Russian PoWs claim abandonment as Ukraine advances in Kursk offensive

On day 910 of the war, hundreds of Russian soldiers were walking into Ukrainian custody across the Kursk region—not as defeated troops dragged from trenches, but as men who simply stopped fighting when they realized their commanders had left them behind. A 22-year-old conscript, speaking to Agence France-Presse at a detention facility just inside Ukraine's Sumy region, described the moment with the flatness of someone stating a fact: he and others were abandoned by their command when Ukrainian forces appeared. Now he wanted only to be exchanged and sent home to his family. The guards standing nearby made no move to silence him. He was not speaking under duress.

Volodymyr, the deputy head of the detention facility, offered a different kind of observation. The prisoners had arrived frightened, he told AFP, but they changed once they understood they would be treated decently. "On the battlefield they are hated soldiers," he said, "and when they are captured they become ordinary people." It was a small mercy, but it mattered enough that men who had been ordered to kill were now willing to talk about what had happened to them. Ukraine has already begun talks with Russia about exchanging these captured servicemen.

The Kursk offensive itself, which began on August 6, had pushed Ukrainian forces between 17 and 22 miles into Russian territory—a penetration that forced Moscow to respond by forming three new military groupings named after the border regions they would defend: Kursk, Belgorod, and Bryansk. The Russian defence minister, Andrei Belousov, announced the reorganization as his government faced mounting criticism at home for breaking its stated promise never to send conscripts into combat against Ukraine. The Kremlin-linked newspaper Izvestia, citing Russian intelligence, claimed that American, British, and Polish intelligence services had helped prepare the Ukrainian invasion, a charge Ukrainian officials rejected. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he had kept the operation secret from Ukraine's allies precisely because they would have called it unrealistic; other officials noted that telling the West would have made operational secrecy impossible.

The fighting elsewhere on the front was intensifying and moving closer to civilian centers. In the Donetsk region, Zelenskiy described the situation as "difficult." The city of Toretsk, which Moscow was close to capturing, saw 14 combat clashes in a single day. The Pokrovsk sector recorded 34 clashes. Residents of Pokrovsk, a military hub and Russian target, were leaving after authorities warned that fighting could engulf the city within two weeks. Russian forces claimed to have seized Niu-York, a town contested since 2014, and were fighting for Hrodikva, a village near Pokrovsk. Belousov announced that additional Russian troops were being sent to the Pokrovsk region.

Russia's air campaign continued to strike at Ukrainian infrastructure and civilians. A missile and drone attack on Tuesday hit energy facilities across northern Ukraine, triggering a massive fire at an industrial complex in the western region of Ternopil that released chlorine gas into the air. People were ordered to stay indoors. In the north-eastern Sumy region, the strikes caused blackouts affecting 72 settlements and more than 18,500 consumers. Ukrainian air defenses shot down three ballistic missiles and 25 of 26 drones launched at nine regions that morning—Russia's fifth major missile attack on Kyiv this month.

A 14-year-old boy died in hospital after a Russian munition struck a kiosk just meters from a children's playground in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, according to regional governor Ivan Fedorov. In the south, Russian forces were struggling to extinguish a massive fire at an oil depot in the Rostov region that had been hit by Ukrainian drones; firefighters had been battling the blaze for three consecutive days.

Ukraine's parliament, meanwhile, passed what it called a "historic" bill that would ban the Russia-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The legislation prohibits the Russian Orthodox Church from operating on Ukrainian territory and allows courts to ban religious organizations affiliated with it—a move that reflects the deepening rupture between Ukraine and Russia at every level of society and governance.