A landscape of death: What's left where Ukraine invaded Russia

Sudzha, Russia: Ukraine's surprise incursion into western Russia last summer quickly overran Sudzha, a little town in Kursk near the border that hosts a transit station for a natural gas pipeline. Ukrainian forces also held a swath of nearby countryside dotted with villages.

Fighting raged around the civilians trapped here for months, including bombardment by the Russian military. They also endured a Russian winter with scant access to heating, medicine and other essentials.

The regional governor has put the civilian death toll of those months at more than 300 people, with nearly 600 missing, totals that could not be independently verified. Many Sudzha residents, in interviews there and in evacuation shelters, said they had helped to bury at least a dozen neighbors. Some said they had buried 40 or more.

Then there were the unburied.

When I visited the area in March, the fields were scattered with carcasses of cows and pigs, and with the corpses of civilians and soldiers. The uniforms visible among the fallen were mostly Russian.

Amid shattered homes, other bodies had lain decomposing for months, seemingly untouched, the circumstances of their deaths unknown.

I reported there for six days, escorted at times by members of Russia's Chechnya-based Akhmat special forces unit, which had fought to reclaim the area and was helping with evacuations. Drone attacks remained frequent. The sounds of incoming and outgoing fire were constant.

Mines, unexploded drones and rockets lay everywhere. Deminers worked tirelessly, while soldiers sifted through rubble and woodland, collecting remains.

The devastation has fueled anger within the community against Russian authorities, as well as against Ukraine and its Western supporters. Kursk represents the rare place in this war where Russian civilians found themselves under the control of Ukrainian forces, while large areas of Ukraine still remain occupied by Russia.

"People should have been evacuated," said Oksana Lobodova, 47, whose sister Olesya, 38, fled the village of Cherkasskoye Porechnoye and joined her in the city of Kursk at the beginning of the incursion. Their mother remained in nearby Russkoye Porechnoye; they last heard from her in August.

"How were people supposed to survive?" Lobodova said. "Seven months in winter, without water, without food, without medicine, without communication, without electricity -- sick pensioners!

"What difference does it make if they were killed or died on their own?" she added. "They were left there."

Russian officials have said that more than 150,000 people were successfully evacuated from the Kursk border region and that the idea the government did too little to help people escape was false information spread by the Ukrainian news media. But senior regional officials and former officials have been forced to retire, arrested on suspicion of corruption and, in one case, fired and then found dead.

The body of Lobodova's mother was recovered from her backyard in Russkoye Porechnoye after Russian forces retook the village. According to Lobodova, authorities said she was killed by shrapnel. She was 68.

In this border area, many people have ties in Ukraine and see the war as, in Lobodova's words, "family fighting family."

Because the Ukrainians could not reach Moscow, she said, "They hit their own. Their neighbors. Half our relatives are Ukrainian."

Hers, she said, live in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine. "Thank God we're women -- they can't draft us and make us fight each other."

Lyubov Blaschuk, 76, whom I met in a shelter, said she was from western Ukraine and had moved to Sudzha in 1986. In those Soviet days, she said, "everything was one."

She spoke of NATO expansion as a cause of the war, reflecting arguments in state media. She characterized Ukrainians as victims of propaganda who blamed everything on President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

"Fine," she added. "Let him be at fault. But it takes a lot to twist people's minds like that."

Her views on Ukraine found many echoes in the shelters.

The conflict's toll in this area was most visible in villages cratered by bombardment that I visited near the former front line. The smell of decomposing corpses rose from the rubble, and I saw bodies in civilian clothing. For most, I did not see an obvious cause of death, though shrapnel had torn the buildings. One body lay in a bullet-ridden car.

In the kitchen of one house in the village of Martynovka, I saw a largely naked body of a man bearing signs of violence at close quarters: a wound to the neck and a hole in the chest that appeared to be a gunshot wound.

Who killed these people, and under what circumstances, is unclear. No one was living in these villages, and I could find no witnesses in the shelters.

The New York Times previously documented two instances of indiscriminate use of lethal force against Kursk civilians early in the incursion, actions that may amount to war crimes. But reporters were unable to establish who was responsible for those deaths.

One of Russia's top law enforcement bodies, the Investigative Committee, has accused Ukrainian forces of torturing and killing a civilian in a residential building in Martynovka, and of killing two other residents of the village.

Russian officials and outlets blame Ukraine for other deaths, including in the village where Lobodova's mother died. State media has published reports describing harsh treatment of civilians, rarely providing evidence.

Russian authorities denied requests by the Times for more detailed information.

In a statement, the Ukrainian army said that its forces had fully complied with international law in Kursk, assisting civilians and trying to rescue survivors of Russian bombing in Sudzha. It denounced the Russian accusations as fakery and propaganda.

Ivan, a local taxi driver who helped evacuate people early in the invasion, said in audio messages in June that he continued to hear drones and gunfire in his town, Korenevo. One woman had died recently after a drone rammed her car, he said.

"Houses keep occasionally lighting up, people keep occasionally dying," said Ivan, who asked his last name be withheld to protect his privacy.

People I spoke to who were in Sudzha during the occupation generally reported respectful treatment by Ukrainian forces within the town, including some medical help and other aid. "They didn't touch us," Blaschuk said. "Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians -- they fought each other, but no one touched civilians."

One woman who remained in the town, Olga Novoselova, said the Ukrainian forces had arrived with the greeting: "'Good day, Slavs. We don't harm civilians.'

"And that was it," she added. "But still, it was stressful -- there were a lot of patrols. You could get stopped four or five times, even just trying to go somewhere with the dog."

The return of the Russian forces came suddenly.

"One day, someone knocked on my door, so I stepped outside," she said. "There were these men standing there -- they were all dirty, black, with red armbands. I just stood there, rubbed my eyes, turned around, and closed the door. Then I heard a voice from outside: 'She's not too happy to see us.'"

The Ukrainian forces fortified their positions and laid minefields that may take the Russians years to clear, even with North Korean help. By holding the territory, they hoped to divert Russian soldiers from battles inside Ukraine and provide a bargaining chip for future negotiations.

A high-stakes operation appears to have allowed some Russian troops to emerge at an unexpected point. Russia drained a mileslong section of the gas pipeline that passes through Sudzha and refilled it with air. Then it sent soldiers through to attack.

Akhmat soldiers who traveled the pipe spoke of having helped deliver a telling blow. One, who gave only his call sign, Skull, in accordance with military protocol, described emerging almost 10 miles behind defensive lines, wearing a blue armband to confuse Ukrainian forces. "When the enemy realized we were there," he said, "they started to retreat very quickly."

Breathing pipeline residues left soldiers hospitalized. "Those fighters who were there had severe poisoning," Akhmat commander Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov said in an audio message, adding that he could speak only of the men from his own unit.

One of his fighters died there, he said, and others "underwent a long medical treatment." Two had been discharged from service after developing what he said doctors described as cancerous tumors.

"You're standing in the dark," said another soldier, using the call sign Artist, describing conditions in the pipe. "You hear dripping. Condensation. Chemicals. Oil. Gas. And we're breathing all of it in. You lean in closer, and inhale that stuff. You walk past these guys, and they're breathing like zombies."

By the last day of the operation, he said, his vision was blurred and he was running a 100-degree fever.

Skull, who said he spent four days in the pipe, described being treated for pneumonia and poisoning.

Many of the troops involved were used to being treated as occupiers, including in parts of Ukraine that Russia claims as its own. In Kursk, they were instead greeted warmly. "For the first time in my life, I saw civilians who came out to meet us, hugged us, cried," Artist said.

Their stay was brief. While I was reporting, the Akhmat fighters were summoned away to face another potential Ukrainian advance. Russia has since launched another bloody cross-border attack, targeting Ukraine's Sumy region.

Many of the civilians who remain speak of their yearning for an end to the war.

Even during the isolation of the occupation, Blaschuk said, people here heard the promises of a quick deal proclaimed by Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.

"Everyone was waiting -- waiting for Trump to end it all, to force peace," she said.

Now they are waiting on another promise, a promise of reconstruction from Putin.

"Vladimir Vladimirovich said that we will rebuild the Kursk region. Yes, it will be better than it was," said Nikolai Ivanenko, a resident of the village of Kazachya Loknya now sheltering in Kursk city, using the Russian president's patronymic.

He drew on a previous brutal conflict to justify his hope: "We saw Chechnya, they rebuilt the most modern cities -- there were ruins there."

Novoselova, still in Sudzha, had a certainty of her own.

"The time will come, I'll pack my things, my animals, and leave here for good," she said. "Whether he rebuilds this city, as you say, or not, I still won't be able to live here anymore."