Catherine Norris Trent takes us to frontlines of Ukrainian-controlled towns in Russia's Kursk region

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00:00Now on the ground in Ukraine, the Russian army says it has captured two more

00:05villages in the east, in the Donetsk region. Russian forces have advanced in

00:10the east at their fastest rate in two years, that was last month. The Kremlin

00:15spokesman Dmitry Peskov describing the dynamic on the front line there as

00:19positive. Well those are reported gains come despite a Ukrainian incursion onto

00:27Russian soil designed to divert Russian troops. The attack on the Kursk region

00:32began in August, it is the first assault on Russian territory by a foreign army

00:37since the Second World War. And our senior reporter Catherine Norris Trent

00:41was one of a small number of journalists who was recently able to travel to the

00:47Ukrainian controlled parts of Kursk embedded with the Ukrainian army.

00:51Catherine is with me now, we'll talk to her in a few minutes, but first here's

00:56her report from Kursk.

01:02In an armoured vehicle speeding down a bomb cratered road, we're heading into

01:08territory proudly seized by Ukraine. We're being taken by the Ukrainian army

01:14into Russian territory, into the Kursk region, part of which they've been

01:20occupying since the beginning of August, when Ukraine mounted a lightning offensive

01:25and breached the Russian border in a move which surprised many of Ukraine's

01:31allies. We pass Russian road signs and see plumes of smoke on the horizon. We're

01:39taken to two villages in Kursk we're not allowed to name for security reasons.

01:46Ukrainian officers tell us some 2,000 Russian civilians remain in the areas

01:51they control. Some locals come to collect food parcels, but are largely suspicious

01:57or hostile to the Ukrainian troops. Putin is Putin, he's a great guy.

02:05What can I say about him? He knows what he's doing.

02:11Why don't you just take us all out and shoot us? You think everything's our fault.

02:17Oleksii is the Ukrainian commander charged with overseeing the Russian population here.

02:25He tries to convince them of the realities of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

02:40We've been to other cities where the Russians have been.

02:45It's the same in the Kursk region. Irpen, Bucha.

02:52No, it's not true.

02:55It's not true?

02:57No, it's not true.

03:00For 20 years they've been suffering from Russian propaganda, from the large

03:09quantity of lies that were poured into their ears and minds.

03:16President Zelensky says that Ukraine has taken more than 1,300 square kilometers

03:24inside Kursk. Russia disputes those figures, but Ukraine has taken over

03:30scores of settlements. The situation on the ground remains unstable. We're

03:33hearing quite a lot of artillery fire and battle sounds from not too far off.

03:40Oleksii takes us to see some of the damage from the ongoing fighting.

03:46This house was bombed last week. When I arrived, it was still smoking.

03:57In the settlements where the Ukrainian military is stationed, the shelling is

04:01constant. We didn't even go to the larger town today because there are so

04:05many drones attacking there.

04:08It's unclear how long Ukraine can hold this territory. Russian troops are

04:13massing for a counter-offensive to take back all of Kursk, which is already

04:17underway. Ukraine hopes this will draw them away from other fragile front

04:23lines.

04:27Catherine Norris-Trent is with me now. Take us behind the scenes of your

04:32reporting. How did you find access and filming during your embed with the

04:37Ukrainian army?

04:43We were taken in by the Ukrainian army as part of a small group of

04:48journalists. Impossible to access by oneself, of course, and impossible for

04:54us to access via the Russian side, where we haven't been given visas for

04:59quite some time. We were allowed to film whatever we wanted, apart from

05:04military vehicles. The Ukrainian army was very anxious not to give away any

05:09of its locations because they are being targeted daily by Russian attacks

05:14in this counter-offensive. Vladimir Putin has said that he wants to take

05:20back the whole of the Kursk region. It is being reported by October. It is

05:25a pretty intensive fight. You could hear some of the artillery there.

05:28There was even more off-camera. We were allowed to speak to whichever

05:32civilians we wanted to, including ones you saw in our report who

05:36definitely hadn't yet been convinced by Ukraine's argument. We were not

05:42given restrictions on what we were allowed to broadcast from them. In

05:47terms of the restrictions, they were mainly only on the security side.

05:51Off-camera, soldiers telling us the battle is intense, it is dynamic,

05:56that was the word one of them used, so fast-moving. The situation is

06:00changing hands. We had been due to go to another location, but at the

06:03last minute we couldn't go there because there were just too many

06:06attacks. One soldier told us that in the 24 hours preceding our visit,

06:11there had been 80 attack drones or missiles, including guide bombs,

06:16fired by Russia onto what is part of its own territory inside the Kursk

06:21region. Catherine, I know that there were parts of this story that you

06:25weren't able to show us in the film itself. Tell us a bit about what we

06:29actually didn't see. I mean, there were so many things we got in our

06:35very quick visit there, but the civilians who were left behind are

06:39often people who are sick or elderly, and often they have been cut off

06:42from their families elsewhere in the Kursk region, in what is still

06:46controlled by the Russian government. So they are desperate to evacuate

06:50and they are asking to evacuate. The Ukrainian soldiers at this point

06:54are saying, well, Russia is not allowing us to, and they have called

06:57for the UN and the Red Cross to have access to Kursk to assess the

07:01humanitarian needs. But they want access to telephones, which they

07:04say they don't have. They want to be able to speak to family members.

07:08Ukraine says it is giving them food, some humanitarian aid and water

07:12trucks now. So they are getting the basics of life, but life for them is

07:18very difficult day-to-day. Of course, we couldn't spend much time there

07:22with them experiencing as much as that, because our trip reporting there

07:27lasted for a few hours for security reasons. And as you said a bit

07:31earlier, civilians were relatively free to talk to you. The Ukrainian

07:35army were happy for you to do that. But were people in general willing to

07:39talk to you? Were they interested in speaking to foreign media? A few

07:46people weren't, but surprisingly, we found that most people wanted to

07:51engage with us. Some of them perhaps hadn't had much contact with the

07:54outside world. Some of them thought that by speaking out, maybe they

07:58could get help to evacuate as well. Some of them wanted to express their

08:02anger, and you saw that pouring out on the streets now. And you saw the

08:07very different vision they have of the world. Some Russians we spoke to

08:14there in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Kursk for now, they said that

08:19they thought the war had started on the 6th of August. That is when

08:23Ukraine's lightning incursion began. They didn't believe that it had

08:27started, some of them, on the 24th of February 2022. They believed what

08:33has been said on Russian state media and pumped out in the Kremlin's

08:37messaging machine that Ukraine had invaded Russia. Some of them asking

08:42us if President Zelensky was a Nazi. So a lot of these talking points

08:48that have been Kremlin talking points have clearly got through right down

08:52to this point near the Ukrainian border. And just a final thought

08:56from you then, Catherine. Zelensky is in the United States right now, the

09:01Ukrainian president. He is due to speak to Joe Biden a bit later on

09:05this week about his so-called victory plan to end the war. How does Kursk

09:10tie into that? This is very much part of Ukraine's victory plan as

09:19President Zelensky has named it. We have spoken to officials, including

09:23one of his closest advisers, who said this is one of the ways of putting

09:28military pressure on Russia to force it to end the war. They have tried

09:32sitting down at the negotiating table before and that didn't come to

09:35anything. So they hope to coerce Russia by military means, expressly

09:40including the incursion into Kursk, saying that by taking the war to

09:44Russian territory, they can give Russia perhaps a taste of what

09:48they have been experiencing and put Putin in a difficult position in

09:52which he might be forced to make concessions. They also hope that it

09:56will move troops away from other front lines, which are vulnerable at

10:00the moment, especially in the east, in the Donbass. They want to try and

10:04prevent advances there. It has also already proved useful, one of them

10:08told us, in terms of prisoner exchanges. The Ukrainians, when they

10:12made this incursion, captured quite a large number of Russian prisoners.

10:16Some of them have already been exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of

10:20war, including some defenders of Azovstal. There are several tactical

10:28advantages to Ukraine of this incursion. Of course, it is coming at

10:32a heavy cost. I was at a military funeral the other day of a man who

10:36was killed in this offensive. So that is proving to be a difficult battle

10:40and we don't know exactly what the casualty figures or death toll

10:44figures or positions are because that is a tightly guarded secret. But

10:48of course, there will be a cost to it for Ukraine as well. Catherine

10:52Norris-Trent speaking to us about her reporting from the Kursk region of

10:55Russia. Thank you very much.

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