ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Ukrainian military forces continue to control hundreds of square miles of land in the Russian territory of Kursk. That's more than a week after they launched an invasion that took Russia by surprise. Now, few reporters have gotten right up to the frontlines of the fighting. But one who's gotten close is Nick Connolly from the German outlet DW News.
Earlier today, I reached Connolly in Sumy, which is a city on the Ukrainian side of the border where Ukraine's military is staging equipment for the operation. I asked him what the scene was like in a city just 20 miles away from the frontline.
NICK CONNOLLY: So it's around 6 p.m. local time here on Saturday evening, and people are out walking with a conspicuous number of children. This is really not something we're used to seeing in Ukrainian cities so close to the Russian border. It's a lot more alive than place like Kharkiv. I can't really explain it because this is a city that constantly gets hit. Just this morning there was an Iskander ballistic missile hit less than a mile from where I'm sitting now in downtown. And you really couldn't tell by seeing all the people out. We saw a wedding earlier, people taking pictures - now people out with coffees, with drinks.
It feels pretty idyllic. It's a really jarring kind of feeling. Just a few hours ago, we were close to the border, and there were Russian glide bombs coming in, which are these kind of devastating, very cheap weapons that are kind of, you know, half a ton heavy and can just take houses apart in a few moments. And here in Sumy, it kind of seems like, you know, the war is pretty far away if you kind of ignore the military vehicles that you see passing through pretty much all the time.
MA: And I can hear some children in the background there also.
CONNOLLY: It's really weird because, you know, you've seen so many families leave Ukraine for Europe. Anyone who had small children, especially in Kyiv, which actually is much safer than Sumy, where we are now - and we're less than about 20 miles, direct line, to the Russian border. This is a city that gets attacked with cruise missiles, with ballistic missiles, with drones. And yet it seems very alive. And it is strange. It is, in fact, that Sumy is a bit less on the radar maybe, than Kharkiv. It has less symbolic importance for the Russians. So they really have focused on Kharkiv, which is not very far away. But it is, you know, something we weren't expecting, even though we're in Ukraine all the time.
MA: So what do you make of this shift in the mood?
CONNOLLY: I think people are really happy to have something else to talk about, to have some grounds for optimism. There is a real sense of kind of pride that, you know, the Russians are now having to feel what war is and that this isn't just going all in one direction. There's a hope that maybe ordinary Russians will put pressure on their government to end this war if they see the real cost of this war, if it stops being this kind of colonial war that Russia can basically just carry out on someone else's territory far away.
But there is also a lot of worry about, you know, if this goes wrong, if the Ukrainian troops there were to be encircled or to, you know, get into Russian captivity. But for now, it really reminds us of kind of the first year of the war, that late summer to autumn of '22, when the Ukrainians were taking back territory and really pushing the Russians back. There's a real sense of that here.
MA: And I'm curious about Russians who live in the area. I understand that some Russian locals, to get away from the fighting, have actually crossed into Ukraine, rather than fleeing further into Russia. Why is that?
CONNOLLY: So we spoke to a mother and son who were here in Sumy yesterday. They are joint Russian-American citizens of Sumy, and they lived in the U.S. in the '90s and got citizenship and had come back for some family reasons. And so they were keen to leave Kursk region, Russia, to get to their family left in the U.S. So that was a kind of fairly unusual case, but there are now reports coming in of more people trying to come to Ukraine because they decide that it's actually worth it, that crossing the front lines between Ukrainian and Russian troops to get to Russian-held territory is just too unsafe. But for now, the numbers are pretty small, and most people we're seeing coming into Sumy are Ukrainians from villages along the border, who are seeing the Russians upping their aerial bombing campaign and trying to get away from that.
MA: Are you seeing any signs that make you think that the Ukrainian military is thinking of moving on or, or potentially giving up some of this territory?
CONNOLLY: Actually, quite the opposite. We've had news in the last few days of them setting up these military authorities - so basically these kind of administrations to deal with Russian civilians left there. We've also seen them blowing up bridges across some strategic rivers, which would allow them to defend the territory more easily and prevent the Russians coming back in. So it seems - I don't think there's any sense that the Ukrainians want to annex these territory, like the Russians have done with bits of occupied Ukraine, but they want to hold on to it for a while, to then trade it for other territory that Russia seized in Ukraine.
MA: That was Nick Connolly from the German outlet DW News, speaking to us from Sumy, Ukraine. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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