Thousands' fleeing Ukraine's Kharkiv region into Russia: official

MOSCOW: A Russian official in a southern region bordering Ukraine said on Sunday thousands of people had crossed the border as Kyiv’s army claimed to have pushed back Moscow’s forces in the country’s east.

“Over the past day, thousands of people have crossed the border. Most of them went to relatives in their own vehicles. Today, there are 1,342 people being housed in 27 temporary accommodation centres in the region,” Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod region said in a video statement on social media.

Ukraine said Sunday that its forces were pushing back Russia’s military from strategic holdouts in the east of the country after Moscow announced a retreat from Kyiv’s sweeping counter-offensive.

The speed of Ukraine’s fight back against Russia’s invasion has apparently caught Moscow’s military off-guard, bringing swathes of territory Russia had controlled for months back into Ukraine’s fold.

Crates of dumped munitions and abandoned military hardware were seen scattered in territory left by the Russian forces, images posted by the Ukrainian military showed.

“The liberation of settlements in the Kupiansk and Izyum districts of the Kharkiv region is ongoing,” the Ukrainian military said in a general battlefield update Sunday, 200 days into Russia’s invasion.

These are key supply and logistics hubs that Russia depends on to restock its frontline positions in the east and military observers have said their capture by Ukraine would be a serious blow to Moscow’s military ambitions in Kharkiv.

The head of the Ukrainian military announced early Sunday that as much as 3,000 square kilometres (1,158 square miles) had been wrested from Russia since the offensive began at the beginning of this month.

That figure is already around one-third larger than the total area announced by President Volodymyr Zelensky late Saturday. On Sunday, he announced that Ukraine forces had taken a village of around 4,000 people between Kharkiv and Izyum.