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A commander of the Russian special forces sat on four battle fronts in eastern Ukraine after joining the invasion of Russia almost three years ago. He said that the fiercest fighting he has seen is now to go home, while the Russian army is used to release a ribbon from the national territory of Ukrainian forces.
The prolonged battle for the occupied Russian city in Sudzha and the surrounding countryside has become unexpected as one of the focal points of a war fought the fate of the Ukrainian state. The two parties committed a significant share of their limited reserves to control Sudzha, a county of the former former asleep in the Kursk region, near the border of the two countries.
“These are the most brutal battles – I have not seen anything such during a whole special military operation,” said the commander, who leads about 200 men to Kursk, in an interview near the first line at the end of Last year, using the euphemism of the Kremlin for the war. He asked that he was only identified by his appeal index, Hades, according to the military protocol.
The two parties consider Kursk as an essential territory, an important element in the expected peace talks promised by President Trump. Military analysts claim that Ukrainian forces have since paid some of their best reservations to Kursk, hoping to use their conquest as a bargaining currency in negotiations.
For President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the Ukrainian foray – the first invasion of Russian territory since the Second World War – was a continuous embarrassment. He is determined to push Ukraine so that he does not have to concession to recover the territory, and Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers, including conscripts and North Korean allies, to repel the invaders, according to US officials.
The Ukrainians “wanted to lead the talks from a position of strength,” said Lieutenant-General Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat’s special forces unit of Russia Chechnya, in an interview in the region of Kursk in December. “When when the talks come, it is not clear if they can still say that they are here.”
With the high issues, Russian soldiers fighting in Kursk believe that the fights are about to become even more bloody.
“We are expecting Bakhmut 2.0,” said Hades, the Russian commander serving in Akhmat, which is largely composed of the remains of Wagner’s paramilitaries.
Bakhmut is a Ukrainian city whose Wagner ruins captured in 2023 after a nine -month assault at the price of tens of thousands of victims. The confrontation was emblematic of the Ukraine stand-and-combat strategy, even in the face of the higher labor and firepower of Russia.
Another Russian commander, who insisted on anonymity for security reasons, said that the cost of a confrontation would be astounding. Blood breaking, the victims are “unimaginable,” he said.
A photographer working for the New York Times had access to Kursk at the end of last year and was authorized to interview and photograph Russian soldiers in a hospital and near the front line, as well as civilians, some who had fled their villages and others who stayed behind.
Some of the soldiers interviewed were Wagner veterans who joined Akhmat after the failed mutiny of the chief of mercenaries, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. They said that the unity of special forces based in Chechnya was most like the loose structure of their old paramilitary force.
Other soldiers interviewed were recent volunteers who joined the receipt of registration bonuses up. They said that an opportunity to fight in their own country caused an additional incitement to join a war whose objectives or wider causes had trouble articulating.
“It is our land, these are our inhabitants and our values,” said Aleksandr, a Russian contractual soldier injured by a mortar in Kursk, in an interview in a medical center. “We have to fight for them.”
Since the start of the Ukrainian invasion six months ago, the two parties have undergone heavy losses on flat ground exposed to Kursk punctuated by small villages, although the armies keep their victims closely. Russia, in glacial advances, was able to recover around 60% of around 500 square miles initially captured by Ukraine.
Between the two armies are around 2,000 to 3,000 Russian civilians, which were trapped by the speed of the initial Ukrainian advance and the failure of the Russian government to assemble an evacuation.
The two parties blamed themselves for having omitted to provide conditions for other residents to leave, forcing these civilians to endure Russian winter with dietary supplies in decline and without running water, heating or electricity. While Russian forces are getting closer, they are subject to an climbing of bombings.
Analysts and relatives of the residents of Sudzha fear that the dependence of the Russian army with regard to heavy bombing and the determination of Ukraine to defend the city will threaten a humanitarian disaster at a level not seen in Russia since The civil war in Chechnya in the 1990s. At the end of January, the Russian forces were held just a few kilometers from the city center.
In Ukraine, the Russian invasion caused civil suffering on a much larger scale, with strikes on residential buildings, hospitals, churches and a range of energy facilities.
Pasi Paroinen, military analyst of the research company in Finland Black Bird Group, said that the Russian assault on Sudzha would be expensive for soldiers and civilians because Ukraine had deployed its strongest strength to Kursk.
Lyubov, mother of four, is part of a group of Kursk residents who for months publicly call a humanitarian corridor to evacuate parents trapped in Sudzha. She said that she feared that the city assault of the city would leave her parents and others there with little chances of survival.
“As the Russian troops enter the colonies, only ruins and ashes remain houses,” she said in an interview, adding: “It is a horrible rescue system.”
The apocalyptic scenes described by civilians who have escaped the surrounding villages of Southzha prefigure the intensity of the imminent battle for the city.
In the interviews, these civilians have provided mixed accounts of the Ukrainian occupation.
Zoya, 64, described the initial conviviality of the Ukrainian soldiers who occupied his village, Pogrebki, on August 12. She said the first soldiers who came to her home had given her husband a packet of cigarettes and offered their help.
“They were very nice guys,” she said.
(Zoya and other civilians who have been interviewed are identified by their first name only to protect them from the laws of Russian censorship.)
This camaraderie decreased while the fighting intensified, according to those who fled. Ukrainian soldiers began to see Russian civilians like an obstacle – or worse, like potential informants who could give their positions.
Zoya and her husband lacked food and survived on occasional frozen potatoes that they dug from their garden. During one of these outings, a drone exploded near her husband. He died in his arms a few minutes later, she said.
Zoya spent most of her time shelters constant bombing in his basement, an extent of darkness that made him hallucinate and temporarily lose his sense of sight and time. Hunger finally pushed him to try an escape.
“There was nowhere to live-it was so scary there, everything was destroyed,” she said in an interview.
She said that she had traveled five miles through fields strewn with destroyed Russian tanks and dead soldiers before reaching the Russian positions in November.
Another woman named Natalia, 69, who uses a wheelchair, said a similar experience.
She said that Ukrainian soldiers had initially brought her bread, water and insulin for her diabetes after occupying her village in Novoivanovka. The soldiers stopped from time to time to discuss a cup of tea.
The treatment has worsened as the fighting approached.
She said in an interview that her husband died after being briefly killed by a Ukrainian soldier. Her account could not be checked independently and Ukraine has repeatedly declared that she adheres to humanitarian laws in Kursk.
In November, Natalia deaits through a basement in No Man’s Land. One day, she said, a Russian recognition group arrived at her house and told her that her only chance of survival was to escape.
“They said,” Please leave, but you can – otherwise you will die “,” said Natalia.
She said other surviving residents helped transport it to another village, where their group was finally rescued by Russian troops.
Residents of Sudzha are now fearing similar difficulties come to their loved ones.
Earlier in February, a missile struck the Sudzha boarding school, which housed around 100 people displaced from the peripheral villages. The two parties blamed themselves for the strike.
The attack killed at least four people; Ukrainian soldiers have evacuated the survivors to Ukraine.
“We do not know where the rocket comes from,” said Yulia, a Russian woman whose parents survived the strike. She said that the Ukrainian soldiers “came and helped dig people from the rubble and save our people.”
A Russian man named Sergei said that video messages from the city family sometimes reached him after his occupation. During the months, he said, he looked at their white hair to get white, their bodies became and the sounds of the explosions stronger.
“I’m sorry to cry,” said her sister in a video that was seen by Times, congratulating Sergei for his birthday. “I would like to have been able to do it in person, at least by phone. You have always complained that I call too little.
“Mother cannot congratulate you because she has trouble getting on the stairs. She is almost always in the basement, ”added the sister. “She joins my congratulations.”
Finally, the videos became too painful to watch, said Sergei, taking her to go to occasional texts.
Constant meheut And Yurii Shyvala Kyiv’s contributed reports and Milana Mazaeva de Tbilissi, Georgia.
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