“Unfortunately, Ukraine does not have sufficient capabilities to launch long-range strikes with the available weapons to protect itself from this terror,” Tykhyi said.

Therefore, “there is a need to liberate these border areas from Russian troops attacking Ukraine or providing cover for terror against Ukrainians,” Tykhyi added. He also said that the Kursk operation prevents Russia from deploying additional troops to ongoing fighting in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, and has successfully disrupted Russian logistics.

The foreign ministry spokesman said that Ukraine’s military actions against targets inside Russia will continue “as long as Putin proceeds with his war effort.”

“These are absolutely legitimate actions on the part of Ukraine, in particular within the framework of… its right to self-defense in accordance with the U.N. Charter,” Tykhyi said. He added: “The sooner Russia agrees to restore a just peace, in particular, based on the Peace Formula [Ukraine’s peace plan, which, among other things, demands the restoration of internationally recognized borders], which leads to this peace, the sooner the raids of Ukraine’s Defense Forces on Russian territory will stop.”

Ukrainian versus Russian military conduct

Tykhyi insisted that the Ukrainian way of waging war is nothing like the conduct of the Russian military in the territories of Ukraine it had occupied.

He said: “The Armed Forces of Ukraine are a civilized European military force that fully complies with the laws and customs of warfare and international humanitarian law. The targets of Ukraine’s Defense Forces are exclusively military forces and military contingents. The purpose of the operation is to preserve the lives of our people and protect Ukraine’s territory from Russian strikes.”

According to the spokesman, Moscow is concerned that there are no recorded instances of Ukrainian forces violating international humanitarian law, which the Kremlin would like to exploit in its propaganda, and that it might therefore be eager to fabricate such incidents by conducting false flag operations, for example, by dressing up its own troops in Ukrainian uniforms.

“We actively appeal to our partners to be ready for such developments and, should there be such attempts on the part of Russia, to remain vigilant and not fall for these traps set up by Russian propaganda,” he said.

Restoring Russia’s understanding of rules of war

Echoing some of the comments by the foreign ministry spokesman, Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said in a post on the Telegram app that the Russian use of its own border regions is “the quintessence of the type of deliberately vile war that Russians always prefer.”

Podolyak said that Russia is deploying artillery, multi-rocket launching systems, small air bases and ballistic missile launchers in its border territories in order to carry out large-scale strikes against Ukrainian civilians, while, “at the same time, it [Russia] is confident that its territory is informally inviolable, and no one will destroy the logistics and infrastructure of the war on the territory of the Russian Federation.”

Podolyak said that the current operations being carried out by Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region are stripping the Russians of that illusion.

“Today, Ukraine is showing that this is not the case. And that there are only two ways to end the war and restore Russia’s understanding of what the rules of war are.”

The first way, according to Podolyak, is to destroy military infrastructure by conducting ground operations against it.

The second way is launching large-scale and regular long-range strikes into the depths of Russian territory.

“But this requires a lot of missiles and the final abandonment of informal bans on the use of these missiles on the territory of the Russian Federation,” Podolyak said.