Russia said on Monday it had struck Ukrainian forces at more than a dozen places along the front in the Kursk region of western Russia where Ukraine has carved out a slice of territory after smashing through the Russian border 20 days ago.

Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers punched through the border on Aug. 6 in a surprise attack that Russian President Vladimir Putin said was aimed at improving Kyiv's negotiating position ahead of possible talks and slowing the advance of Russian forces along the front.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that his forces had advanced up to 3 kilometres (1.86 miles) in Russia's Kursk region, taking control of two more settlements there.

Russia said it had struck Ukraine's 22nd and 115th Mechanized Brigades, the 82nd Airborne Assault Brigade, and a Guard and Support Brigade in at least 12 different places with air strikes, artillery and infantry.

Moscow said it had also repelled attacks at seven additional places in Kursk and had struck Ukrainian forces at 16 other locations in Ukraine's neighbouring Sumy region.

"Units of the northern group of forces, with the support of army aviation and artillery fire, repelled attacks by enemy assault groups in the direction of the settlements of Kremyanoye, Malaya Loknya and Nechayev," Russia's defence ministry said in a statement.

It said Russian forces had also "thwarted attempts to attack in the direction of Komarovka, Spalnoye, Korenevo, Pogrebky and Olgovka."

The ministry said it was seeking to identify and destroy Ukrainian sabotage units which had hidden in the forests in an attempt to penetrate deeper into Russian sovereign territory.

While the Kursk incursion has grabbed headlines, Russian officials say the attack will fail to draw Russian forces away from the east of Ukraine where they are still advancing. They also say it will ensnare thousands of Ukrainian troops in a new front which has little strategic or tactical importance.

The Kremlin said on Monday that there would have to be a Russian response to Ukraine's incursion, and that the idea of ceasefire talks with Kyiv was no longer relevant.

Putin has said that Ukraine will receive a "worthy response" but has yet to set out in public what that response is.

Since the incursion, Russia said that Ukraine had lost 73 tanks, 61 armoured personnel carriers and 404 armoured combat vehicles in the Kursk region. Reuters was unable to verify battlefield reports from either side.

Russia also gave estimates for Ukrainian losses in Kursk, but Reuters does not publish combatant estimates from either side.

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Russian attacks on Ukraine kill 4 and injure 37, local authorities say

Russia launched attacks on northern, eastern and southern Ukraine, killing at least four people and injuring 37, Ukrainian military and local authorities said on Sunday.

Overnight attacks targeted Ukraine's frontline regions of Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Donetsk, Ukraine's air force said on the Telegram messaging app.

Russia has been pummelling Ukrainian border regions with strikes, and Kyiv said its surprise incursion earlier this month into Russia's Kursk region aimed to hinder Moscow's ability to stage such attacks.

"Most of the missiles did not reach their targets," the air force said, adding that Russia launched an Iskander-M ballistic missile, an Iskander-K cruise missile and six guided air missiles. It did not specify how many were destroyed.

A missile attack on the northern region of Sumy killed one person, injuring at least 16 more, including three children, local authorities said on Telegram.

Oleh Sinehubov, governor of the Kharkiv region in the east, posted that at least 13 people were injured in the Russian attacks, including a 4-year-old child.

Ihor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv city, said a gas pipeline was damaged in the city and at least two houses were destroyed and 10 damaged.

The air force said Russia launched nine attack drones, with Ukraine's air defence systems destroying eight of them over the Mykolaiv region.

Russian attacks continued throughout the day in the southern region of Kherson, killing one person and injuring six more, according to Roman Mrochko, head of Kherson city's military administration.

Regional prosecutors in Sumy said an aerial bomb attack on Sunday afternoon struck a residential neighbourhood in the Svesa village, killing two people and injuring two more.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy says more territory seized in ongoing Kursk incursion

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his forces have seized more territory in Kursk as they advance deeper into the Russian region.

In his nightly video address he said Ukrainian troops had advanced up to three kilometres and taken control of two more settlements, without naming them.

Speaking to members of the foreign press in the capital Kyiv earlier on Sunday, Zelenskyy said that the incursion into Kursk was launched "preventively" in order to stop Russia from occupying the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Sumy.

"Russia prepared an invasion of the Kharkiv region and wanted to occupy millions of people in the city of Kharkiv. Today 1.5 million people live there because Russia attacked this direction and destroyed houses in small towns and villages of Kharkiv region," he said.

"People came to Kharkiv and there are now 1.5 million people there. Russia wants to occupy this city, it was part of their operation, but we disrupted this offensive."

Zelenskyy's comments come after a British national working for Reuters was killed in a Russian strike on a hotel in Kramatorsk.

The body of safety advisor Ryan Evans was found under the rubble on Sunday after a missile hit the Hotel Sapphire in the eastern Ukrainian city the night before.

Four of the six injured are part of the same Reuters team. One of them is Ukrainian, and the other three are foreigners from the US, Latvia and Germany.

Two were being treated in the hospital on Sunday.

Local officials said that the hotel had been struck by an Iskander ballistic missile, leaving the news team with blast injuries, concussion and cuts on the body.

Reporters at the scene described the former hotel as "rubble", with excavators still being used to clear debris hours after the attack.

Meanwhile, residents in Ukraine's Sumy region, just over the border from Kursk, are subject to almost constant shelling by Russian forces.

"Most of the strikes hit civilians. In the last round, they are also attacking with the help of KAB guided bombs," said Vadim Mysnik, a spokesperson for the Siversk Operational and Tactical Group.

Further south in the Donetsk region, evacuations continue as the Russian army advances more rapidly in eastern Ukraine.

People have been forced to leave frontline villages and towns to escape the shelling.

"There is no one left in our house at all. Maybe two apartments are occupied in the stairwell. Of course, they are leaving. Look, the last dentist's office was moved and now the pharmacy. We are left without any pharmacy," said Myrnohrad resident, Galina.

Ukrainian military and regional authorities said on Sunday that Russian attacks on northern, eastern and southern Ukraine had killed at least four people and injured 37 on Sunday.

Ukraine's air force said on Telegram that overnight strikes had targeted the frontline regions of Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Donetsk.

But despite Zelenskyy's claim that the Kursk incursion was supposed to create a buffer zone to prevent attacks on Ukraine, Russia has continued to pummel border regions.

"Most of the missiles did not reach their targets," the air force said in a statement without specifying how many had been destroyed.

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Ukraine's daring strike on Kursk boosts Kyiv's morale, may put Putin in a box

Three weeks after Ukraine's bold assault on Russia's Kursk region, experts are still trying to determine the long-term impact on a war that has dragged on for more than two and a half years.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the offensive has created a "buffer zone" to curb Russian attacks on the cities of Kharkiv and Sumy while also draining Russian reserves. Those goals did not stop Russia from launching a massive attack with missiles and drones across Ukraine on Monday, killing at least five people and cutting off power and water to millions around the war-battered nation.

"Like most previous Russian strikes, this one was just as vile, targeting critical civilian infrastructure," Zelenskyy said, again imploring the West to allow use of its weapons to strike deeper into Russia.

John Kirby, a National Security Council spokesperson, said Monday that there was no change in the U.S. weapons policy. But he called Russia's latest attack "outrageous," saying it targeted more than two dozen critical energy sites.

"This is a classic play out of the playbook for Vladimir Putin to go after energy infrastructure, particularly as he knows the weather's about to turn and people are going to need heat and power," Kirby said at a White House briefing.

Even before Monday's attack, Ukrainians were evacuating areas of the Donetsk region as the Russian army continued its eastern advance. Still, the Ukraine forces that swept into Kursk and took hundreds of Russian soldiers prisoner maintained their grip on almost 500 square miles, a small fraction of the region that is home to more than 1 million Russians.

Russia gets 'taste of its own medicine'

Zev Faintuch, head of Research and Intelligence at the Global Guardian international security firm, told USA TODAY the offensive has a “taste-of-your-own-medicine logic to it." Faintuch questions the tactical benefits but says the offensive has boosted Ukrainian morale and diminished Russian morale.

The offensive also signals to Western supporters that with more support it can do serious damage to Russia’s military and economic infrastructure, Faintuch says. And it could fuel domestic dissent in Moscow while providing an opportunity to trade land in a diplomatic settlement.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, in an assessment of the war, said Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be demanding his military take back the seized territory without sacrificing the stability of his regime or slowing the Russian offensive into eastern Ukraine. Also off the table: "firing his incompetent but loyal lieutenants," the assessment says.

The results of such a strategy are too early to forecast, the assessment adds.

Putin blames US, West for Kursk incursion

Putin has blamed the West for the stunning breach, although U.S. officials have said they had no prior knowledge of the incursion. Putin called it a 'major provocation" and once again accused the U.S. of using Ukrainians as proxies. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a top Putin adviser,  said Russia should now expand its goals to include seizing all of Ukraine and to "mercilessly defeat and destroy the enemy."

Joe Chafetz, an intelligence analyst at Global Guardian, says the incursion – while far from decisive – has forced Russia to make difficult choices. It also reveals the possibility that Putin might not be able to end the war on his own terms, Chafetz said.

"If nothing else, Kyiv’s foray into Kursk has demonstrated that Ukrainian forces are capable of complicated mechanized advances," he said. And if Ukraine can replicate the success, Russia’s strategy of incremental and irreversible advance could fail, he said.

Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, was an adviser to Putin foe Alexei Navalny before Navalny's mysterious death in a Russian prison six months ago. Luzin says he is unsure what the reports that Ukraine is controlling more than 90 Kursk villages really mean. If a few Ukrainian soldiers drive into a town and no one stops them, do they control it?

"Villages and cities ... are now in the Ukrainian military sphere of influence because the city administrations, by and large, ran away," he said at a forum last week, adding that "we don't know if we are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of this military operation (that) will only be understood over time."

Russian citizens may have little interest in Ukraine

Luzin also says the apparently complete indifference of Russian society toward the Ukraine offensive might be an indicator of indifference for the Putin's goals of seizing the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts − provinces - in Ukraine and holding on to Crimea, territory Russia seized a decade ago that Ukraine is struggling to recover.

That raises the question of how much sacrifice Russian citizens are willing to make in Ukraine.

"What does it mean for us? What does it mean for Ukraine?" Luzin said. "It means that if Russians do not care about Kursk, they will never care about Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and other occupied territories of Ukraine."

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