Juan Pablo Duch
Correspondent
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 23, 2024, p. 24
Moscow. In the Russian region of Kursk, in the districts whose population must be evacuated, there are still just over 19 thousand inhabitants, its governor, Aleksei Smirnov, reported yesterday to President Vladimir Putin, who called – from his official residence in Novo-Ogoriovo, outside Moscow – to a new meeting by videoconference on the situation in the border regions with Ukraine.
Smirnov said: It was agreed that eight districts of the Kursk region with a population of 152,600 should be evacuated. As of today (Thursday), 133,190 people have left, while 19,376 remain..
This time – with extensive coverage on local public television, the second time since foreign soldiers have been on Russian soil – Putin wanted his compatriots to know that he is attentive to the needs of the population in the area occupied by Ukrainian troops, for which he listened to reports from the respective governors of Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk, as well as members of the federal government, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov.
Unlike what happened at the first meeting dedicated to the situation on the border, as the Kremlin calls what is happening in Kursk and surrounding regions, no one spoke – at least in the part that was aired – of occupied localities or kilometers of territoryand they all claimed that The situation is complicated, but it is under control.
In this context, Putin accused Ukraine of attempting an offensive against the Kursk nuclear power plant in the city of Kurchatov.
The enemy attempted to attack the nuclear plant early this morning (Thursday). The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has already been informed and has promised to send its experts to Kursk to assess the situation.said.
Meanwhile, Aleksei Likhachev, head of RosAtom, a state-owned atomic energy corporation, commented that Every night, the alarms are activated between 10 and 12 times due to the risk of air attacks. In parallel, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Rafael Grossi, Director General of the IAEA, will travel to the Russian border region next week. The head of Bryansk, Aleksandr Bogomaz, confirmed that there were clashes in his region on Wednesday with a group of saboteurs and reconnaissance; about 200 troops, who were forced to retreat to Ukraine.
News from the front
In addition to launching missiles in various Ukrainian regions, especially in Sumy and Kharkiv, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported yesterday the capture of the town of Mezhove, with a population of about a thousand, 24 kilometers from Pokrovsk, which remains its main objective at this stage. The fall of Pokrovsk would clear the way to Konstiantinovka and Chasiv Yar, a prelude to what could be its plan: the assault on the Ukrainian strongholds in Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Ukraine, for its part, continues its drone bombings in various regions of Russia, while the Moscow military department claims to have shot down 13 such devices yesterday in the Volgograd region, seven in Rostov-on-Don, four in Belgorod, two in Voronezh and one each in Bryansk and Kursk.
Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles struck the Marinovka military airfield in the Volgograd region early yesterday morning. The attack was confirmed by Governor Andrei Bocharov, who said that “(…) most of the drones were shot down, but fragments of the drones caused a fire at the Ministry of Defense facilities.” Videos from local residents circulating on Russian social media suggest, given the continuous explosions that can be heard, that the fire caused a missile depot or fuel storage facility to explode.
Another military airfield, Slavasleika, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, was targeted last night (Wednesday) by armed drones that destroyed a hunt MiG-31 and two Il-76 transport aircraft, according to Ukrainian media.
On Thursday evening, the Ukrainian presidential office confirmed that its aircraft had struck a Russian ferry carrying 30 fuel tankers in the Port of Kavkaz in the Kerch Strait in the Krasnodar region, off Crimea, causing it to sink, said Fyodor Babenkov, head of the Temriuk district (Krasnodar), where the ship was stationed.
Speaking to attendees at a veterans conference yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: We all have to understand that in order to expel the occupier from our land, we have to create as many problems as possible for the Russian state on its territory.the official Ukrinform news agency reported.
Regarding the August 21 attack on the Oleniya military airfield in Murmansk, 1,850 kilometers from the border, the independent Russian digital media Viorstka published a map of the Russian territory that could eventually be attacked by Ukrainian drones: 2,612,000 square kilometers, an area in which there are 10 cities with more than one million inhabitants each.