Fleeing Russians tell of panic after Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk region

Strategic push into Russian territory is a blow to morale, with tens of thousands of people rushing to escape

Russians who fled from a cross-border attack by Ukraine have described abandoning their homes and running for their lives as local government control collapsed.
Panic spread quickly through villages in the Kursk region, in southern Russia, as Kyiv’s forces staged the first foreign invasion of Russian soil since the Second World War last week.
“We don’t understand why they don’t tell the truth,” one woman told Russia’s Kommersant newspaper. “On TV, they kept saying, ‘this is an emergency’. 
“What kind of emergency is it when there are foreign tanks on our land? This is already a real war.”
On Sunday, Ukrainian forces posted videos of themselves ripping down Russian flags above government buildings in villages around the small town of Sudzha, 75 miles south-west of Kursk city. 
Other videos showed dozens of bodies of dead Russian soldiers strewn across fields or lying on the fringes of woodland.
Nikolai Volobuyev, head of the Belovsk District that neighbours Sudzha, also admitted that Ukrainian soldiers have now advanced into his region and ordered an evacuation.
“The situation is stable, but very tense. Today we don’t understand all the issues in the border areas,” he said. 
The Russian defence ministry inadvertently confirmed this advance by reporting that its forces had engaged Ukrainian troops near two villages 20 miles from the border. 
Russian soldiers were also spotted apparently building a new defensive line that included trenches around the Kursk nuclear power plant, 40 miles to the west of Kursk city.
A Ukrainian security official told the AFP news agency that “thousands” of soldiers had been involved in the attack, which has captured an estimated 600 square kilometres of Russian land.
“The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses and to destabilise the situation in Russia,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It came amid reports that Russian forces had started a fire on a nuclear power station in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials indicated that occupying soldiers had set fire to a large number of car tyres in the station’s cooling towers. A 20-second clip circulated on social media showed plumes of black smoke pouring from one of the two towers.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, accused Moscow of attempting to blackmail Ukraine as it pushed into Russian territory in the Kursk region, but said that radiation levels were at normal levels.
“However, as long as the Russian terrorists maintain control over the nuclear plant, the situation is not and cannot be normal,” he said.
“Since the first day of its seizure, Russia has been using the Zaporizhzhia NPP [nuclear power plant] only to blackmail Ukraine, all of Europe, and the world.
“We are waiting for the world to react, waiting for the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to react. Russia must be held accountable for this.”
In scenes similar to those from across Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, tens of thousands of people have now fled the advance, pouring into Kursk city in cars, on bicycles and squashed into emergency buses, clutching a few bags of hastily-grabbed belongings. 
Russian media reported that 20 evacuation centres had been set up for people fleeing the border region, but these quickly swelled to capacity.
In a video uploaded onto Telegram, a group of mainly middle-aged women who had fled from Sudzha described their terror – and their anger at officials.
“Foreign soldiers armed with Nato equipment entered our land and within a few hours our city was turned into ruins,” their spokesman said, ignoring a woman sobbing next to her. “We lost our land, our homes. We fled under fire, mainly without documents.”
Another man accused the Russian military of failing to protect the country. He said the evacuation had been chaotic and that people had been forced to flee “in their underwear and T-shirts”, with children “wrapped in rags”.
“In one cut-off village, people had to swim across a river as best they could,” he said.
In another video, a woman sitting on an evacuation bus said that she had to cower in the basement of her building overnight to survive the Ukrainian attack.
“Everything was burning, drones were flying, missiles were whistling. We were in the basement all night,” she said.Another woman said that there had been total “chaos”.
“Everything was destroyed. We only barely managed to escape thanks to our neighbour who led us through the forest,” she said. “The Nazis’ armoured vehicles were driving around the streets firing at houses.”
Despite an edict by the Kremlin to its propaganda units to play down the Ukrainian attack, people’s shock and bewilderment leaked out across Russia’s usually pliant media.
In its lengthy article, Kommersant described how its correspondent had tried to reach Sudzha but had turned back because fighting was too fierce.
His report was reminiscent of scenes played out thousands of times across Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
“A jeep was completely smashed,” he wrote. A few minutes later, we noticed a white Niva [car] that had been blown into a ditch, also damaged by a drone attack. Another couple of hundred metres and another smashed jeep, right next to a religious cross,” the correspondent wrote. 
“We then saw a burnt-out white car. The blow had been dealt recently, as the wreck was still smoking.”
People who had fled the fighting also told the Kommersant correspondent how their increasingly panicked phone calls to emergency hotlines went unanswered as the Ukrainian military advanced and their villages were destroyed. 
“Two apartment buildings were destroyed on the central Lenin Street,” a woman said of Sudzha. “The prosecutor’s office building was badly damaged. The former sanitary and epidemiological station building was also damaged.” 
They also said that they had been forced to leave old and disabled people behind in the rush to flee, despite a lack of food and running water in the town.
One woman said that she was ashamed of the Russian military, which she described as a “corrupt mess”.
“I thought we would take them, but it turns out they are taking us,” she said of the invasion of Ukraine. “Who made these plans anyway? Maybe we shouldn’t have sent the guys to Kiyv right away.”
The Ukrainian attack has also sent shockwaves beyond the Kursk region, deeper through the Russian system, with businessmen close to the Kremlin telling local media it has dealt “a very big blow” to the reputations of Vladimir Putin and the Russian military.
While hardcore Putin supporters living in St Petersburg and Moscow told The Telegraph that the Kremlin would shrug off the Ukrainian attack on the Kursk region and then “finish off Ukraine” as revenge, others said that people were becoming more wary.
One person living in a large Russian city said on condition of anonymity that work colleagues had discussed the attack and that they sounded “more afraid”.
“One of my acquaintances is on the way to Kursk now, her mum lives there and she wants to take her away because of the fighting,” the person said.
Ordinary Russians’ nervousness and accusations of incompetence and duplicity levelled at Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top general, will alarm Putin who has relied on his usually hardcore propaganda to maintain public support for his war in Ukraine.
He has sent tanks, conscripts and mercenary units filled with hardened former Wagner fighters to Kursk to try and regain control of the border region.
According to news reports, Volodymyr Zelensky personally ordered the military incursion into Russia.
In a Telegram message to Ukrainians on Saturday night, the president acknowledged the attack as strategically important for the first time.
“Ukraine is proving that it really knows how to restore justice and guarantees exactly this kind of pressure is needed, pressure on the aggressor,” he said. 
It has also given Ukrainians a major moral boost. In Ukraine, people have been celebrating, cheering on Ukrainian soldiers who they feel are giving ordinary Russians a “taste of their own medicine”.
“Combined with the F-16 arrivals, it is finally giving people something positive to talk about,” said a senior Western aid worker based in Kyiv. 
“They love it.”