Recently, three Ukrainian soldiers from the Special Operations Command got into their car in the heart of occupied Russia. Without a rear windshield because of explosives from a Russian drone the day before, they sped toward Ukraine. Six hours later, they arrived in Kiev with their precious cargo of documents in boxes stacked on the back seat, the result of a four-day mission in enemy territory.
Among the documents were Russian Interior Ministry documents and military orders. They had been taken from official buildings in the town of Sudzha, the center of the Ukrainian surprise operation in Kursk, as well as from abandoned Russian trenches in the area. “At that time, everything was blurry; until you leave, you don’t understand where you are and what you are doing,” says Artem, one of the three commando members, on the side of a Ukrainian highway, a few hours after leaving Russian territory.
Ukraine’s surprising incursion into Russia, now in its fourth week, has become an unexpected challenge to the Kremlin. Suddenly, Russian flags are being removed from government buildings; Russian civilians are taking shelter while soldiers from a foreign army patrol the streets; and Russia is trying to demonstrate that it maintains control of its own long-established borders.
After months of constant bad news, the incursion into Russian territory has boosted morale in Ukraine, whose troops remain under constant pressure in other parts of the front. According to a Western diplomat in kyiv, the mood of the political elite has improved considerably in recent weeks thanks to the Kursk operation. “They are engaged in a desperate David-and-Goliath fight, and this is reawakening their desire to rebel,” he said.
a secret plan
Part of the initial excitement was the unexpected nature of the raid. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, discussed the plans privately with top military officials, and few people entered that circle. “From our experience so far in this war, the less people know about an operation, the more successful it will be,” Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky, said in an interview in kyiv. “A very small number of people knew about it.”
In the weeks leading up to the raid, residents of the Ukrainian city of Sumy, the closest to the border, noticed that the city centre and surrounding area were filled with soldiers, without understanding why. “In Sumy, there are not many rental options, and there were people looking for free places to house the soldiers; when the operation began, the puzzle fell into place,” says Dmytro Tishchenko, general director of cukr.citya media outlet specializing in news and cultural life in Sumy.
The soldiers were also not warned of what awaited them. “We thought they were moving us here for defensive missions against a possible Russian incursion,” said one soldier who was transferred to the area a week before the incursion.
The Ukrainian government announced last week that its forces controlled nearly 1,300 square kilometers of Russian territory, an area that includes about 100 towns. Although most of them are small villages, the area includes the town of Sudzha, where about 5,000 people lived before the assault. The road from Sumy to the border is still lined with military vehicles, as soldiers head toward Russia in everything from tanks to motorcycles.
Ukrainian soldiers say the streets of Sudzha are almost deserted and smell of fresh produce rotting in the late summer sun. Many of their neighbors fled to Russia at the start of the offensive, but those who stayed live in isolation: without cellphone reception, without electricity and without the ability to go out. Their only source of information is the Ukrainian soldiers who patrol the streets. “We tell them that Ukrainian forces have taken the city of Kursk, that they are marching toward Moscow and that it is time to learn Ukrainian,” laughs a soldier who was recently in Sudzha.
Ukrainian soldiers leave Sudja with trophies: Russian flags and posters salvaged from government buildings to T-shirts with Vladimir Putin’s face picked up from market stalls. They claim that they are not inflicting on the population the terror that the Russian occupiers have sown in Ukrainian cities occupied by Moscow.
Sudzha has been under full Ukrainian control for more than two weeks, but Russian drones continue to pose a constant threat, and operating outside the offensive can be terrifying. One day, Artem thought he saw a Russian soldier running away from the abandoned Russian trench he was checking. Just before he fired, he realized it was a mirror left by someone in the trench. The soldier he thought he saw was his own reflection. “You crawl through the woods in the dark and realize you’re in enemy territory and completely alone,” says Serhii, another member of the team.
progress blocked
Ukraine’s advance beyond its borders appears to have stalled for now, but Russia has also failed to regain any ground. Although kyiv claims to have no interest in annexing Russian territory, it will for now retain control over what it has taken. “We are not Russia, we do not want to rewrite our Constitution to add these territories,” Podolyak says. “Our mission is to remove Russian artillery and other equipment, destroy warehouses and other military infrastructure; and also influence public opinion in Russia.”
At a time when there are growing calls for some sort of medium-term negotiation with Russia, many in Kiev see the Kursk raid as a message to Ukraine’s international partners. “Ukraine is trying to pressure Russia to engage in real negotiations, not capitulation disguised as negotiations,” says Alyona Getmanchuk, founder of the New Europe Center in Kiev. At first, Podolyak denied that kyiv was considering future negotiations. But then he said: “Russia is not a rational country, it may be forced to negotiate, but for that it is necessary [hacer cosas como] the operation in Kursk.
kyiv has not shared with its Western partners the details of an operation that Getmanchuk said also stems from Ukraine’s frustration over Washington’s repeated warnings about the risks of escalating the war. “The Kursk operation was a signal that the so-called ‘red lines’ that Ukraine should not cross were forgotten,” he said.
prisoners of war
Another goal of the raid was to capture Russian soldiers who would be used as an exchange for the release of some of the thousands of Ukrainians held in Russian prisons. Ukraine claims to have captured nearly 600 Russian soldiers in the Kursk region, many of them conscripts. A week ago, Ukraine exchanged 115 of those soldiers for the same number of Ukrainians held in Russian prisons.
In a detention center in the Sumy region, Russian prisoners talk about their lack of combat readiness and their shock at the arrival of war on Russian soil. When some of them were captured, they had been in the Kursk region for only a few days or weeks. Tutor He spoke to more than a dozen Russian prisoners, with their consent and without the supervision of guards, but cannot name them directly because of international conventions on prisoners of war.
“As a Ukrainian citizen, I despise them, but I treat them the same way I want our prisoners in Russia to be treated,” says Volodymir, deputy director of the center where they are imprisoned. “If we can use them to free our boys, then I am happy.”
The Kursk operation has generated a climate of optimism, but many Ukrainian soldiers remain aware of the increasingly dire situation to the east, where Russian troops are approaching the town of Pokrovsk.
If this progress continues, the questions, so far only whispered, about whether the Kursk adventure was worth it, are likely to grow stronger. But for now, the raid remains a battlefield success for Ukraine. “We can use it to create a buffer zone on the border that will reduce attacks on us,” Artem says. “And at least we have prisoners to exchange with and we have given our people something to celebrate.”
Translation by Francisco de Zárate.
