Military authorities in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk urged civilians to speed up their evacuation on Friday because the Russian army was quickly closing in on what has been one of Moscow’s key targets for months. Pokrovsk officials said in a Telegram post that Russian troops were “advancing at a fast pace. With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions.” Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the eastern Donetsk region. Its capture would compromise Ukraine’s defensive abilities and supply routes and bring Russia closer than ever to its stated aim of capturing the whole region. Ukraine’s lightning offensive into several Russian border regions is designed to persuade Moscow to engage in “fair” talks about its war in Ukraine, an aide to Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday. “We need to inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Telegram. “In the Kursk region, we clearly see how the military tool is objectively used to convince the Russian Federation to enter into a fair negotiation process.” Ukraine’s army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on Friday that Kyiv’s forces were advancing between one and three kilometres in some areas in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukraine has said it has taken control of 82 settlements over an area of 1,150 sq km (444 sq miles) in the region after it launched a major cross-border attack on 6 August. Briefing President Volodymyr Zelenskiy via video link, Syrskyi reported fighting in the area of Malaya Loknya, some 11.5km from the Ukrainian border. It appeared that Ukraine had largely cut off a significant area of Glushovsky district of Kursk and Russian troops there after blowing up two important bridges on the Seim river. A mass evacuation is under way in the Glushkov district, home to 20,000 people, and the destruction of one bridge had hindered their evacuation, the Russian news agency Tass reported. Italy’s ambassador to Moscow defended media “independence” on Friday after Russian authorities summoned her over an Italian television report in the embattled Kursk region, the foreign ministry said. Cecilia Piccioni faced a “strong protest” over the Italian broadcaster RAI’s reporting team, which “illegally entered Russia to cover the criminal terrorist attack by Ukrainian soldiers against the Kursk region”, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement. Piccioni explained during the meeting that RAI, “and in particular the editorial teams, plan their activities in a totally free and independent way”, an Italian foreign ministry spokesman told Agence France-Presse. Economic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia will remain in place for decades, even if there is a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, a senior Russian foreign ministry official said on Friday. Russia became the most sanctioned country by the west after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, surpassing Iran and North Korea. “This is a story for decades to come. Whatever the developments and results of a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, it is, in fact, only a pretext,” said Dmitry Birichevsky, head of the economic cooperation department at the foreign ministry. Russia added at least nine more people linked to late opposition leader Alexei Navalny to its blacklist of “terrorists and extremists” on Friday, exactly six months after he died in prison. Among those listed were Navalny’s former spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh and the chair of his Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, according to the website of Russian financial monitoring service Rosfinmonitoring. More than 200 vehicles that fell foul of London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) have been sent to Ukraine to aid the country’s war effort, despite initial legal concerns over the plan. Transport for London said on Friday that 330 vehicles had been given the green light to be sent to Ukraine under the Ulez vehicle scrappage scheme. More than 200 are already in the eastern European country.