‘Judging by the reports, our town no longer exists’

Russian woman recounts fleeing the border region where Ukrainian forces are reportedly advancing

On Wednesday, Russian pro-war Telegram channels reported that Ukrainian forces had taken control of multiple settlements in Russia’s Kursk region and were advancing towards the town of Sudzha, a district center. Early afternoon local time, the channel Rybar reported that Ukrainian troops had captured the Sudzha gas metering station, a key transit point for natural gas flowing from Russia to Europe. The Ukrainian authorities have not yet commented on the reports. Journalists from the independent outlet Verstka spoke to a woman from Sudzha who evacuated from the town on Tuesday with her family amid heavy shelling. In English, Meduza shares her account of the family’s escape.

Anna (name changed), a resident of Sudzha, fled the town with her family on Tuesday after it came under fire amid the Ukrainian military’s apparent incursion into Russia’s Kursk region that began that morning. She told Verstka that the local authorities did not issue an evacuation order and that her family left at their own initiative.

“We were awoken at 3:00 a.m. by the sound of the missiles being launched at us,” Anna said. “[Air raid] sirens went off, the air defense system was activated, and we all went down to the basement, including our baby who’s practically an infant. We also had my grandmother, who’s over 80 years old, my husband’s parents, my sister, our dogs, and our cats. It’s not even a basement, it’s a damp cellar where we keep canned foods. If there had been a strike nearby, we would have just been buried,” she said.

According to Anna, she and her family spent over seven hours in the basement. She said they were unable to leave even to use the bathroom due to the constant fire overhead.

“We’ve never experienced anything like that before,” she told Verstka. “They were firing at us nonstop — it was immediately clear that an offensive was underway. The explosions never stopped, not even for a minute.”

Eventually, Anna said, she and her family decided to try to flee the town, but they only had one car, which was physically too small to fit the entire family. “We started going through the streets and pleading with our neighbors to help,” she said. “Some of our neighbors essentially saved our lives — they gave us their car so that we could escape. If we’d only had one car, we wouldn’t have abandoned our parents or our cats and dogs; we would have stayed in Sudzha, and we probably would have all died there.

On their drive out of the combat zone, Anna said, she was terrified that either her own family or her parents, who were driving behind them, would be killed. “We tried to keep them in our line of sight at all times,” she recounted.

Our child was hysterical. At one point, a drone dropped something onto the car that was driving in front of us. People panicked and started to turn back, but we thought it was already too late to go back. It’s good that we took the risk and continued on: judging by the news reports, our town no longer exists.

Anna noted that on Tuesday, there was no official evacuation order from the authorities, and many residents were unable to leave the town.

I’ve gotten messages from classmates and friends whose parents live in Sudzha and haven’t been able to get out. They’re all crying. They don’t even know whether their loved ones are alive — they can’t get in touch with them. Our entire family lived together in Sudzha, in a big house that my dad built with his own two hands. And now we have nothing. We’re hoping the house will survive, but we just received news that my grandpa’s house, for example, has been bombed to rubble, nothing left.

On Wednesday, Kursk Governor Alexey Smirnov reported that several thousand residents had been evacuated from the areas under attack.

The Ukrainian authorities have not commented on the alleged incursion.