Moscow promises 'tough response' to Ukraine's offensive inside Russia

We reported earlier claims by Russian officials that 13 people were injured late on Saturday when the wreckage of a downed Ukrainian missile fell on a multi-storey building in Kursk's regional capital, Kursk.

That number has now gone up - 15 people are known to have been injured, according to regional governor Aleksei Smirnov, who says they are all being currently treated.

And we now have photos showing the destruction.

Smirnov now says temporary accommodation has been offered to the affected residents - but they have decided to move to their relatives' houses instead.

The residents will also get compensation, Smirnov adds.

A group of soldiers have filmed themselves raising a Ukrainian flag while trampling a Russian one in a video uploaded to social media this morning and located by BBC Verify to an administrative building in the village of Guevo, in the Kursk region of Russia.

This village is just over 3km (1.8 miles) into Russia.

It's one of several videos BBC Verify has analysed showing Ukrainian soldiers in Russian settlements in the Kursk and Belgorod regions since the incursion began six days ago.

Another, published yesterday, shows a Russian flag being torn from an administration building in Sverdlikovo, while two others, also published in recent days, are confirmed by BBC Verify to show Ukrainian troops in Poroz and outside a gas distribution branch in Sudzha.

These videos are recently indexed by search engines, and therefore likely to have been recently uploaded to the internet, but it's unclear precisely when they were filmed.

Sumy activity suggests this is more than a smash and grab

Since Russian forces tried and failed to capture territory here in 2022, the northern Sumy region had experienced a relative reprieve from the fighting.

Over recent months, that started to change as Russian forces both gathered on the border and increased air strikes on the border.

It’s in this part of the country that Ukraine now seems to be seizing the initiative across the border - 50km from where we are today.

The steady flow of personnel carriers, tanks and supply trucks suggests they are committed to this offensive as well.

“It’s a good a thing, they need to be punished,” says Liubov, a caretaker at a village school towards the Russian border.

She’s helping clear debris from a glide bomb that landed next to the main building. There’s a large crater outside the entrance.

This week, Ukrainian military expert Mykhaylo Samus repeated his claim that Kyiv “can seize the initiative from Russia only in a non-standard way, asymmetrically”.

After acknowledging the cross-border offensive for the first time last night, it seems President Zelensky was thinking the same.

We're receiving some fresh reaction from Russia, with officials vowing a "tough response" to Ukraine's latest reported attacks on several regions in the country, in addition to the Moscow-controlled part of Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said in a statement: "The Kyiv regime is continuing its terrorist activity with the sole purpose of intimidating the peaceful population of Russia."

She adds that Ukraine "understands perfectly well" that the recent attacks "make no sense from a military point of view".

The Russian spokeswoman mentioned several attacks in the past 24 hours, including what she said was a "massive" overnight strike on the regional capital Kursk.

Earlier, the local governor for Kursk said 13 people had been injured when the wreckage of a Ukrainian missile fell on the multi-storey building in the city.

Ukraine's air force says 53 drones shot down overnight

Some updated figures now on the overnight attack that Russia carried out across Ukraine last night.

Ukraine's Air Force has recently said that they shot down 53 of 57 attack drones (UAVs).

A post on the force's Telegram account lists a number of regions where the drones were destroyed, including Odesa, Kyiv, Sumy and Cherkasy.

It also goes on to say that four North Korean missiles were used as part of the attack, a report that the BBC was unable to verify.

This update does not specify what happened to those four, but it went on to claim that those kinds of projectiles rarely reach the desired targets.

Earlier, President Zelensky said the overnight attack just east of the capital that killed two people involved a North Korean-made missile.

Men are seen at a site of a residential building heavily damaged during a Russian missile strike in the village of Rozhivka in Kyiv region on 11 August

Ukraine's incursion shows Russia's war is not going to plan

As we've been reporting this morning, Ukraine's cross-border offensive into Russia began last Tuesday.

Before Zelensky's confirmation of the incursion last night, our Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg had considered how the war has progressed since Moscow's full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

"The expectation was that it would take a matter of days, a few weeks maximum, for Russia to establish control over its neighbour," Rosenberg writes.

"That was nearly two-and-a-half years ago.

"The war in Ukraine rages on. It has not gone at all as Moscow had intended."

-BBC