Russia ordered the evacuation of 20,000 more residents on Thursday, as Ukraine pressed on with its daring cross-border assault.
Alexei Smirnov, the governor of Kursk, a region on Russia’s southern frontier, announced that police would coordinate the evacuation of the Glushkov district.
Kyiv has claimed that it has seized control of more than 385 sq miles of territory on Russian soil since springing the surprise attack early last week.
On Thursday, Russian sources reported fierce fighting at the entrance to Korenevo, a town to the north-west of the evacuation zone.
Pro-Kremlin military bloggers also detailed further battles along a front of more than 20 miles in the area, between the Russian villages of Snagost to Kauchuk.
But Western analysts have reported a slower operational tempo in Ukraine’s attempts to capture more Russian villages.
On Wednesday, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Kyiv’s top general, said that his forces had only pressed forward less than a mile.
Russia has been rushing reinforcements to the region, while also digging new fortifications to halt the Ukrainian invasion, the first on Russian soil since the Second World War.
Mobilisation News, a Russian opposition news outlet, said that Moscow had started sending conscripts from its spring recruitment drive to support its forces fighting in Kursk.
Meanwhile, a prominent Ukrainian unit fighting in Kursk published what it claimed to be interviews with Russian prisoners of war on its social media channels.
The Khorne Group of Ukraine’s 116th Mechanised Brigade said it was rescuing injured Russians to later exchange for members of Azov battalion, who have been held in Russian captivity since being surrounded in Mariupol in the first months of the war.
In the interviews, the Russian soldiers said that some 400 to 500 of their comrades had been captured in Kursk since Ukraine launched its cross-border raid.
They said the men would either quit the Russian military to join anti-Putin forces fighting alongside Kyiv or insist they be swapped for members of Azov.
The Telegraph could not independently verify the footage.
Separate drone footage shared on social media on Thursday appeared to show about 100 Russian troops, an entire company, surrendering to Ukrainian forces.
The men were laid on their front on the ground and surrounded by Ukrainian soldiers.
“Our advance in the Kursk region is going well today, we are reaching our strategic goal. We have significantly increased the ‘exchange fund’ for our country,” Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said on Wednesday night.
