Russia postpones elections in seven border districts amid ongoing Ukrainian offensive

Russia’s Central Election Commission has decided to postpone local elections in seven districts in the southwestern Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops began an offensive over two weeks ago, the commission announced on Telegram on Wednesday.

The commission did not specify for how long the elections would be postponed, but noted that votes will not be held in the districts of Belovsky, Bolshesoldatsky, Glushkovsky, Korenevsky, Sudzhansky, Khomutovsky and in the city of Lgov until the security of voters could be “fully guaranteed”.

The September elections for the governor of the region will go ahead as planned, said Tatyana Malakhova, the chair of the regional election commission, with early voting due to take place between 28 August and 5 September, and in-person voting taking place between 6 and 8 September.

While the situation on the ground in the Ukrainian-held areas of the Kursk region remains unclear, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are continuing to target Russian logistics in the area, as the AFU Special Operations Forces posted a video on Wednesday that appeared to show Ukrainian troops targeting Russian military equipment and pontoon bridges with HIMARS missiles.

At the same time Russia continues to press forward in eastern Ukraine, claiming to have captured the small town of Niu-York in the Donetsk region, which the Russian Defence Ministry described on Tuesday as a “strategically important logistics hub”.

Ukraine’s top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Tuesday that his forces had pushed 28–35 kilometres into Russia, capturing a total of 1,263 square kilometres of territory including 93 settlements. Novaya Gazeta Europe could not independently confirm these figures.

Syrskyi’s comments came on the same day that Russia’s Defence Minister Andrey Belousov announced the formation of three new military groupings in the border regions of Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk as Russia tries to repel the incursion without diverting forces from front lines in eastern Ukraine.

According to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, one of the possible reasons Ukraine was able to launch a surprise strike in the Kursk region was the dissolution of an interagency council tasked with protecting the region by General Alexander Lapin, who oversaw security in the region, in the months prior to Ukraine’s incursion.