Putin is in a dilemma as Ukraine reins missiles while advancing deeper into Russia.

President Vladimir Putin is facing a dilemma, according to U.S. President Joe Biden, after Ukraine said on Wednesday that its soldiers had advanced farther into Russia’s Kursk area, marking the largest foreign invasion of Russia since World War Two.

In what Putin called a significant provocation intended to gain a better hand in potential future ceasefire talks, thousands of Ukrainian forces broke across the Russian border early on August 6 and entered Russia’s western Kursk region.

Despite Putin’s assurances that the Russian army would drive the Ukrainian troops out, almost a week of fierce fighting has not succeeded in driving them from their portion of the Kursk border region in Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, reported on Wednesday that the forces of Kyiv had advanced another one to two km in the Kursk region.

“From one to two kilometres in various areas since the start of the day, we continue to advance further in the Kursk region,” Zelenskiy stated in a statement posted on Telegram and more than a hundred Russian POWs throughout that time.”

Overnight, 117 Ukrainian drones were shot down within Russian territory, primarily in the regions of Kursk, Voronezh, Belgorod, and Nizhny Novgorod, according to Russia’s defense ministry.

It showed footage of Sukhoi Su-34 planes hitting Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region and claimed that missiles had also been intercepted.

The front has stabilized, pro-Russian war bloggers claimed, and the ministry later reported that Russian forces had repulsed a string of Ukrainian strikes inside the Kursk region, including at Russkoye Porechnoye, 18 km (11 miles) from the border.

A Ukrainian security source, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the Ukrainian drone attack targeted four Russian military airfields to weaken Russia’s capacity to attack Ukraine with glide bombs.

At the Kursk nuclear power facility, which is only 35 km (22 miles) from the conflict, the Russian National Guard announced that it was stepping up protection.

The story of the 2.5-year-old conflict has undergone a significant alteration as a result of the Ukrainian invasion of Russian territory.

With Kyiv’s 2023 counteroffensive failing to produce significant advances against Russian forces, Russia has been advancing in eastern Ukraine.