Fleeing Russians tell of panic and terror after Ukraine invasion of Kursk

Strategic push into enemy territory is a blow to morale and a Kremlin that has held tight rein on propaganda at home

Russians who fled from cross-border attack from Ukraine have described abandoning their homes and running for their lives as local government control collapsed.
Panic and fear spread quickly through villages in the Kursk region, southern Russia, from Tuesday as Kyiv’s forces staged the first foreign invasion of Russian soil since the Second World War.
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“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!”
Ukrainian forces on Sunday posted more videos of themselves ripping down Russian flags above government buildings in villages around the small town of Sudzha, mocking the Kremlin. 
The head of Belovsk, a district which neighbours the occupied area, has also admitted that Ukrainian soldiers have now advanced into his administrative area.
A Ukrainian security official told the AFP news agency that “thousands” of soldiers had been involved in the attack that 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 on condition of anonymity.
Tens of thousands of people have now fled this advance, pouring into Kursk city in cars, on bicycles and squashed into emergency buses, clutching a few bags of hastily grabbed belongings. 
In a video uploaded onto Telegram, a group of mainly middle-aged women who had fled from Sudzha described their terror and anger at officials.
“Foreign soldiers armed with Nato equipment entered our land and within a few hours our city was turned into ruins,” the 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 Russia.
He said that 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.
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, the Kommersant newspaper described how its correspondent had tried to reach Sudzha but had turned back because fighting there was too fierce.
His report was reminiscent of scenes played out thousands of times across Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
“A jeep was completely smashed. 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. 
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 Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “Who made these plans anyway? Maybe we shouldn’t have sent the guys to Kiyv right away?”
And the Ukrainian attack on Russia 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 Putin and the Russian military.
These sentiments will alarm the Kremlin which has relied on its usually hardcore wall of propaganda to maintain public support for its war in Ukraine.
According to news reports, Volodymyr Zelensky personally ordered the military incursion into Russia and in a Telegram message to Ukrainians on Saturday night he acknowledged the attack for the first time as strategically important.
“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,” a source in Kyiv told The Telegraph, referencing the arrival of F-16 fighter jets from Ukraine’s Nato allies this month. “They love it.”