Russia said on Sunday that Ukraine had launched a counter-attack in the Kursk region, an area of western Russia from which Russian troops have been trying to eject Ukrainian forces for the past five months.

Russian forces continue to make costly but consistent gains in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. They are steadily grinding down a pocket of resistance around the town of Kurakhove in the southern Donbas region and are also fighting to envelop the larger city of Pokrovsk to the north, Ukrainian soldiers and officials said.

A Russian guided bomb attack on Saturday wounded 10 people, including two children, in a village in Ukraine's northeastern Sumy region, near the Russian border, local authorities said.

Russia’s defence ministry may believe its forces are “defeating” Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the Kursk region, but Vladimir Putin clearly doesn’t.

Ukrainian forces started a surprising ground offense against Russia in August in the Kursk region but then began to lose ground after Russia deployed up to 12,000 North Korean troops in the region in its nearly three-year-long war in Ukraine.