Military authorities in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk on Friday urged civilians to speed up their evacuation as the Russian army rapidly approached what has been one of Moscow’s top targets for months.. Pokrovsk officials said in a Telegram post that Russian troops are “advancing at a rapid pace. With each passing day, there is less time to pack up personal belongings and move to safer regions.” Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine’s key defense strongholds and a vital logistics hub in the eastern Donetsk region. Taking it would jeopardize Ukraine’s defense capabilities and supply routes, bringing Russia closer than ever to its stated goal of taking over the entire region.

Ukraine’s lightning offensive in several Russian border regions is intended to persuade Moscow to hold “fair” talks about the war in Ukraine, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday.“We must inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak wrote on Telegram. “In the Kursk region, we clearly see how military means are being used objectively to force the Russian Federation to enter into a fair negotiation process.”

Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Friday that Kiev’s forces advanced between one and three kilometers in some areas in Russia’s Kursk region.. Ukraine has said it has taken control of 82 settlements covering 1,150 square kilometers in the region after launching a major cross-border attack on August 6. In a video message to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Syrskyi reported fighting in the area of ​​Malaya Loknya, about 11.5 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

It appeared that Ukraine had largely cut off a large part of the Glushovsky district of Kursk, and Russian troops had blown up two important bridges over the Seim River there.A mass evacuation is underway in Glushkov district, home to 20,000 people, and the destruction of a bridge has hampered the evacuation, Russian news agency Tass reported.

Italy’s ambassador to Moscow defended the “independence” of the media on Friday after Russian authorities summoned her over an Italian television report from the contested Kursk region, the Foreign Ministry said.. Cecilia Piccioni faced a “strong protest” because the team of reporters from the Italian broadcaster RAI “illegally entered Russia to cover the criminal terrorist attack by Ukrainian soldiers on the Kursk region,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Piccioni explained during the meeting that RAI “and in particular the editorial offices plan their activities completely freely and independently,” an Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman told Agence France-Presse.

The economic sanctions imposed by the West against Russia would remain in force for decades even if the Ukraine conflict was resolved peacefully, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official said on Friday.. Russia became the country most sanctioned by the West after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, surpassing Iran and North Korea. “This is a story for the next decades. Regardless of the developments and results of a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, in reality this is just a pretext,” said Dmitry Birichevsky, head of the Department of Economic Cooperation at the Foreign Ministry.

Russia on Friday added at least nine more people with links to late opposition leader Alexei Navalny to its blacklist of “terrorists and extremists,” exactly six months after his death in prison.Among those listed were Navalny’s former spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh and the chairwoman of his anti-corruption foundation, Maria Pevchik, according to the website of the Russian financial monitoring service Rosfinmonitoring.

More than 200 vehicles that violated London’s Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) were sent to Ukraine to support the country’s war effort, despite initial legal concerns about the plan.Transport for London said on Friday that 330 vehicles had been given the green light to be shipped to Ukraine under the Ulez scrapping scheme. More than 200 vehicles are already in the Eastern European country.