Outgunned Kursk invaders fight to last man standing

As Putin’s battle-hardened units eye victory in Kursk, Kyiv’s few infantry units left on enemy soil are growing angry with America.

Ukrainian troops continue to train in and around Sumy as they bolster defences on their side of the border. Picture: Jack Hill/The Times

As the sun set, they crept back to their homeland on foot, dashing between ravines, hollows and bushes to avoid being spotted by Russian drones circling above.

The officer who gave the order for his unit to fall back had an even more dangerous task – he would drive. He raced at full speed across the border, in full view of enemy drones, in a car laden with equipment he did not wish to leave to the Russians. His only defence was one passenger with an assault rifle pointed out of the window and up towards the sky.

“It’s safer on foot,” said a Ukrainian soldier with knowledge of recent events in the Kursk region of Russia. Remarkably, the officer and his men escaped unscathed on Thursday, bar one twisted ankle. “He told me he was in shock [that they survived],” the soldier said.

A relatively small Ukrainian force remains in Kursk, clinging on in a handful of villages on the Russian side of the border and facing down attacks from a far larger Russian and North Korean force. Despite talks aimed at agreeing a 30-day ceasefire, the northern front in this war is more active than it has been in months.

President Zelensky said over the weekend that Russia was building up a large force along his country’s eastern border, indicating “a desire to strike our Sumy region”.

Despite President Putin’s claim, rejected by Zelensky, that “thousands” of Ukrainian troops in Kursk are surrounded, those remaining fight on. “It’s full Star Wars,” the soldier said over a coffee in Sumy. Tanks and heavy machinery have already been withdrawn from Kursk, so infantry fight with only drones for support.

“Very few of our forces are still there. I don’t think they will be able to cut off the road with infantry units in the coming days. Even if they cut it off it won’t be the end.”

President Putin at military headquarters in the Kursk region. Putin visited Kursk in military fatigues last week as Russian troops advanced into Ukrainian-held territory. Picture: EPA

He said his colleagues still in Kursk describe the current fight as “f***ed” – but that morale was mostly still high. What had dented the fighters’ spirits, he said, was America’s actions. Many soldiers who used to wear US patches on their uniforms as a nod to western values had taken them off.

The temporary loss of American intelligence-sharing and arms assistance affected the Kursk operation, and contributed to the retreat, he said. But several other factors were at play too. Battle-hardened Russian units were moved to the north to join the fight. These units have names such as Judgment Day, the People’s Wrath and Sudoplatov’s Men – a reference to a Ukrainian-born Soviet intelligence chief who orchestrated the assassination of Leon Trotsky and of Ukrainian nationalists during Stalin’s purges.

There is also, perhaps unexpectedly, a unit who call themselves the Irishmen, a name that the soldier believes is derived from a popular Russian subculture for Nordic and northern European cultures. The arrival of these experienced units in recent weeks has piled pressure on the Ukrainian lines.

Russia released video of recaptured villages in Kursk devastated by fighting. Picture: Russian Defence Ministry/EPA/The Times

North Korean fighters have been effective, too. They did not scatter in the face of a drone attack, the soldier said, or abandon their wounded. “The Russians often shoot their wounded – the Koreans try to take them away.”

Whatever the decisive factor, it is clear that Russia’s forces are on the move. On the road into Sumy, faint columns of black smoke can be seen to the north, towards the Kursk region where fighting still rages, and to the southeast where Russian forces pounded the border town of Velyka Pysarivka with cruise missiles on Friday.

Villages near the border have been pummelled. Liudmyla, 46, who was evacuated at the weekend from Zapsillya, less than a mile from the border, said: “It’s a nightmare, it’s just horrible … I want to weep. We are now homeless. Everything that we spent years building with our own hands we have left behind. We collected our entire lives in two bags and left.”

Morale remains high in the Ukrainian army despite the losses and America’s shifting attitude. Picture: Jack Hill/The Times

She said there had been 11 strikes by Russian cruise missiles on her village in the 24 hours before she left on Saturday. Vehicles - humanitarian, civilian and military – were targeted indiscriminately with drones.

“I believe in our armed forces, and that the Russians won’t be able to enter the village, but the shelling [was terrible],” she said.

On Thursday evening, the forced evacuation of eight villages in the Sumy region was announced. Liudmyla, whose husband and son are serving in the Ukrainian armed forces, hopes one day to go back.

“My dream is to return home to everything we built with my husband,” she said. “Our gardens, our vineyards, our lands. What do I now see? A grey zone that has been razed to the ground. There are streets in our village that no longer exist.”

If the Russian advance continues, the city of Sumy will be in the firing line. But despite tightening security, on Friday evening the city centre was abuzz. A busker sang and played guitar beside a monument to a sugar cube – much of Sumy’s 19th-century grandeur is owed to the industrialist and sugar baron Ivan Kharytonenko, who is honoured with a mural in the main square.

In the Silpo supermarket, the shelves were full and Ukrainians packed their weekly shopping, paying little attention to a speaker system announcing an air raid. For now, life in the city has changed little. The threat of ballistic missiles and glide bombs remains but, mercifully, Russian artillery and drones remain out of reach.

For how much longer, though? One Ukrainian soldier who recently surveyed the defensive lines said: “[We’ve] built the line well. Will it hold? I don’t know. It’s war. They have a lot of men on the move, and they are moving this way.”

The Times