the first time Saturday after Kyiv had stayed largely mute about the operation.
And the Russian defense ministry acknowledged Sunday it was still fighting Ukrainian troops with forces stationed in Kursk and newly-arrived reserves. It said it was engaging Ukrainians near the villages of Tolpino, Obshchy Kolodez and Zhuravli, which are within 13 to 17 miles from the closest stretch of the Ukrainian border.
The Kremlin rushed reinforcements to the area last week, and Moscow’s defense ministry has shared videos it says show Russian troops destroying Ukrainian units and their weaponry in Kursk with helicopters, drones and rocket launchers.
The ministry said that Ukraine had now lost more than 1,300 troops in the operation, more than the number that Russia’s military chief Gen. Valery Gerasimov said last week had attempted the incursion.
But the ongoing battles are a major embarrassment to Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the country’s influential military bloggers suggesting Monday that fighting inside Russia continued and that regions neighboring Kursk could also be at risk.
NBC News could not confirm any of the details. Ukraine has not commented on the number of its troops involved in the Kursk region.
The incursion has caused tens of thousands of people to be evacuated from border communities in Kursk, amid reports of civilian casualties and destruction. A national emergency was declared there last week.
New evacuations were announced Monday in the Belovsky district, where Russian defense ministry said Sunday Ukrainians had tried to break through.
Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the neighboring Belgorod region, warned about a rise in “enemy activity” in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district of his region, right on the border with Ukraine.
He called it “an anxious morning” in a post on Telegram early Monday and said officials were starting to proactively evacuate people from the district.
District officials said later on Monday that 11,000 people had been evacuated.
Putin called the incursion a “major provocation” by Kyiv last week, but has yet to make any subsequent statements about the fast-moving events on Russia’s own territory.
The country’s new defense minister Andrei Belousov, who replaced Putin ally Sergei Shoigu in May, broke the silence Monday but did not address the incursion. Speaking 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
