The Ukrainian General Staff has confirmed that they have evacuated from the town of Sudzha, several days after Russia claimed to have recaptured it.
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The recapture of the largest town under Ukraine’s control in Russia’s Kursk region represents another success in Russia’s campaign to expel Ukrainian forces from their territory.
Reports indicate that Sudzha was the scene of some of the fiercest battles in the ongoing conflict, which has continued for over three years.
Sudzha is believed to have had a population of around 5,000 before the hostilities, but is now heavily damaged.
Ukraine’s top military officer, Oleksandr Syrskyi, stated on Thursday that Russian air strikes on Kursk have been so extensive that the town is nearly demolished.
In recent weeks, Russian forces have reclaimed much of the territory that Ukraine had captured following their surprise cross-border invasion of the Kursk region in August of the previous year.
The Kursk region has initiated plans to reconstruct and develop areas that have been retaken from Ukrainian control, as stated by Alexander Khinshtein, the acting governor of the region, on Saturday.
According to Khinshtein, the most pressing tasks are to completely remove landmines and restore the population to its pre-Ukrainian forces levels.
Also on Saturday, the Russian Defence Ministry announced that their engineering units have commenced demining operations in the recovered border areas of the Kursk region.
The efforts are aimed at restoring critical infrastructure and reviving economic activities following intense combat, as per the ministry’s statement.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian northern city of Chernihiv faced multiple Russian drone attacks overnight, as reported by Dmytro Bryzhynskyi, the head of the Chernihiv City Military Administration.
Russian drones struck residential high-rise buildings, leading to fires that were extinguished by emergency responders.
Bryzhynskyi also noted that a drone hit a five-story building and damaged private houses.
Additionally, in the Chernihiv region, a Russian ballistic missile reportedly crashed near the border town of Semenivka, close to Russia, resulting in a partial power outage, according to Ukrainian authorities.
