Russia said 76,000 people had been evacuated from the border area of the Kursk region, where local authorities declared a state of emergency.
The region's acting governor, Alexei Smirnov, said late Saturday that a Ukrainian missile had been shot down, sending debris crashing into a multi-story building in the Kursk region's provincial capital, injuring 15 people.
Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko welcomed the operation, saying it “brings us much closer to peace than 100 peace summits.”
“When Russia fights back on its own territory, when the Russian people flee and the people pay attention, that's the only way Russia can show that it will stop this war,” he told the BBC.
The Kursk Offensive came after several weeks of Russian advances in the east, during which Kremlin troops captured several towns in the east.
Some analysts have suggested that the Kursk attack was part of an effort by Russia to redeploy its forces from eastern Ukraine and relieve pressure on the beleaguered Ukrainian defense forces.
But Ukrainian officials told AFP that Russian operations in the east had not slowed down significantly so far.
Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the offensive a “grave provocation.”
Meanwhile, the Kyiv region's emergency response service said a man and his four-year-old son were killed in a missile attack near the capital.
Air Force officials also said that air defenses destroyed 53 of the 57 attack drones that Russia launched in the night strikes. They said four North Korean-made missiles were also launched as part of the strikes.
Russia has been forced to rely on the isolated Asian nation for its military stockpiles, and the United States claims Pyongyang has shipped huge quantities of military hardware.
Elsewhere, Russian officials in occupied Zaporizhia said on Sunday that a fire had broken out at a nuclear power plant in the region.
Yevgeny Valitsky, the Kremlin-appointed governor of Zaporizhia, claimed the fire started after Ukrainian military shelling. He said there was no radiation spike around the plant.
Russia's state-run TASS news agency reported that the main fire at the plant was extinguished early Monday morning.
In a statement posted on X, the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said inspectors on site observed “heavy, black smoke” coming from the northern part of the facility, but stressed that “no impacts” on nuclear security were reported.
President Zelensky said in a social media post that Russian forces had set fire to the factory site.
The facility has been under the control of Russian military and officials since 2022. It has not produced electricity for more than two years, and all six reactors have been in a cold shutdown since April.
