Ukraine has ruled out any talks with Russia if Russian troops do not leave its territory.
President Vladimir Putin has said Russia would declare a ceasefire only if Kyiv withdraws from the four regions that Russia claims to have annexed but only partially controls – Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Ukraine meanwhile claims to have seized over 1,100 square kilometres of Russian territory, in the biggest attack by a foreign army on Russian soil since World War II.
“I was very scared, very scared,” Nina Golinyaeva, a former resident of the border town of Sudzha, told AFP at an evacuation centre in Kursk city, the regional capital.
“Shells were flying from all sides, helicopters, planes, fighter jets were flying over the house,” she said, recounting a dramatic night-time escape amid the fighting.
“We don’t know what to do. We cry day and night, every day. We don’t know what we are going to do,” said 70-year-old Zinaida Tarasyuk, another evacuee collecting humanitarian aid.
“We left everything,” she added.
Kyiv claims to have taken control of more than 80 settlements in the lightning incursion.
The governor of the Kursk region said on Monday that Ukraine had seized 28 settlements.
Source: CNA
