Ukrainian forces tighten control of Kursk region ‘buffer zone’ as two more bridges destroyed

The aim of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) incursion into Russia’s southwestern Kursk region is to create a “buffer zone” to protect Ukraine’s own border regions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday.

In his evening address to Ukrainians, Zelensky said that “everything that inflicts losses on the Russian army, the Russian state, their military-industrial complex and their economy”, including the AFU’s cross-border incursion, would help prevent the war from expanding and bring Ukraine closer to “a just end” to the war and a “just peace”.

Zelensky’s comments echoed remarks made by other Ukrainian officials last week, with the country’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko and Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk both saying that a buffer zone on Russian territory was a necessity to ensure the safety of Ukraine’s border regions.

Zelensky also said that the AFU had achieved “good and much-needed results” over the weekend, with reports emerging that they had rendered two more key bridges in the Kursk region’s Glushkovsky district unusable by Monday morning, thereby cutting off the southern part of the district from the north and forcing Russian troops to use pontoon bridges to cross the Seym River.

On Sunday, security camera footage widely shared on Telegram appeared to show three Russian soldiers looting a phone shop in the deserted Kursk region village of Glushkovo, which was evacuated on Thursday.

Amid reports that at least one of the soldiers caught on the footage may be a member of the Chechen Akhmat special forces battalion, Roman Alyokhin, an advisor to the region’s governor, called the looters “complete scum” for whom the “only measure” is death.

Another video published by Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov on Sunday, meanwhile, appeared to show him setting fire to the case files of Russians who had evaded army service in a military draft office in the AFU-held Kursk region town of Sudzha, calling the files a “list of reasonable people” and saying he was “helping [Russian] citizens who don’t want to fight and die for Putin”.