Oksana Kalashnyk, with 6 children and two cats, was evacuated from the border village of Myropylia to the city of Sumy in Ukraine, on Sept. 6.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
Oksana Kalashnyk and her children remained in their village near Ukraine’s border with Russia through more than 2½ years of war, watching and listening as Russian troops swept through in the early days of the invasion, then withdrew, only to continue striking the Sumy region with artillery and drones.
It was just this week, as Russia escalated its air attacks on the region – Moscow’s angry response to a month-old Ukrainian offensive into the neighbouring Kursk region of Russia – that Ms. Kalashnyk decided it was no longer safe for her and her six youngest children, aged five to 15, to stay in Myropylia, less than eight kilometres from Russian-held territory.
On Friday morning, she and her kids said goodbye to her husband – who stayed behind to care for the family’s animals – and bundled into a pair of cars, carrying one suitcase each, plus two cats in a plastic cage. An hour later, they reached the regional capital, Sumy, where they were registered as internally displaced persons and assigned a temporary place to live, another two hours’ drive west.
Violetta Kalashnyk, left, pets a kitten held by her mother, Ms. Kalashnyk, after being evacuated from the border village of Myropylia.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
“The Russian strikes were getting too close. One of their drones landed in the garden right beside our house,” Ms. Kalashnyk, 45, said in an interview at a receiving centre run by Pluriton, a non-governmental organization that specializes in assisting difficult evacuations. “We asked the kids, ‘Do you want to leave this place?’ They immediately said yes.”
The border area was literally aflame when The Globe and Mail travelled Friday to the destroyed Sudzha crossing between Ukraine and Russia. Along the potholed road that once connected the cities of Sumy and Kursk, a fire burned immediately to the west – started by Ukrainian troops trying to expose any land mines left behind by the Russians – while two pillars of smoke rose over the wheat fields to the east.
Rows of houses on the Ukrainian side of the route had been destroyed by Russian artillery fire. A café in the village of Kiyanytsia had been obliterated by a direct hit, leaving only a wooden “Welcome” sign hanging over the entrance to a rubble-strewn parking lot.
The Sudzha checkpoint, where on Aug. 6 Ukrainian troops surrounded and routed Russian border guards in the first battle of the incursion, remains a broken mess, with only a single “S” remaining on a sign that once welcomed visitors to Russia. Some 1,300 square kilometres on the other side have been captured by Ukrainian troops, who have dug in to defend the territory.
Later in the day, The Globe saw a missile-carrying Ukrainian fighter jet streaking north toward the front line.
Colonel Vadym Mysnyk, the press officer for Ukraine’s northeastern front, said the Kursk offensive can be considered a success, since it has pushed Russian troops farther away from Sumy, while boosting morale and demonstrating that Ukraine would be able to take the war to Russia if its allies were to remove their restrictions on how and when Western-supplied weapons can be used in the conflict.
But those gains have come at a cost. One key objective of the offensive was to force Russia to divert forces away from the war’s main battlefield in the southeastern Donbas region. But the Russian push in Donbas has, if anything, accelerated over the past month, with the front line now just a few kilometres from the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.
Col. Vadym Mysnyk, military spokesperson for Ukraine’s northern front, looks over the Sudzha border crossing between Ukraine and Russia on Sept. 6.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
Meanwhile, Russia has intensified its air attacks on cities around the country, including mass missile and drone attacks on Kyiv and deadly strikes this week on a military academy in the central city of Poltava, which killed 55 people, as well as on the western city of Lviv, killing at least seven.
Sumy has been one of the hardest-hit regions. Col. Mysnyk said Russian forces have used hundreds of “glide bombs” – a crude Russian invention that consists of wings and a simple guidance system attached to a 500-kilogram explosive device – to pummel both Sumy and the Russian-held parts of Kursk. “The main reason they are attacking Sumy so often is to stop the Kursk offensive,” he said.
On Sunday, glide bombs struck a children’s social and psychological rehabilitation centre in the city of Sumy, injuring 18 people, including six children. On Tuesday, another glide bomb hit a building on the campus of Sumy State University, destroying classrooms used to teach medicine and engineering, as well as a gymnasium where the university’s successful martial arts team trained.
Vasyl Karpusha, the university’s rector, said no one was injured in the strike – which tore off a section of the four-storey building – only because most of the university’s classes had been held online since the start of the Kursk offensive. Lectures will continue that way while the university rebuilds, he said.
Air-raid sirens are so constant in Sumy that no one looks up or bothers to take shelter, at least during daylight hours. One recent alarm lasted for a day and a half.
A destroyed civilian house sits in the village of Sumy, a few kilometers from the Ukraine-Russia border, on Sept. 6.Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail
The night sky, meanwhile, is filled with the buzz of Russian drones and the pops of Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire. “We are just continuing our lives as before, even if there are more and more strikes happening on the city,” Mr. Karpusha said in his office on the largely deserted campus.
Another casualty of the incursion has been the closing of what had been the only open border point for civilians – most of them Ukrainians trying to leave Russia. Kateryna Arisoy, the director of Pluriton, said those looking to flee now have to first acquire a Russian passport so they can exit the country via Belarus.
With the flow of Ukrainians leaving Russia all but stopped, Pluriton and its network of evacuation groups have turned their attention to rescuing Ukrainians such as Ms. Kalashnyk and her family from an increasingly dangerous part of their own country.
“We assume the situation will only become harder. Every night Sumy is shelled, and the Russians will not stop,” said Ms. Arisoy, whose own home in the Donbas region city of Bakhmut was flattened and then occupied by Russia last year. “People are leaving Sumy now – but there are no safe places in Ukraine any more.”