Putin visited a control centre used by Russian forces and heard a report from Valery Gerasimov, head of the Russian General Staff, who told him that Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region were now surrounded.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, dressed in fatigues, visited a command post near the front in Kursk late Wednesday to cheer on his military’s ejection of Ukrainian forces from much of the territory they had been occupying in the Russian border region.