The video on his phone showed Ukrainian soldiers smiling in an armored vehicle, a Russian prisoner at their feet. The footage was taken on Russian Federation territory, explained the commander answering to the nom de guerre "Gerar," in a café in the town of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine on Monday, August 12.
On their arrival in the region of the same name a week earlier, the soldiers in his unit of the 225th separate assault battalion had had to sign a document committing them not to broadcast anything on social media. "It's been coming unstuck since yesterday," enthused the commander, a Belarusian enlisted in the Ukrainian forces, who wanted to share the video on his Telegram channel. "Our aim is to create panic in the Russian army," he said, before adding with conviction that in Russia, "It's total chaos."
After the initial uncertainty around the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, launched on the morning of August 6, the euphoria of the humiliation inflicted on Moscow continues to thrill Ukraine. On Monday, the Ukrainian offensive even extended to the Russian region of Belgorod next to Kursk, forcing the authorities to evacuate civilians there too.
After months of retreating under the onslaught of the Russian armed forces, the operations are galvanizing the mood of the population and the soldiers. "Just a week ago, people were depressed. But today, morale has gone up a notch," says Serhiy, a soldier in a reconnaissance unit on its way back from the Russian region of Kursk. "The soldiers are in a good frame of mind. They see that we can make advances, that we can do things..."
The crossing of the border brought a wave of pride to a country exhausted by more than two years of war, almost making us forget for a while the territorial advances made by the Kremlin's forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kyiv, who had remained enigmatic about the incursion until now, are now openly talking about it. On Monday, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces Oleksandr Syrsky even claimed at a meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine controlled "around 1,000 square kilometers" of Russian territory. "We continue to carry out offensive operations in the Kursk region," he said.
In the border region of Sumy, the setting off point for the Ukrainian brigades sent to Russia, the incessant line of cars bearing the white triangle emblem of the incursion testifies to the scale of the operation. On the main road leading to the border post, which is now open to fighters coming and going, tanks, armoured vehicles and military vehicles pass each other all day long, in an constant coming and going. The villages closest to Russia bear the scars of bombardment, with destroyed buildings and the heavy acid smell of burnt plastic and metal.
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