Russia said 76,000 people had been evacuated from border areas in the Kursk region, where local authorities had declared a state of emergency.
Acting regional governor Alexei Smirnov said 15 people were injured late Saturday when debris from a Ukrainian missile fell on a multi-storey building in the region’s capital, Kursk.
Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko praised the process, saying it “brings us closer to peace than a hundred peace summits.”
“When Russia needs to respond on its territory, when the Russian people run, when people care, this is the only way to show them that this war must stop,” he told the BBC.
The Kursk offensive comes after weeks of Russian advances in the east, where Kremlin forces have captured a string of villages.
Some analysts have suggested that the Kursk offensive is part of an effort to force Russia to redeploy its forces away from eastern Ukraine and relieve pressure on besieged Ukrainian defenses.
But the Ukrainian official told AFP that Russian operations in the east had so far seen little sign of a pullback.
Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attack was a “major provocation.”
Meanwhile, emergency services in the Kyiv region said a man and his four-year-old son were killed in a rocket attack near the capital overnight.
Air force officials said air defenses also destroyed 53 of 57 Russian drones launched during the airstrikes on Tuesday night. They added that four North Korean-made missiles were also fired as part of the strikes.
Russia has been forced to turn to the isolated Asian state to replenish its munitions stockpile, with the United States claiming Pyongyang has sent massive amounts of military equipment.
Elsewhere, Russian officials in the occupied Zaporizhia region said a fire broke out at a nuclear power plant in the region on Sunday.
Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor of Zaporizhia, claimed the fire broke out after shelling by Ukrainian forces. He said there was no spike in radiation around the plant.
The main fire at the station was extinguished in the early hours of Monday morning, Russia’s TASS news agency reported.
In a statement published by the United Nations’ nuclear agency, the agency said its inspectors at the site had observed “heavy dark smoke” coming from the north of the facility, but stressed that “no impact” on nuclear safety had been reported.
Russian forces set fire to the plant’s grounds, President Zelensky said in a social media post.
The site has been under the control of Russian forces and officials since 2022. It has not produced power in more than two years, and all six reactors have been cold shut since April.
