Putin hails end of Ukraine's Kursk incursion

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed on Saturday what he called the complete failure of an offensive by Ukrainian forces into Russia's Kursk region after they were expelled from the last village Moscow said they had been holding. Putin, speaking amid intensified diplomatic efforts by the Trump administration to end the Ukraine conflict, said that the expulsion of Ukrainian forces from Russian soil opened the way for further Russian successes inside Ukraine.

'The Kyiv regime's adventure has completely failed,' Putin said in video footage released by the Kremlin that showed him receiving a report from the head of Russia's military general staff, Valery Gerasimov. 'The full defeat of the enemy in the Kursk border region creates conditions for further successful actions by our forces on other important parts of the front,' Putin added.

Gerasimov told Putin that the last occupied settlement in the Kursk region, the village of Gornal, had been 'liberated from Ukrainian units' on Saturday. 'Thus the defeat of the armed formations of the Ukrainian armed forces that had attacked the Kursk region has been completed,' Gerasimov said. — Reuters