Fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and ‘a second front’ in Africa, Moscow says

Did you miss the latest developments on the war in Ukraine? 20 minutes gives you an update every evening. Between strong statements, advances on the front and the results of the fighting, here is the essential information from this Wednesday, August 7, the 896th day of conflict.

The fact of the day

The Russian army reported on Wednesday that fighting was “continuing” in the Kursk region, bordering Ukraine, which has been the scene of an incursion by Ukrainian troops since the day before and was targeted by strikes that have left at least five civilians dead. According to the head of the Russian general staff, Valery Gerasimov, Ukrainian forces entered this Russian region on Tuesday with nearly 1,000 soldiers, a dozen tanks and twenty armored vehicles. Kiev, for its part, has remained largely silent on this operation. Only a source within the Ukrainian security services (SBU) claimed responsibility to AFP for the destruction in flight by a small drone of a Russian Mi-28 helicopter, which would be a “first in the history of warfare.”

According to the Telegram channel Rybar, followed by more than a million people and close to the Russian army, Ukrainian troops have seized three villages in the Kursk region. Several incursions into Russia by fighters from Ukraine have taken place since the start of the conflict in February 2022. The Russian army has each time claimed to have repelled them, but some of them have led it to resort to artillery and aviation, as is the case for the one on Tuesday.

The number of the day

6.5. Andrei Kurshin, creator of the Telegram channel “Moscow Calling”, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for spreading “false” information about the conflict, because of two publications mentioning Russian bombings. According to Mediazona, a media outlet specializing in monitoring legal cases, Andrei Kurshin fought against Ukraine from 2014 on the side of pro-Russian separatists supported by Moscow in the east of the country. He then adopted a more moderate and critical position towards the most radical supporters of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.

Quote of the day

All my clothes were taken away from me in Lefortovo [centre de détention du FSB, les services russes de sécurité]. For shoes, I had rubber flip-flops that I used to shower in. The director of the center said to me: “So, you’re going to wear these.” So I arrived in my boxer shorts, a T-shirt and shower slippers. »

These are the words of pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Mourza, who arrived in Germany on August 1st as part of a prisoner exchange between Moscow and the West. With him were twelve other Russian and dual-national opponents. Vladimir Kara-Mourza recounted how he left the penal colony in Siberia, where he was serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence, in his underpants, armed only with his Russian identity card. To the point of envying, he would say, his comrade Ilya Yashin, who was expelled in his prison uniform and with only “a toothbrush and toothpaste” for luggage. Of all the prisoners released from Vladimir Putin’s jails, only Kara-Mourza was expelled in his underwear.

Today’s trend

Russia accuses Ukraine of opening “a second front” in Africa by supporting “terrorist groups.” “Unable to defeat Russia on the battlefield, the criminal regime of (Volodymyr) Zelensky has decided to open a ‘second front’ in Africa and supports terrorist groups in states on the continent that are favorable to Moscow,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was quoted as saying by the Ria Novosti agency.

His remarks come more than a week after an attack in Mali in which dozens of Wagner group fighters and Malian soldiers were killed, according to separatists and jihadists. The defeat was the heaviest suffered in a battle by the Wagner group in Africa, analysts agree.

Our file on the war in Ukraine

After these unprecedented events, a Ukrainian military intelligence official, Andriy Yusov, implied that kyiv had provided information to the rebels so that they could carry out their attack. These remarks provoked the ire of the Malian authorities, who accused Yusov of having thus “admitted Ukraine’s involvement in a cowardly, treacherous and barbaric attack”, accusing Kiev of “supporting international terrorism”.

In the wake of this, Mali broke off diplomatic relations with kyiv, followed on Tuesday by Niger. Ukraine immediately regretted a “hasty” decision by Bamako, firmly rejecting “the accusations of the transitional government of Mali.”

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