Civilians flee in Ukraine’s Sumy region, but Russia faces huge losses
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Howard LaFranchi Staff writer
| Sumy, Ukraine
As the summer fighting season intensifies in Ukraine, the heavily wooded Sumy region in the northeast corner of the country finds itself subjected to two incongruous styles of Russian warfare.
There is the grueling, World War I-style ground war, throwing waves of Russian infantry against Ukrainian fire. And there is the 21st-century warfare of surveillance and explosives-laden drones terrorizing the civilian population on the cheap.
Together they are helping thousands of Russian soldiers, massed along Sumy’s border with Russia, to advance meter by meter – and at great human cost – to overrun a few border farming villages and advance toward dozens more.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onRussian troops are advancing very slowly in the Sumy region of Ukraine, but their progress is forcing local villagers to flee to safer locations.
This month Russia crossed a remarkable threshold: Its army has suffered 1 million casualties, dead and wounded, on the Ukrainian battlefield since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
U.S. President Donald Trump is still pressing for a ceasefire – he says he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call Sunday that he must bring “his” war in Ukraine to an end.
For now, it is Russia’s deadly missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure that are attracting the most attention.
On the night of June 17, Russia launched its deadliest air assault on Kyiv in months, killing 23 people in a barrage of more than 400 drones, 125 missiles, and cluster munitions. Several high-rise apartment buildings were heavily damaged, some destroyed.
But the intensification of fighting along Sumy’s border is evidence that the ground war continues.
Three times uprooted
Nataliia Piven can attest to that. She has seen her life turned upside down by both the old-fashioned and the ultramodern versions of a war now in its fourth year.
Sitting in the sparsely furnished three-bed room she shares with her husband and adult son in a Sumy city refuge, Mrs. Piven recounts how the war has uprooted her family three times since fighting in March 2022 destroyed her home just over a mile from the Russian border.
Most recently, on May 5, a Russian glide bomb landed in the courtyard of the farmhouse the Pivens had occupied, wounding Mrs. Piven and her husband.
“We knew the enemy was getting a little closer every week,” she says, “but we had nowhere else to go.”
Now, at least until another abandoned farmhouse can be found, the hospital-turned-shelter is home.
“We’ve been here living like this for over a month,” she says, indicating the plastic bags serving as dresser drawers. “But I’m not complaining; I know many people have had worse things happen.”
Such as the neighbor who recently lost a son. “He was just sitting at the table when a drone killed him,” she says. “That’s what we face now; it’s really scary.”
Down the hall, Rita Husakova tends to her eight children in a room they have occupied since a grenade dropped from a Russian drone hit the bus she was taking from her village. Her uncle, aunt, and sister were killed.
Advancing Russian troops have made it too dangerous to return home, so she awaits assignment to a nearby village that seems safer.
“The danger is everywhere, but maybe we can find something a little better. Children can’t live like this every day,” she says, gesturing at the cramped room.
Ukrainian bravado
At Sumy city’s government center, administrator Oleh Hryhorov acknowledges the recent Russian advances, but insists that together the people of Sumy and the army will prevail.
“Despite the Russian desire to occupy Sumy region and Sumy city,” he says, “I can say confidently they don’t have a chance.”
In the meantime, he says a gamut of regional agencies is prepared to provide temporary housing, food, and other services for the 100 people evacuated every day from the most threatened border villages.
Of the 85,000 residents of villages under threat that the administration has deemed eligible for government evacuation, about 55,000 have been brought out. The rest are either waiting their turn, or refusing to leave their homes and farm animals.
Noting that Sumy region has more than 350 miles of border with Russia, Mr. Hryhorov says safeguarding civilians from Russia’s “campaign of panic and chaos” is not easy. But he points to a nearby outdoor café with several occupied tables and adds, “Is that the sign of a community that is fearful and ready to give up to the enemy?”
Russia has amassed some 50,000 troops along the Sumy front line over recent weeks. That may sound like a formidable number, but military experts say it’s unlikely to be enough to threaten large swaths of the region or to capture and occupy Sumy city and its quarter-million residents.
In any case, some suspect Russia has something else in mind.
“Putin’s main objective for this Sumy campaign is to allow Russia to break through and occupy all of Donbas,” says Mykhailo Samus, director of the New Geopolitics Research Center in Kyiv, referring to the eastern Ukraine territory Russia has annexed but does not fully occupy or control.
“He thinks that if he can increase the pressure on Sumy and cause alarm there, he can force Ukraine to shift resources away from Donbas and pave the way to his main goal,” he says.
But Mr. Samus says that scenario does not take into account the realities of front-line battlefields today.
“The fact is Russia is losing 90% of the infantry it’s sending forward because of Ukrainian drones,” he says. “Warfare is obviously different from 10 years ago,” he adds, “but honestly it’s different from how it was” when the war started.
Four years ago, Russian infantry could advance 7 to 8 miles beyond the border before encountering Ukrainian fire, he says. “But now as they advance, almost all of them will be killed by Ukrainian drones.”
New Russian tactics
There are some signs that Russia is taking account of its heavy infantry losses. Rather than send waves of infantry across the landscape or expose troops in large transport vehicles, Russian commanders are providing their soldiers with motorcycles and nondescript vehicles, military analysts say.
Another factor this fighting season is an almost certain end to U.S. aid to Ukraine. At a Senate budget hearing this month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration’s goal in cutting the military aid would be to pressure Ukraine to accept a negotiated settlement and cut short an “endless war.”
Ukrainians are by and large aware that the days of large U.S. aid packages are over, but they are not complaining about betrayal.
“We understand that the U.S. wants to be free of all these global problems like Ukraine,” Mr. Samus says. “But that says to me the U.S. doesn’t want to be a leader anymore.”
Most local people in Sumy say that Ukraine remains grateful for the vital assistance the United States offered their country in its most dire moment, which helped Ukraine to build its own capacities and hold off a formidable foe.
Oleh Strilka, a press officer for the Sumy region’s emergency response service, says he’ll never forget the day he realized Ukraine had a powerful and dedicated partner in the U.S.
His commander had asked him and emergency responders to compile a “wish list” of all the American equipment and supplies they could use to better serve the civilian population facing deadly and unpredictable attacks.
“I was shocked and amazed when the equipment arrived. It was everything I had asked for and more,” he says. Firefighters received powerful water pumps; emergency responders received state-of-the-art tools for pulling survivors from rubble.
Mr. Strilka says that even though that aid has stopped and the work of Sumy’s emergency responders has become more dangerous, he still feels the effects of past American support.
He points to two women planting petunias in a city park. “You see that here in Sumy we are all doing things that despite our situation give us hope for the future,” he says.
Oleksandr Naselenko contributed reporting for this story.
