wounded during a Ukrainian drone strike.
Nikolai Volobuyev, head of the Belovsky District in the Kursk region, was seriously injured in the strike. While details remain unclear, it is not yet known whether this was a targeted assassination attempt.
Volobuyev was urgently transported to a hospital, where he remains in serious condition but is reportedly stable.
The Belovsky District, located east of the Sudzha District—which was mostly occupied by Ukrainian forces from last August until this March—also experienced Ukrainian incursions last year before troops were pushed back by Russian forces.
Volobuyev’s injuries come amid a sharp uptick in Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory. Russian authorities have reported record numbers of civilian casualties as a result.
On Friday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that 788 drones were fired onto Russian territory the previous night.
On Wednesday night into Thursday morning, 16 people, including two children, were injured in a missile strike on the city of Lgov, also in the Kursk region. The attack was reportedly carried out using U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets.
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would establish a “security buffer zone” along the entirety of the Russia-Ukraine border. During a virtual meeting with officials from Russia’s border regions, Putin cited the growing threat from Western-supplied long-range artillery as the reason for enhancing border security.
Putin stated that the buffer zone would initially include the Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk regions, which cover the Chernigov, Sumy and Kharkov regions of Ukraine. However, on Friday, Viktor Sobolev, a member of Russia’s State Duma, expanded on the plan, saying the zone would also cover the Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Nikolaev regions. This appears to suggest Russia intends the buffer zone to extend into Ukrainian-administered areas including parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and the Donbas—territories Russia has claimed as its own following the referendums held in 2022.