SUDZHA, RUSSIA – When we got out of the Ukrainian armored personnel carrier, we were greeted by a scene of devastation. The Lenin statue in the main square had been defaced, his name crossed out and marked “pidor”, with an obscene swear word scrawled underneath. The streets were littered with broken glass and branches of fallen trees. On the wall of one house was the graffiti “Ukraine above all”. The streets were almost completely quiet, except for the roar of artillery and drone fire in the distance.
Until August 6, this was Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Now it is Ukrainian-occupied territory.
After countless cities in Ukraine had been reduced to rubble, it was a shock to see Russia itself confronted with such destruction. Russian territory had not been attacked since the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa in World War II, let alone since Russia became a nuclear power.
Yet here I was in Russia, a place where Putin’s henchmen would normally be on alert to arrest me and make me another journalist or innocent Westerner he is holding captive.
Less than two months ago, I was banned from entering the territory of the Russian Federation “in perpetuity” after writing a series of articles – including many for the Daily Beast – exposing the tainted secrets and torture during President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the remarkable counterattack.
Thomas Mutch in front of the destroyed Lenin statue in Sudzha, Russia.
Courtesy of Thomas Mutch
This ban lasted about as long as Kherson, the Ukrainian city that Putin’s forces first captured and then lost, was part of Russia “forever.”
The Daily Beast arrived with the Ukrainian military in Sudzha, the largest Ukrainian-controlled city in Russia. Driving across the border into Russia couldn’t have been more surreal. “Very dangerous” today, said Vadim, a Ukrainian army officer who accompanied The Daily Beast as we passed through the checkpoint to leave Ukraine and head into the belly of the beast. Fortunately, our vehicle had thick armor plates and a squad of armed Ukrainian soldiers.
The Russian Foreign Ministry declared that my reporting on Ukraine was part of the West’s “Russophobic campaign” and officially sanctioned me. Now I was sitting in a huge Ukrainian armored car, racing at top speed along a potholed road from the Ukrainian region of Sumy to Russia itself.
A map shows the invasion of Sudzha, Russia, near Sumy, Ukraine.
Photo illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Viewsridge/Wikimedia Commons
But honestly, I was amazed at how easy it was to get in. The border was unguarded and there were no signs of Russian artillery fire near us. As we entered Sudzha, we could hear the roar of artillery. However, it was far less intense than comparable sounds I experienced in Ukrainian cities under fire, such as Bakhmut or Kherson. Along the road, armored personnel carriers, tanks, and regular cars and vans transported Ukrainian soldiers to and from the front. In the Ukrainian border town of Yunakivka, we could hear neither artillery fire nor drones, but several buildings along the road were completely destroyed by Russian glide bombs.
We peered out of the narrow window slits of the border crossing, whose buildings had all been reduced to rubble. On August 6, Ukrainian troops launched a surprise offensive into Russian territory, throwing another spanner in the works of Putin’s war machine. After two weeks of fierce fighting, the Ukrainians had advanced nearly 40 kilometers into Russian territory and controlled around 1,900 square kilometers, according to Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top general.
A Ukrainian soldier stands in front of the destroyed Lenin statue in Sudzha, Russia.
Courtesy of Thomas Mutch
The only other Western journalist to have reached Kursk, CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by Russia’s FSB intelligence agency, the KGB’s successor said on Thursday. In a statement, the FSB said Briton Paton Walsh and two Ukrainian colleagues had “illegally crossed the state border of the Russian Federation.”
The Daily Beast pulled our correspondent out of Moscow in the early months of the Ukraine war after Putin enacted tyrannical press laws that could have resulted in prison sentences for reporting the truth.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine is seeking to establish a “buffer zone” in Kursk, possibly a deliberate reference to Russian plans to establish a “buffer zone” in Kharkiv Oblast before the Russian offensive there stalls.
But the area remains a dangerous combat zone. A Ukrainian soldier received a call on a walkie-talkie and turned around with a worried expression. “Drones are flying. An FPV, an Orlan.” They can be used by the Russians to direct artillery fire, and according to the soldier, “if they see us, they’ll almost certainly try to hit us with something.”
Beneath an abandoned school, a shelter was being used by some civilians who had yet to be evacuated. The sign by the door reads “Peaceful People.” Nikolai, a middle-aged man carrying supplies in and out of the basement, insisted that ordinary Russians had nothing to do with the war and should not be blamed. Asked what people living so close to the war zone think of the situation in Ukraine, he said: “We are small, poor people, we don’t know what to do, whatever we do, nothing will help. We don’t watch TV or this propaganda… but these are the masters of the country, they are waging this war, not us. We are not guilty.” He did not vote in the elections, he said, because “I’m not going to go, because nothing will change, so why should I waste my time?”
“Oh. Not political!” said Vadim with a grin.
I asked the Ukrainian soldiers if they felt sorry for the civilians who, ironically, were seeking shelter from the shelling of their own army. “Honestly, not really. I’m from Mariupol,” said Oleksiy, a Ukrainian soldier in Sudzha. “So after seeing what happened in Bucha and in my hometown, I might feel a little sorry for them, but they’re very low on my list.”
Graffiti on a wall in Sudzha, Russia.
Courtesy of Thomas Mutch
Tetyana Drobotia, a Ukrainian journalist from Zaporizhia, told me that this is typical of the Russian mentality, which does not take responsibility for the atrocities committed by their country. “I just listened to the recording you sent me and, to be honest, I am so angry. They look nice, but when you get into a deeper conversation, they are so utterly Russian! Only in the third year of the war, when there was artillery shelling, did they go into the basement. But otherwise they didn’t care at all!”
There were already signs that the Ukrainians were digging in and preparing defensive positions. In addition to tanks, excavators were also being used to dig trenches.
“Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod. These are all historical Ukrainian territories,” said Dmytro, a Ukrainian soldier in Sumy, half-ironically. The Kremlin has frequently claimed that Ukrainian territories such as Donetsk, Kharkiv and Odessa are historical Russian territories. Here the Ukrainians turned the tables. They could advance even further, as they have attacked the town of Koronevo and thousands of Russian soldiers may be trapped in a pocket between the border and the Seim River.
Ukraine won a tactical and political victory in Kursk. It changed the narrative that it was constantly being squeezed and losing land in Donbass. It ridiculed Putin and the West’s “red lines” and showed that his promises of escalation are hollow and false.
Even the name “Kursk” is significant: it was from here that the Nazis launched their last major offensive on the Eastern Front in 1943. In the largest tank battle in history, the Soviets repelled Hitler – a victory that every Russian schoolchild hears about. This is Russia’s equivalent of the beaches of D-Day. Putin has not only experienced an invasion, but also an embarrassment on holy ground.
Despite Ukraine’s extraordinary success at Kursk, the situation further east at home is bleaker. Ukraine’s front lines in the Donetsk region are fragile, and Russian forces are steadily gaining territory around key cities such as Toretsk and Pokrovsk. Ukraine has attempted to withdraw Russian reserves from Pokrovsk, but so far the Russian advance has continued unabated. Thousands of civilians are being evacuated daily, and soldiers report being outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians by five to ten times, depending on their location.
However, for the Ukrainian soldiers holding the Russian city of Sudzha, the situation remains stable.
And for the first time since the liberation of Kherson in November 2022, the citizens of Ukraine, defeated by a brutal and bloody invasion that turned into a long war of attrition, can celebrate victory.
