President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that he visited the northern region of Sumy, from where Ukraine launched a major incursion into neighboring Russia’s Kursk region in August.

“Today I started my visit to the Sumy region with a meeting with our soldiers who are fighting in the Kursk region, defending the border areas and the entire state,” he said in a post on the Telegram app.

Nearly two months after the surprise invasion, Kiev’s troops control parts of the Russian border region, although the pace of the advance has slowed and Moscow’s forces have begun to fight back.

“It is vital to understand that the operation in Kursk is something really strategic, something that gives our partners an incentive, an incentive to be with Ukraine, to be more decisive and to put pressure on Russia,” Zelensky said in the post of Telegram.

The president, flanked by army commander Oleksandr Sirsky, in his meeting with the men of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, thanked the army for defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

He said the invasion, which Ukraine says brings the war back to Russia, had “greatly helped” Kiev secure the last packages of military aid from the West.

“We have to motivate the whole world and convince them that Ukrainians can be stronger than the enemy,” he said addressing the military.

Zelensky added that he had a meeting with his own military command, with whom he discussed the situation on the front lines and the energy situation in the Sumy region. Russia is hitting regional power infrastructure, causing power outages.

Today it was announced that due to the drone attack on an energy plant, part of the Sumi region was left without electricity. The Ukrainian electricity company Ukrenergo was forced “in order not to overload the equipment in the main network, to carry out planned blackouts in the Sumy and Poltava regions.