Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said today he visited the area on Ukraine’s northeastern border from where Ukrainian forces launched their cross-border offensive in Russia’s Kursk region and hailed the capture of yet another Russian village.

The Ukrainian leader added that he met with his commander-in-chief Oleksandr Sirsky during a visit to the Sumy region more than two weeks after the raid by thousands of Ukrainian soldiers on Russian soil.

“I went to the border region of the Sumy region and met with General Sirsky and the head of the military command of the Sumy region,” Zelensky said in a Facebook post.

According to the Ukrainian president, the Ukrainian army captured “another settlement” in the Kursk region, bringing the number of settlements that Kiev says it has captured to 94, and more Russian soldiers captured.

Zelensky also released video showing himself shaking Sirsky’s hand and hugging him. The operation in Russia’s Kursk region has boosted the morale of the Ukrainian military after months of slow but steady gains by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that Moscow will give a “worthy response” to the invasion, which he described as a major challenge.

However, despite the attack on Kursk, the Russian army continues to advance on the eastern front and is within ten kilometers of Pokrovsk, an important logistics hub in this sector.

In this context, Zelensky emphasized that he discussed today “measures taken to strengthen the defense” of Pokrovsk, as well as that of Toretsk, another city in eastern Ukraine that is under threat of being captured by the Russian army.

In the meantime, a source within the Ukrainian security services (SBU) announced today to AFP that Ukraine hit a Russian air base in Marinovka, Volgograd region, located more than 300 kilometers from the border.

“The SBU in cooperation with the Ukrainian armed forces attacked warehouses of remote-controlled aerial bombs and fuel at the Marinovka airport,” which is used to “bomb the front line in Ukraine,” the source noted.

Volgograd regional governor Andrey Bocharov said today that debris from a downed Ukrainian drone caused a fire “at a Defense Ministry facility,” without elaborating.

The Russian news agency TASS has reported that at least 31 civilians have been killed and 143 injured in the Ukrainian attack in the Kursk region.