Russian victory in Kursk brings war back to Ukraine’s civilians in Sumy

NORTH OF SUMY, Ukraine – For eight months, this rural border region served as the staging ground for an astonishing Ukrainian offensive that allowed Kyiv to seize a large stretch of Russian territory it hoped to one day exchange for occupied Ukrainian land.

But a gradual retreat and then a rapid Russian counterattack has in recent weeks pushed most Ukrainian troops out of Russia’s Kursk region - losing Ukraine its only territorial bargaining chip just as President Donald Trump pushes for a deal to end the war.

It’s also transformed Ukraine’s border area into a deadly gray zone - a military no-man’s land neither side fully controls - giving Russia an advantage for an expected offensive in Ukraine’s volatile north as winter melts into spring.

In the largest evacuation in this region since the early days of the war, tens of thousands of civilians are fleeing intense Russian bombing and nonstop drone attacks in the villages near the front line. They are streaming into the regional capital just 18 miles from the border. The city of Sumy is now so crowded that new arrivals are competing for limited housing and beds in emergency shelters.

Others are staying home, hoping to avoid being bombed by the Russians as the Ukrainian forces - outnumbered and outgunned - try to hold an increasingly blurry front line.

Civilians’ mass flight from the region shows that they are largely paying the price for Ukraine’s abrupt retreat from Kursk, as sections of the front line move over the border into Ukraine.

Ukrainian troops have tried to redirect some Russian forces by attacking the neighboring Belgorod region but have made only small advances and still face major obstacles in securing Ukrainian land in the weeks and months ahead. Kyiv has long hoped to establish a buffer zone in Belgorod, the region used to launch near daily attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.

On Friday, as a team of Washington Post reporters traveling with volunteers passed the village of Hlybne, northeast of Sumy and 12 miles from the border, Ukrainian troops reversed their passing vehicle to warn the team against going further, shouting that the area was under intense attack.

Smoke swirled on the skyline and locals gathered outside said they had just seen a Russian jet dropping bombs on the neighboring village.

“Putin will never stop, whatever Trump says,” said Lyudmila, 68, as she glanced up at a sky she said is often filled with Russian drones. She spoke on the condition her last name not be used out of fear that she would be targeted. “Putin is just playing games with naive Trump.”

“This is the so-called ceasefire - they’re bombing all day and night!” one of her neighbors called out, referring to recent separate agreements Washington penned with Moscow and Kyiv to limit attacks on energy infrastructure. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to a U.S.-proposed full ceasefire but Russia declined. Both countries have since accused the other of violating the deal.

Lyudmila has seen the convoys of evacuees pass by as they flee from villages closer to the border in recent weeks, and she knows that Russian troops are advancing quickly. The time could soon come for her, too, to leave. But for now, she said will stay home with her husband and their chickens, dogs and two goats and try to find a way to graze them, despite the ever-present Russian drones.

Ukraine justified its attack on Kursk last August by saying it would divert Russian troops from the beleaguered eastern front and help create a buffer zone to prevent Russian attacks on Sumy. But top Ukrainian officials long warned that if Ukraine were to retreat from Kursk, the more than 60,000 troops Russia had deployed against them would follow them over the border into Ukraine.

The swift Russian gains of recent weeks, made possible in part with help from North Korean troops, is a realization of those fears.

Volodymyr Artiukh, head of the Sumy region military administration, insisted in an interview Friday that although Russian troops have crossed the border in assault groups, they have not yet seized any land in the Sumy region. Ukraine still controls a dwindling patch over the border in Kursk.

But Russia is launching an aggressive bombing campaign in the area, attacking the region nearly 9,000 times this year with a variety of drones, missiles, rockets and bombs, he said - a nearly threefold increase compared to the same period last year and rendering it uninhabitable.

Outside, a boom shook the city. “That was ours - outgoing,” Artiukh said. Then came the whoosh of fighter jets overhead. “F-16s,” he said, referring to the U.S.-made planes Ukraine uses in limited numbers on the front. Moments later, another whoosh. “That was a MiG,” he said, naming a Soviet-era jet.

Just months ago, such sounds would have been rare in the city, he said. But now that the front line has moved out of Russia and back toward Ukraine, residents are adjusting to a new reality. In some parts of the region, he said, they have installed hanging nets over busy roads to try to intercept first-person view drones that hunt for targets.

Although bustling with residents, military and evacuees, Sumy city remains far from safe. If Russian forces advance further, they could soon use the FPV drones to attack the city, creating hellish conditions as they have in other cities, like Kherson and Nikopol.

Inside the city, a shelter for evacuees was crowded with new arrivals. Each day, more than 400 civilians fleeing Russian advances arrive to the Pluriton shelter, according to the group’s director, Katerina Arisoy, who is displaced from the eastern city of Bakhmut, which has been occupied by Russia since 2023.

Just two months ago, this same facility housed nearly 100 Russian civilians who were evacuated into Ukraine, fleeing an attack on their school-turned-shelter in the Ukrainian-controlled town of Sudzha. But Ukraine has since lost Sudzha, once its crown prize. Now Ukrainian civilians run from the Russian advance.

Each day, volunteers risk their lives to evacuate civilians under constant shelling, dodging Russian attacks as they move mainly elderly and disabled in the countryside into unarmored ambulances and minibuses and head away from the border.

On Friday, Anna Zhelizhniak, 84, arrived to the center in Sumy in the back of an ambulance, wrapped in a fleece robe with slippers on her feet. Several walls in her house had already collapsed. Then a Ukrainian soldier stopped by Thursday and told them their village would soon be a gray zone. They agreed to leave.

Every time a bomb hit, her son, Anatolii, said, “we were lying down and praying to God.”

Olha Rud, 29, from Krasnopillya village near the Russian border, described how she left in her own car with her husband and three children, Liza, 6, Yehor, 3, and Artem, who was born March 5. They didn’t even have three weeks at home with their newborn before Russian glide bombs prompted them to pack up and move in with relatives in Sumy city. They had already moved once before, when their house was bombed in 2022.

Liza said she wasn’t scared and showed off her sparkly purple purse. When asked what she had packed, she giggled and pulled out a stuffed capybara.

Her mom shook her head. “She’s been crying at night.”

Upstairs in the shelter, Andrii Kremeznyi, 54, had settled into a bedroom with his daughter Anna Ostrizhko, 11. The single dad had fled his border village of Novodmytrivka with Anna in 2022, and then moved between relatives’ homes, rented apartments and shelters as he looked for work.

With evacuees pouring in and prices soaring, he was no longer able to afford an apartment in Sumy and had to move into the shelter. By coincidence, the same day they arrived, so did their neighbors from back home, who told them the village was under new intense attack.

One elderly woman, who Anna calls Grandma Nadiia, pulled her in for a hug. “She told me she thought she would never see me again,” Anna said with a shy smile.

Years ago, Anna had visited Grandma Nadiia to play with her kittens. Now they were reunited - but further than ever from home. From the sterile shelter room with its metal twin beds and gray wool blankets, Anna remembered her life before the war - before she had to wonder whether Nadiia’s kittens had survived or whether her grandparents’ house still stood.

She thought instead about all the good things. The wooden swing her grandfather had built for her by hand and hung from a tree outside his house. The wagon her grandmother used to use to pull her through the fields. The fresh flowers she used to pick for her as a surprise.

The whole street, she assumed, was destroyed by glide bombs. But maybe, she thought, at least the swing would be okay. Her grandfather had hidden it in his garage.