Russia claimed to retake a key town in the area from Ukrainian forces. Ukraine’s top military commander has said that its forces would continue to “hold the line.”

Russian forces claim to have pulled off an audacious operation, using a subterranean pipeline to sneak past Ukrainian defenses. The reported operation coincided with a full-on Kremlin effort to push Kyiv’s forces out of Russia’s Kursk region,

Ukrainian troops sprang one of the biggest surprises of the war by invading Russia's Kursk region last August, and Russia has taken more than seven months to eject them.