President Volodyymyr Zensky said for the first time on Monday, April 7 that the Ukrainian forces operated in the Belgorod region in Russia, where Moscow reported attacks in March. Belgorod is regularly the objective of Ukrainian air attacks and is close to the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukrainian forces have desperately clung to the territory since it launched a surprise raid last year.
Zensky said in his daily speech that the commander in chief of the country, General Oleksandr Syrsky, had reported on “our presence in the Kursk region and our presence in the Belgorod region.”
“We continually perform active operations in the border areas in the territory of the enemy, and this is absolutely correct: the war must return from where it came from,” Zensky added. It is the first time in the more than three years since the invasion of Russia that Zensky has explicitly mentioned a Ukrainian presence in Belgorod, a region on the border with Ukraine with a population of approximately 1.5 million people.
The Russian army acknowledged that it faces Ukrainian terrestrial attacks in the region in March, at a time when Ukrainian forces were under pressure in Kursk. Zensky and other Ukrainian officials have said that the incursion in Kursk and other Russian territory is to divert the Russian forces that attack the Ukrainian regions of Sumy and Jarkiv.
“The commander in chief reported on the activity of our units along the border, as well as in the so -called gray zone and directly in the enemy territory,” Zensky said in his speech.
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