Russians who fled a cross-border attack from Ukraine reported leaving their homes and running for their lives as control of their local government collapsed.
Panic quickly spread through the villages of the Kursk region in southern Russia as Kyiv’s forces carried out the first foreign invasion of Russian soil since World War II last week.
“We don’t understand why they don’t tell the truth,” one woman told the Russian newspaper Kommersant. “On TV they kept saying, ‘This is an emergency.’
“What kind of emergency is it when foreign tanks are on our soil? That is a real war.”
On Sunday, Ukrainian forces released videos of them tearing down Russian flags from government buildings in villages around the small town of Sudzha and mocking the Kremlin.
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The head of the Belovsk district, which borders the occupied territory, admitted that Ukrainian soldiers had now entered his administrative area.
A Ukrainian security official told AFP news agency that “thousands” of soldiers were involved in the attack, which captured an estimated 600 square kilometers of Russian soil.
“The goal is to expand the enemy’s positions, inflict maximum losses and destabilize the situation in Russia,” he said on condition of anonymity.
Tens of thousands of people have now fled the advance, streaming into the city of Kursk in cars, on bicycles and crammed into emergency buses, with a few bags full of hastily taken belongings in their luggage.
In a video uploaded to Telegram, a group of mostly middle-aged women who had fled Sudzha described their fear – and their anger at the officials.
“Foreign soldiers armed with NATO equipment entered our country and within hours our city was in ruins,” her spokesman said, ignoring a woman sobbing next to her. “We lost our land, our homes. We fled under fire, mostly without papers.”
Another man accused the Russian military of failing to protect the country, saying the evacuation was chaotic and people were forced to flee “in underwear and T-shirts” while children were “dressed in rags.”
“In an isolated village, people had to swim across a river as best they could,” he said.
Despite a Kremlin order to its propaganda units to downplay the Ukrainian attack, the public’s shock and dismay leaked out through the otherwise compliant Russian media.
In its detailed article, Kommersant described how its correspondent had tried to reach Sudzha but turned back because the fighting was too intense.
His report recalled scenes that have played out thousands of times in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
“One jeep was completely smashed,” he wrote. A few minutes later, we noticed a white Niva (car) that had been thrown into a ditch and was also damaged by a drone attack. A few hundred meters further and another smashed jeep, right next to a religious cross,” the correspondent wrote.
“Then we saw a burnt-out white car. The accident had happened recently because the wreck was still smoking.”
People who fled the fighting also told the Kommersant correspondent that their increasingly panicked calls to emergency numbers went unanswered as the Ukrainian military advanced and their villages were destroyed.
They also reported that in their rush to flee, they had to leave behind elderly and disabled people, even though there was no food or running water in the city.
One woman said she was ashamed of the Russian military, which she described as a “corrupt mess.”
“I thought we were taking them, but it turns out they’re taking us,” she said of the invasion of Ukraine. “Who made these plans anyway? Maybe we shouldn’t have sent the guys to Kyiv in the first place.”
The Ukrainian attack has also sent shockwaves into the Russian system beyond the Kursk region. Businessmen close to the Kremlin told local media that the attack had dealt a “very serious blow” to the reputation of Vladimir Putin and the Russian military.
These sentiments are likely to worry the Kremlin, which, as usual, relies on its tough propaganda wall to maintain public support for its war in Ukraine.
According to media reports, Volodymyr Zelensky personally ordered the military invasion of Russia.
In a telegram message to the Ukrainians on Saturday evening, the president acknowledged the strategic importance of the attack for the first time.
“This kind of pressure is necessary, pressure on the attacker,” he said.
It has also given Ukrainians a huge morale boost. In Ukraine, people have celebrated and cheered on Ukrainian soldiers who they say are giving ordinary Russians “a taste of their own medicine.”
“Along with the arrival of the F-16s, people finally have something positive to talk about,” a source in Kyiv told The Telegraph, referring to the arrival of F-16 fighter jets from Ukraine’s NATO allies this month. “They love it.”
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