Washington:

Ukraine’s cross-border incursion into Russia is giving President Vladimir Putin a “real dilemma,” US President Joe Biden said Tuesday in his first comments on Kyiv’s surprise attack.

“It’s creating a real dilemma for Putin, and we’ve been in direct contact, constant contact, with the Ukrainians. That’s all I’m going to say about it while it’s active,” Biden told reporters in the southern US city of New Orleans.

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More than 76,000 people have been evacuated from areas bordering Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region, the local emergency ministry was quoted by the Tass news agency as saying on Saturday, following Ukraine’s incursion into the region this week.

Russia is fighting intense battles against thousands of Ukrainian troops as deep as 20 km (12 miles) inside the Kursk region after Ukraine’s biggest attack on Russian sovereign territory since the start of the war in 2022.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)