Zelenskiy says Ukraine now controls 92 settlements in Russia’s Kursk
- 19 August, 07:07
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that his army now controls 92 settlements and 1,250 square kilometers of lands in Russia’s western Kursk region. "The Russian border area opposite our Sumy region has been mostly cleared of Russian military presence," Zelenskiy said in a post on X social media platform on Monday.
Commenting on Ukraine’s cross border incursion on Russia’s Kursk region on August 6, Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s attack “is the most effective counter to Russian terror and ensures a real complication of the situation for the aggressor state.”
“We now have an extremely important ideological change, namely: the entire naive, illusory concept of the so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessments of the war by some partners. The world sees that everything in this war depends only on our courage, the courage of our partners,” the Ukrainian leader said.
Furthermore, Zelenskiy called on Western allies to lift current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, stressing that had it not been for these restrictions, Ukrainian troops would not have to physically enter the Kursk region. Ukraine has long called on its partners to allows the use of Western-provided weapons in the territory of Russia, with Kyiv officials claiming that such restrictions Zelenskiy also said such restrictions were undermining the army’s capability to fend off a Russian offensive in the east, in areas of the strategic hub of Pokrovsk and Toretsk.
