President Volodymyr Zelensky urged allies to allow Ukraine to advance deep into Russian territory after a rocket attack near Kyiv killed two people, and his troops continued to hold ground they seized in a surprise border crossing last week.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its troops fired on Ukrainian soldiers in the western Kursk region to repel the first foreign attack on Russian territory since World War II. The ministry said on Sunday it shot down four missiles and 35 drones over Kursk and surrounding regions overnight.

Moscow had previously said it would send reinforcements to repel Ukraine’s surprise cross-border attack – the largest attack inside Russia since President Vladimir Putin ordered what he called a swift “special military operation” against Ukraine in 2022, now in its third year.

Officials in Kyiv are keeping quiet about their goals, as they did during the counteroffensives in 2022 and 2023. In his evening address on Saturday, Zelensky said that army commander Oleksandr Syrsky was keeping him informed about “our measures to expand the war to the territory of the aggressor,” but did not provide further details.

Zelensky thanked his armed forces for “creating the necessary pressure – pressure on the aggressor.”

Russia attacked several regions of Ukraine with missiles and drones overnight, and explosions were heard from western to eastern regions, local authorities said.

The attack destroyed a residential building in the Brovary district east of the capital. A father and his four-year-old son were killed and at least three others were seriously injured, regional authorities said. Zelensky said the attack was probably carried out with a North Korean missile.

Russian troops continue to push along the front line in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk and are also storming positions in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, the General Staff in Kyiv said on Sunday.

Ukrainian politicians complained that delays in the arrival of promised Western aid were allowing the Kremlin to make slow progress in fighting an army already overwhelmed by a lack of weapons and personnel.

While the Kremlin’s ground forces have made slow progress in recent months, Ukraine has increasingly used drones and missiles to attack military facilities and energy infrastructure – often deep inside Russia.

Russian military bloggers had previously reported that the Ukrainians had advanced up to 37 kilometers deep into the Kursk region. Now they said that the Kiev troops had not managed to make any further breakthroughs overnight.

Fighting over the town of Sudzha, a key transit point for the last remaining pipeline for Russian gas to Europe, has helped push European natural gas prices to their highest levels this year on fears of possible supply disruptions. Russian gas company Gazprom reported on Sunday that gas volumes in Ukraine were within normal range.

Russian evacuations

Russian nuclear company Rosatom said the Kursk nuclear power plant near the town of Kurchatov was operating normally, Tass reported on Saturday. Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Alexei Likhachev, chairman of the board of Rosatom, discussed the situation in a phone call late Friday, the company said in a statement on its website.

Russia’s FSB intelligence agency on Saturday announced an “anti-terror” regime in Kursk and the neighboring border regions of Belgorod and Bryansk, which includes restrictions on movement and communications. The National Anti-Terrorism Committee said this was a response to Ukraine’s “unprecedented” attempt to destabilize the situation.

In response to the fighting, more than 76,000 residents were evacuated from the Russian border areas in the Kursk region. On Friday, the government declared a state of emergency in the region.

In the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, which borders Kursk and other Russian regions, officials have carried out a forced evacuation of up to 20,000 residents from a 10-kilometer-wide area under Russian shelling.

Ukraine’s main allies have endorsed the attack on Kursk. The Pentagon said the move was in line with Washington’s policy on the use of US-made weapons, while the EU said Ukraine had a legitimate right to defend itself, including by attacking Russian territory.