Moscow’s troops have retaken a few villages in a border area that Kyiv’s forces invaded last month and are also advancing steadily in eastern Ukraine.

"(Russia) tried to attack from the flanks, but they were stopped there," spokesperson Oleksii Dmytrashkivskyi told AFP.

Russia said on Friday that its army would regain control of its Kursk region "in a timely manner", declining to say how soon this could be achieved.

Russia has taken two villages in the western Kursk region, a senior commander said, as Russian forces advance against thousands of Ukrainian forces who smashed through the Russian border last month.

According to documents obtained by the Ukrainian military and shared with The Guardian, Russia's military command foresaw Ukraine's August 6 incursion and failed to act on warnings from those in the region. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment on the reports.

Russian commanders anticipated that Ukraine was planning an incursion into Kursk Oblast months before it occurred, the Guardian reported on Sept. 20, citing a collection of documents that Ukrainian soldiers said they had seized from abandoned Russian positions.

Russia's counteroffensive to retake Ukrainian-held territory in the Kursk region has been "stopped", a spokesman from Ukraine's military administration there told AFP on Wednesday, after Moscow said i