Russia says it will take back Kursk territory captured by Ukraine in ‘timely manner’

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MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Friday that its army would regain control of its Kursk region “in a timely manner”, declining to say how soon this could be achieved.

Ukraine on Aug. 6 launched the biggest foreign attack on Russia since World War Two, bursting through the border into the western Kursk region supported by swarms of drones and heavy weaponry, including Western-made arms.

Russia has been fighting since then to expel the Ukrainian forces. On Thursday, a senior Russian commander said Russian troops had recaptured two villages in the Kursk region.

“Our military is doing its job. They will accomplish it. Control will be restored,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that the army would obviously not discuss publicly how it planned to achieve that.

“The situation, of course, in those areas that are under the control of Ukrainian fighters – well, of course, it is extreme. This situation will be corrected in a timely manner,” he added.

Ukraine’s incursion caught Russia by surprise and provided a significant morale boost for Kyiv’s forces after months of slow Russian advances in eastern Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that the operation had succeeded in diverting close to 40,000 Russian troops, relieving some of the Russian pressure on Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says, on the contrary, that his army is advancing faster than before in the Donbas, where it has taken control of a series of settlements in a push towards the Ukrainian logistical hub of Pokrovsk.

(Reporting by Anastasia Lyrchikova; writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Christina Fincher)