KURSK OBLAST, Russia — It’s around noon on Tuesday, September 10 when, after more than an hour’s drive, the Ukrainian armored personnel carrier finally comes to a halt. We’ve reached the border and are about to cross into enemy territory, “Vadym,” the Ukrainian colonel supervising the press tour, informs us.
Beyond the mangled and charred remains of what used to be the border crossing between Russia and Ukraine lies Kursk, the Russian oblast now stunningly in the hands of a Ukrainian invasion force.
“Wait here,” Vadym orders as he gets out to confer with the men manning the checkpoint. The two soldiers making up the rest of our escort — Oleg, a young press officer sporting a neatly trimmed beard, and Kostya, an older conscript from Vinnitsya — are sitting still, the latter occasionally swatting away a fly with an absent look on his face while Oleg tries, without much success, to get a quick nap.
Two journalists from Ukraine’s TSN TV channel twist and turn to get a glimpse of the surroundings through the narrow, dirt-covered bulletproof windows of the vehicle of the carrier. Eviscerated prefab structures, shredded sheets of corrugated metal and torn down letters that once spelled “Russia” are all that’s left of the border crossing after, in an ironic twist of fate, was the first target of the Ukrainian army’s lightning blitz across the border August 6.
The trip itself demonstrates that while Ukrainian forces remain in a desperate war of attrition with Russian troops along a 600-mile front, Kyiv is simultaneously waging a two-front public relations campaign — trying to reassure the U.S. and its allies of Kyiv’s ability to carry on the fight while confronting Russia’s own population with the crimes committed in their name.
Prepared with the utmost secrecy, kept hidden even from allied nations, the bold — reckless, even — operation stunned local residents, the Kremlin and — most importantly — the poorly-trained Russian conscripts and national guardsmen tasked with defending what was believed to be a backwater border region of little significance to the heavy fighting elsewhere on the front.
Under the cover of relentless artillery fire and precision drone strikes, Ukrainian troops easily broke through feeble Russian defenses, seizing more territory in a week that Moscow had managed to capture in Ukraine over the previous year.
A month into the incursion, Ukrainian forces remained deep inside Russian territory and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that the offensive had inflicted around 6,000 casualties on the Russian forces. Videos of what appeared to be a great number of captured Russian soldiers began making the rounds on social media.
The surprise operation, a massive morale boost for Ukraine’s dispirited and war-weary population, sparked panic within Russia’s border regions, with almost 200,000 residents fleeing or being evacuated in the first weeks of the offensive.
Russian Telegram channels issued dire warnings about a potential attack on the local Kursk nuclear power plant.
With one stroke, Kyiv took back control of the narrative about the war, proved to its allies — and to the Kremlin — that it could still successfully perform combined arms operations, and bolstered domestic support for continuing the 2 1/2-year fight.
Sustaining the momentum
Whether the high will last is another question.
After the early advances in August, Ukraine’s progression has slowed, and Ukrainian troops have been building up defenses, signaling to the world — and to Moscow — that they will not be easily ousted.
Mr. Zelenskyy declared on September 3 that Ukraine would “hold” the territory it had taken in Kursk as part of his “victory plan” to end the war: “For now, we need it,” the president said.
Having seized about 30 localities and nearly 400 square miles of Russian territory in the span of a week, the Ukrainian government set out on August 15 to create a military administration tasked with managing the newly captured territory — and its remaining inhabitants.
“It is important for us not to be like those who brought war with looting and rape to us. I am very proud of our soldiers, that we don’t have anything like that,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in late August. “It also affects the attitude of the international community to the incursion. And you see the attitude toward this operation, although [partners] did not know it was going to happen. This is because we behave like humans.”
Intent on playing up differences with Russian forces who face war crimes charges for their treatment of Ukrainian civilians and POWs early in the invasion, Ukrainian authorities have facilitated the work of media in the Kursk oblast to an unprecedented degree: A September 8 request to the Ministry of Defense for a reporting trip into occupied Kursk led to the armored personnel crossing with Vadym, Oleg and Kostya just two days later.
We waited about ten minutes at the checkpoint before the military police came onboard to check our press credentials, again, ironic given the wreckage of the Russian border crossing office just outside our vehicle.
“We’re going to have to adapt our itinerary to the situation,” Vadym explained, noting that Russian military planes — part of a belated Kremlin campaign to push back the Ukrainian forces — had been operating in the morning and dropping 500-kilogram glide bombs on Ukrainian positions. “They’re bombing their own towns and villages,” he sighed, before signaling to the driver to start moving.
Once into Russia proper, the nearby hamlets and villages were for the most part intact, with no apparent traces of fighting or shelling — a testament to the swiftness of the Ukrainian operation.
Ukrainian officials say the surprised Russians simply did not have the time nor the means to put up defenses and fight for those places.
There were also very few people out in the streets and almost no civilian cars on the road, with most of the vehicles barreling down either side being armored personnel carriers or military cars that bore a white triangle — the sign used by Ukrainian forces taking part in the Kursk offensive.
On both sides of the road, seemingly endless fields of golden wheat were gently swaying in the wind under a cloudless, cerulean blue sky. But the idyllic scene was marred by the numerous plumes of black smoke rising over the horizon: As Russian forces have recovered from the initial shock of the offensive, they’ve launched multiple counteroffensives, though with limited success so far.
After a short, uneventful ride, the tour arrived in the tiny village of Kazachya Loknya, parking the armored vehicle in a leafy residential street lined with houses bearing the words “Lyudi” — “People” written in chalk, signifying that local residents were still living there.
The soldiers had come with bags full of food and medication for the locals, and were greeted warmly by Lyuda, a loquacious septuagenarian whose eyes were red from anguish and sleep deprivation.
“Thank you, my children. Thank you, my dear ones,” she said as the men brought the bags inside her house. She asked the visiting journalists to “show the world” what was happening there and expressed a widespread feeling the government in Moscow had failed the region.
“We’ve been abandoned by our government. We have no gas, no food, no medications,” she told The Washington Times, speaking in Surzhyk, a Ukrainian-Russian pidgin used in certain border regions.
As she spoke, she flagged down anyone within shouting distance to “come and speak to the journalists, to America,” and explained that the Ukrainian soldiers were treating them well, in spite of the circumstances.
But however cordial the relations seemed, a deep incomprehension simmered under the surface.
When pressed on the reasons for the war, or the numerous crimes reportedly committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, most of the gathered inhabitants claimed total ignorance.
“Son, we don’t have internet and us old people only use old telephones with buttons,” Lyuda told a soldier. “How are we supposed to know?”
Clearly unsatisfied with the answers — or lack thereof — of the residents, one of the officers pulled out a computer and played a — in Russian — for them. The video featured footage of the latest Russian missile strikes on residential buildings in Lviv and Poltava that have killed and injured scores of innocent civilians. The assembled inhabitants of Kazachya Loknya watched in silence while Lyuda would jump with fear and whimper every time artillery went off in the distance.
Standing a few feet away from the proceedings, a soldier whispered to me: “Our children and grandparents have learned more than two years ago to distinguish between outgoing and incoming fire,” he said with a faint smile. “Here, they still can’t tell the difference.”
Compare and contrast
After parting with the residents of Kazachya Loknya, the tour made a quick stop in Sudzha, the administrative center of Kursk’s Sudzhansky District. With a pre-war population of around 5,000 people, it remains the largest town captured so far by the Ukrainians since the beginning of their offensive.
The unremarkable city center was pretty much empty of people, save for one woman who walked up to the soldiers and saluted them in Russian, before the officers took us to a side street and showed us an undetonated explosive lodged into the ground.
“As you can see, the Russians have been bombing their own cities with anti-tank weapons,” one Ukrainian officer remarked.
A damaged bust of Lenin still stood in front of a nearby building, one stark difference with the situation on the other side of the war’s front: In Ukraine, statues of Soviet leaders have been dismantled as part of the decommunization process, but they are still an ubiquitous sight in most Russian cities.
The excursion inside Russia lasted about four hours in total and it seemed local residents were genuinely grateful for the humanitarian aid Ukrainian forces had supplied.
But the disconnect between the two sides remained stark: Ukrainian men, women and children have been living under the constant threat of bombs and missiles for years, and many can cite relatives and friends killed on the battlefield or murdered in their homes.
But for the Russians we met on that day, the war “started” when armed men bearing Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag on their shoulders showed up on their doorstep, barely seven weeks ago.
Vadym, the Ukrainian colonel, was frank about the motivation behind allowing a rare press foray into what is still very much a war zone. However long they remain in Kursk, the Ukrainians want the world to know that they are nothing like their Russian counterparts.
“It’s because the Ukrainian army is different from the Russian army, and we fully respect international law,” he said.
“In other words, we are responsible for the population under our control. For the first few days, we provided food, medicine, everything that was necessary, because the people there had no light, no communications, nothing.”
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.