Putin says Ukraine's Kursk offensive has failed

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday slammed Ukraine's roughly one-month offensive in the Russian Kursk region, saying Kiev had failed to achieve its goals and done nothing to stop the Russian army.

The Ukrainian army's plan was to unsettle Russia and stop the Russian advance in the Donbass, Putin said.

"Has the adversary succeeded in this? No, he has achieved nothing," Putin said at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

Rather, he said, there are now more Russian conquests in the Donetsk region than there have been for a long time because Ukrainian officials would rather let its better trained units fight in Kursk than in their own country.

Russian society has consolidated and there are more and more volunteers for front-line deployment, he said.

Russian armed forces have begun to push the Ukrainian army out of the border region in the Kursk area, the president added.

"We must above all think of the people who are going through severe trials and suffering from these terrorist attacks," he said, adding that overall, the situation has stabilized.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has justified the offensive, which began on August 6, by saying he wanted to increase pressure on Russia to negotiate.

Zelensky had described the invasion of around 10,000 soldiers as a success after they brought dozens of villages and hundreds of square kilometres under their control.

The Ukrainian leader added that many Russian prisoners of war had been taken for a possible new exchange.

Putin talks of willingness to negotiate

Shortly after the Kursk offensive, the Russian leadership was fairly negative about the chance for a negotiated settlement. However in Vladivostok, Putin again reaffirmed his willingness to negotiate on the basis of the agreements reached in Istanbul between delegations from Moscow and Kiev shortly after the war began in February 2022.

The conditions laid out in those negotiations, which were first reported this year, called for Ukraine to stop pursuing membership of NATO in exchange for a ceasefire.

There was no agreement in part because Ukraine did not believe there would be any security guarantees should the deal be signed. On top of that, the provisional agreement still called for Ukraine to give up some of its territory.

Meanwhile on the ground, Russia attacked Ukraine with 78 Iranian-made combat drones overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force said on Thursday, adding that air defences were able to destroy 60 of them.

A further 15 were pushed off course by electronic warfare systems, while two drones "returned" to Russia and one flew into Belarusian airspace, the air force said on Telegram.

An Iskander missile was also launched from the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, it said. There was no reports of damage or casualties from the assault.

An air raid warning was in place in Kiev for nine hours overnight due to the constant drone threat. Anti-aircraft fire was also heard briefly over the city of 3 million people. Authorities said there was no damage.