Panic among residents in Kursk, villages are being emptied, thousands of residents are evacuated

Ukraine launched an armored offensive against Russia's weakly defended Kursk region, causing panic among the civilian population and forcing Moscow to urgently bring in additional troops. Villages near the Russian border were evacuated as hundreds of Ukrainian troops moved forward in fast-moving armored vehicles, The Wall Street Journal reports .
Russia has deployed army units, border guards and warplanes to confront Ukrainian forces and said Wednesday it had stopped Ukrainian forces. Russian military bloggers close to the Russian military said Ukraine had captured several villages and advanced several kilometers in two directions.

Ukrainian officials have not commented, but analysts said the move appeared to be a more serious incursion than previous cross-border raids in other areas that were carried out by lightly armed commandos who retreated after a few days.

"It is obvious that this is something completely new. This is a full-scale army operation," said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based defense think tank CAST.

The purpose of the raid was not immediately clear. Ukraine's front-line defenses are fragile against a larger and better-armed enemy.

Russia is advancing on the key Ukrainian logistics hub of Pokrovsk and is advancing on the nearby town of Chasov Yar, located on strategic heights in the eastern Donbass.

"Ukraine cannot open a second front. They need to stabilise the front line in Donbas," said Nick Reynolds, a research fellow in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

The speed and suddenness of the Ukrainian operation appears to have caught Russian forces by surprise. Ukraine may be hoping that Russia will divert forces from the front in eastern Ukraine, easing the pressure on Ukrainian forces there.

Advancing forward could allow the Ukrainian army to disrupt Russian supply lines to its troops near Kharkov.

The attack also demonstrates that "Ukraine is not done with cross-border raids and that Russia should not sit quietly on its own territory," said Reynolds, a research fellow at RUSI.

While senior Russian officials have downplayed the scale of the Ukrainian offensive, Russian military bloggers and volunteers close to the military say Kyiv's troops have entered a lightly guarded area with unprepared defenses and weak troops.

They reject the official Russian line that the offensive has been halted, arguing that Ukraine is sending in reserves to continue its offensive, while Russia struggles to bring in additional forces from afar.

A state of emergency has been declared in Kursk Oblast , Acting Governor Alexey Smirnov reported. Among the reasons for this decision, he named "the difficult operational situation in the border areas" and the need to eliminate the consequences of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' entry into the region.