KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s stunning charge across the border has seen it capture an expanding chunk of Russian territory.
The question now is how long Ukraine wants to — and can — hold onto it without sacrificing more of its own eastern heartland.
The high stakes of that gamble were highlighted Friday by authorities in the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk urging civilians to speed up their evacuation as the Russian military is closing in after months of intense fighting. The warning offered a stark parallel to events in southern Russia, where more than 120,000 people had to flee or be evacuated from the neighboring Kursk and Belgorod regions from 11 days of fighting.
Kyiv now claims that more than 80 Russian settlements in the Kursk region, including the key border town of Sudzha, are under its control and it is setting up a military command office in the area.
But this is not an occupation, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told NBC News in an interview.
“There is a big difference between this and the type of war that Russia is leading,” Podolyak said Thursday. “Ukraine is incurring with completely different goals.”
One of these is the destruction of Russia’s military infrastructure used to launch attacks across the border into the Ukrainian regions of Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv, Podolyak said.
“Ukraine is not planning to occupy this territory. This is temporary,” he added.
Asked if Ukraine is keeping humanitarian considerations in mind for those Russians now living under its control, Podolyak vowed that Kyiv would ensure access to medication, food and drinking water for the local population that has not yet evacuated.
He denied that Ukraine had any plans to take over the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, a possibility raised by Russian officials given its close vicinity to the ongoing fighting.
Should the Kremlin’s scrambled defense fail to push Ukrainian forces back, they will stay inside Russia “for as long as needed” to fulfill Kyiv’s goals, Podolyak said, refusing to disclose any concrete plans since the incursion is still ongoing.
Ukraine is also demonstrating to the world that Moscow is not in control of its own territory and that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s so-called “red lines” don’t exist, he added.
The Russian leader has often threatened that any violation of his country’s sovereignty could prompt him to use nuclear weapons. But National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby noted Thursday the U.S. has not heard any escalatory rhetoric around nuclear weapons from Putin in the days since the incursion.
In an irate speech earlier this week, Putin said Ukraine launched the “provocation” as a way to better its positions in any future peace talks.
Asked if the Kursk region will now become a bargaining chip Ukraine can use in future peace talks, Podolyak said there was no such thing as exchanging territories between nations under international law. “Russia doesn’t want any negotiations; it gives ultimatums,” he added. But on X on Friday, he said Kyiv will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia, but on its “own terms,” he added.
Another senior adviser to the Ukrainian government, who is not authorized to speak publicly, told NBC News the idea for an operation like the surprise Kursk assault had been on the table for more than a year.
One of the main purposes of the operation was to divert Russian effort and attention from elsewhere across the 600-mile front line, the adviser said, especially from the east where Russian troops are slowly chipping away at Ukraine’s defenses.
Military analysts have particularly raised concerns about Ukraine losing the towns of Toretsk and Pokrovsk in the eastern Donetsk region, where the calls for civilian evacuations grew stronger Friday.
Russia’s defense ministry said Friday its troops had seized a third settlement in Donetsk this week.
But Podolyak was confident that Russia would have to start pulling troops out of eastern Ukraine and elsewhere to repel the Kursk incursion, possibly easing the pressure on Donetsk.
“Russia is still limited in manpower,” he said. “So it will be forced to redirect a chunk of these resources.”
Erin McLaughlin and Matthew Bodner reported from Kyiv, and Yuliya Talmazan reported from London.
CORRECTION (Aug 16, 2024, 6:08 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated one of its authors. The article was written by Erin McLaughlin, not Sarah McLaughlin.
