Russia Plans to Move Kursk Evacuees to Occupied Ukraine

Alexey Smirnov, the acting governor of Russia’s Kursk region, told the Russian Current Time TV channel on Aug. 13 that the region’s evacuees will be moved to the occupied Zaporizhzhia territory. He said he had agreed this with his counterpart, the Russian appointed “head” of the southern Ukrainian region, Yevgeny Balitsky.

Smirnov added that flights would be organized to take evacuees the 550 kilometers (341 miles) from Kursk to temporary accommodation centers – including sanatoriums and boarding houses – on the coast of the Azov Sea between Berdyansk and Kirillovka.

The evacuation plan will involve residents from five districts on the border with Ukraine, including the Sudzhansky and Belovsky districts.

Smirnov said at a meeting on Aug. 12, that 180,000 residents of the Kursk region were subject to evacuation and that around 121,000 people had already been evacuated, although by all accounts that had not been as orderly as he suggests. Numerous reports over the last week have told how villages were left to their own devices to escape from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) advance, with groups appealing on video for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s help in getting out.

“The first groups of evacuees will be transported to temporary accommodation in the Zaporizhzhia region in the near future,” Smirnov wrote on Telegram.

Smirnov said that since the start of Ukraine’s Aug. 6 cross-border incursion, 28 settlements were now under the control of the AFU. The Ukrainian open-source intelligent (OSINT) project DeepState claimed that Kyiv’s forces occupied 44 settlements. President Volodymyr Zelensky put the figure at 74 and his Commander-in-Chief Alexander Syrsky said that about 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Russian territory had been taken.

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Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Aug. 13 that it had suppressed Ukrainian attempts to advance, while the pro-Russian milblogger “Two Majors” reported that the AFU continues to transfer reserves in new directions and was stretching Russian armed forces.

Meanwhile a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry Herohii Tykhyi said: “Ukraine is not interested in taking the territory of the Kursk region, but we want to protect the lives of our people.” He added that there had been more than 2,000 artillery strikes including more than 250 glide bombs and 100 missiles aimed at the Sumy region from the Kursk region since the beginning of summer.

“Unlike the Russian Federation, Ukraine does not need someone else’s territory,” he noted.

The plan by Smirnov and Balitsky to evacuate its citizens from Kursk to the seaside appears at odds with Putin’s vow to force Ukraine’s forces from the region. Moving evacuees out of the region, even if only on a temporary basis, suggests the Kremlin is not expecting a speedy resolution that its public pronouncements have declared.