The Kremlin announced on Monday that it would not engage in diplomatic talks with Ukraine, given its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
Ukrainian officials have ordered the immediate evacuation of families with children from the eastern city of Pokrovsk, as Russian forces advance rapidly towards the key defensive stronghold. The move comes as the Russia-Ukraine war enters its 906th day.
Russian troops are “advancing at a fast pace. With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions,” officials warned last week, saying that the Russian forces were just 10 kilometres from the outskirts of Pokrovsk.
Pokrovsk residents have just two weeks to leave the city safely, officials said in an interview with the U.S.-funded Radio Liberty.
Pokrovsk, a city with a pre-war population of approximately 60,000, serves as a critical defensive stronghold and logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the Donetsk region.
The Institute for the Study of War said Russian forces have been advancing roughly two square kilometres per day in the Pokrovsk region over the last six months. They have relied on frontal infantry assaults from village to village, notching incremental progress as they make their manpower and materiel advantages tell, the Washington-based think tank said late Sunday.
Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts have stalled. The Kremlin announced on Monday that it would not engage in diplomatic talks with Ukraine, given its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told the Russian Shot Telegram channel, that “at the moment it would be completely inappropriate to enter into a negotiating process”. Ukraine's cross-border attack into the Kursk region marks the first time since World War Two that a foreign army has been fighting inside Russia.