Editor’s note: CNN was accompanied by the Ukrainian military, which reviewed the above video without sound before publishing it for operational security reasons. The Ukrainian military had no editorial control.
Sudzha, Russia
CNN
—
There are rotting corpses in the streets. Civilian vehicles riddled with bullets line the streets. Half of Lenin’s face has been blown off the statue in the square. The streets are littered with shrapnel. Locals are crowded into an air raid shelter.
The smell of death in torn down buildings.
It is a scene painfully familiar to Ukraine but alien to Russia. Yet the border town of Sudzha was attacked by Ukraine 11 days ago and declared under its control by President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday. When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war of choice two years ago, Russia did not expect to be attacked in return.
CNN crossed the border into Russia accompanied by Ukrainian soldiers, passing the border post that had been blown to pieces by the first Ukrainian attack. While the horizon ahead was occasionally clouded by black smoke from explosions, the road itself was surreally quiet. On either side lay silent fields once protected by a Cold War superpower that had not seen an invasion since the Nazis.
The turnoff to Sudzha was marked with a huge Orthodox cross that read “God bless and protect us.” A few meters further on lay the wreckage of two tanks and other weapons from the fierce fighting of the last few days.
The city’s streets were mostly empty, but the storm echoed around them. Small arms fire and artillery fire broke the silence, albeit from some distance.
Our Ukrainian escort said the Russian attack drones that had hampered Ukraine’s progress on the front lines in recent months were simply too busy fighting on the front lines to harass Kyiv’s forces on the border and in Sudzha. Their conspicuous absence and the Russian air force suggested that Ukraine’s capabilities for this surprise attack may be enhanced. The ubiquity of Western-supplied armored vehicles on the roads to Russia showed that Ukraine was putting resources into this fight that it had long claimed it lacked.
Sudzha was not completely deserted. On a large building, in front of the basement entrance, a large handwritten cardboard sign proclaimed: “Here in the basement are peaceful people, not military.” Inna, 68, was sitting outside. There were 60 other civilians downstairs, she said.
“They brought many boxes of food,” she said of the Ukrainian forces.
The scene in the basement was one that we have seen in dozens of Ukrainian cities over the past two years and that continues to send an equally sad message in Russia.
Stanislaw stood at the entrance to the shelter, stroking his grey beard when he was asked what life was like there. “Look, this is not life. It exists. It is not life.”
In the dark, subterranean dampness the sick lay, isolated and confused. An elderly woman, still in her wig and bright red summer dress, rocked gently from side to side as she intoned, “And now I don’t know how it will end. At least a truce so we can live in peace. We don’t need anything. It’s my crutch, I can’t walk. It’s very hard.” Flies buzzed around her face in the damp gloom.
In the next room, the light flickered on a family of six. The man said: “One week. No news. We don’t know what’s happening around us.” His son sat silently next to him, his white face stony.
At the end of the corridor, Yefimov spoke to one of our Ukrainian companions. He said he was over 90 years old. His daughter, niece and grandchildren are married to Ukrainian men and live in Ukraine, but he cannot reach them.
“To Ukraine,” he said when asked where he wanted to flee. “You are the first to mention it. People have talked about it, but you are the first to come.” The idea of an evacuation would be difficult for many here in peacetime.
Outside on the street, 74-year-old Nina stands looking for her medicine. The shops are destroyed and the pharmacies are closed. She insists she does not want to leave, and defends her right to live where she has always lived with the same passion as so many Ukrainian women her age in similarly scarred cities.
“If I wanted to, I would. Why should I leave the place where I lived for 50 years? My daughter and my mother are in the cemetery, my son was born (here), my grandchildren… I live on my land. I don’t know where I live. I don’t know whose land it is, I don’t understand anything.”
It is unclear how and where this swift, successful and surprising attack will end, or when Russian forces will arrive, but they will be too late to prevent another blow to Russia’s pride since it began an invasion in February 2022 that was supposed to last only a few days.
