The Kremlin rushed reinforcements to the area last week, and Moscow’s defense ministry said that Ukraine had now lost more than 1,300 troops in the operation, more than the number that military chief Gen. Valery Gerasimov said last week had attempted the incursion.
Putin said Monday that Ukrainian losses were “dramatically increasing.”
But the ongoing battles are a major blow to Putin’s internal standing, with the country’s influential military bloggers suggesting Monday that fighting inside Russia continued and that regions neighboring Kursk could also be at risk.
NBC News could not confirm any of the details. Ukraine has not commented on the number of its troops involved in the Kursk region.
A national emergency was declared last week and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from border communities in Kursk, amid reports of civilian casualties and destruction.
New evacuations were announced Monday in the Belovsky district, where the Russian defense ministry said Sunday that Ukrainian troops had tried to break through.
Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the neighboring Belgorod region, warned about a rise in “enemy activity” in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district of his region, right on the border with Ukraine.
He called it “an anxious morning” in a post on Telegram and said officials were starting to proactively evacuate people from the district.
District officials said later Monday that 11,000 people had been evacuated.
Meanwhile, the two sides accused each other of endangering Europe’s largest nuclear plant after a major fire broke out at the site.
Refocusing some attention on southern Ukraine, Zelenskyy shared a video Sunday appearing to show smoke billowing from one of the towers at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. He said that Russian forces, who have occupied the site since the early weeks of the Feb. 2022 invasion, had started the fire.
Moscow blamed the Sunday incident on Ukraine.
The Kremlin-installed governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, said on Telegram that the plant’s cooling facility was on fire as a result of the shelling of the nearby city of Enerhodar by Ukraine. He later said one of the cooling towers was hit by a Ukrainian drone, but that the fire had since been put out.
Both Ukrainian and Russian officials have said radiation levels at the plant remained normal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said in a statement on X Sunday that its experts witnessed “strong dark smoke” coming from the plant’s northern area “following multiple explosions heard in the evening” but that there was no impact on nuclear safety.