A Russian special forces commander served on four battlefronts across eastern Ukraine after joining Russia’s invasion nearly three years ago. He said the most ferocious fighting he has seen is now unfolding back home, as the Russian Army he serves struggles to liberate a sliver of national territory from Ukrainian forces.
The protracted battle for the occupied Russian town of Sudzha and the surrounding countryside has unexpectedly emerged as one of the focal points of a war fought over the fate of the Ukrainian state. Both sides have committed a significant share of their limited reserves to control Sudzha, a once sleepy county seat in the Kursk region, near the two countries’ border.
“These are the most brutal battles — I haven’t seen anything like this during the entire special military operation,” the commander, who leads about 200 men fighting in Kursk, said in an interview near the front line late last year, using the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war. He requested that he be identified only by his call sign,Hades, according to military protocol.
Both sides see Kursk as must-have territory, an important element in the expected peace talks promised by President Trump. Military analysts say the Ukrainian forces have since poured some of their best reserves into Kursk, hoping to use its conquest as a bargaining chip in negotiations.
For President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the Ukrainian incursion — the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II — has been an ongoing embarrassment. He is determined to push Ukraine out so he does not have to make any concession to get the territory back, and Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers, including conscripts and North Korean allies, to repel the invaders, according to U.S. officials.
Ukrainians “wanted to conduct the talks from a position of strength,” Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat special forces unit from Russia’s Chechnya region, said in an interview in the Kursk region in December. “When the time comes for the talks, it is not clear if they can still say that they are here.”
With the stakes so high, Russian soldiers fighting in Kursk believe the fighting is about to become even bloodier.
“We are expecting Bakhmut 2.0,” said Hades, the Russian commander serving in Akhmat, which is made up in large part from the remnants of Wagner paramilitaries.
Bakhmut is a Ukrainian town whose ruins Wagner captured in 2023 after a nine-month assault at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. The standoff was emblematic of Ukraine’s stand-and-fight strategy even in the face of Russia’s superior manpower and firepower.
Another Russian commander, who insisted on anonymity for security reasons, said the cost of a showdown would be staggering. The bloodshed, the casualties, it’s “unimaginable,” he said.
A photographer working for The New York Times was given access to Kursk late last year and was allowed to interview and photograph Russian soldiers at 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 interviewed soldiers were Wagner veterans who joined Akhmat after the failed mutiny of the mercenaries’ leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. They said the Chechnya-based special forces unit most closely resembled the loose structure of their former paramilitary force.
Other interviewed soldiers were recent volunteers who joined to take advantage of rising sign-up bonuses. They said an opportunity to fight inside their own country provided an additional incentive to join a war whose broader goals or causes they struggled to articulate.
“This is our land, these are our people and our values,” Aleksandr, a Russian contract soldier who was injured by a mortar fighting in Kursk, said in an interview at a medical center. “We must fight for them.”
Since the Ukrainian invasion began six months ago, both sides have taken heavy losses in Kursk’s exposed, flat terrain punctuated by small villages, although the armies closely guard their casualty rates. Russia, in glacial advances, has been able to recover about 60 percent of about 500 square miles initially captured by Ukraine.
Between the two armies are an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Russian civilians, who were trapped by the speed of the initial Ukrainian advance and the Russian government’s failure to mount an evacuation.
The two sides have blamed each other for failing to provide conditions for the remaining residents to leave, forcing those civilians to endure the Russian winter with dwindling food supplies and without running water, heating or electricity. As the Russian forces close in, they are being subjected to escalating bombardment.
The analysts and relatives of Sudzha residents fear that the Russian military’s reliance on heavy bombing and Ukraine’s determination to defend the town threaten a humanitarian catastrophe at a level not seen in Russia since the civil war in Chechnya in the 1990s. By late January, Russian forces stood just a few miles from the town center.
In Ukraine, the Russian invasion has caused civilian suffering on a much larger scale, with strikes on residential buildings, hospitals, churches and an array of energy facilities.
Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst at Finland-based research company Black Bird Group, said the Russian assault on Sudzha would be costly for both soldiers and civilians, because Ukraine had deployed in Kursk its strongest force.
Lyubov, a mother of four, is part of a group of Kursk residents who for months have been publicly calling for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate relatives trapped in Sudzha. She said she feared that the impeding assault on the town would leave her parents and others there with little chance of survival.
“By the time Russian troops enter the settlements, only ruins and ashes remain of the houses,” she said in an interview, adding: “This is an awful rescue system.”
The apocalyptic scenes described by civilians who have escaped Sudzha’s surrounding villages foreshadow the intensity of the impending battle for the town.
In interviews, these civilians provided mixed accounts of Ukrainian occupation.
Zoya, 64, described the initial friendliness of Ukrainian soldiers who occupied her village, Pogrebki, on Aug. 12. She said the first soldiers who came to her house gave her husband a pack of cigarettes and offered their help.
“They were really nice lads,” she said.
(Zola and other civilians who were interviewed are being identified by their first names only to protect them against Russian censorship laws.)
That camaraderie waned as the fighting intensified, according to those who fled. The Ukrainian soldiers began to see Russian civilians as a hindrance — or worse, as potential informers who could give away their positions.
Zoya and her husband ran out of food and subsisted on occasional frozen potatoes that they dug out from their garden. During one of those sorties, a drone exploded near her husband. He died in her arms minutes later, she said.
Zoya spent most of her time sheltering from constant bombing in her basement, a stretch of darkness that made her hallucinate and temporarily lose her sense of sight and time. Hunger eventually drove her to attempt an escape.
“There was nowhere left to live — it was so scary there, everything was destroyed,” she said in an interview.
She said she walked five miles through fields littered with destroyed Russian tanks and dead soldiers before reaching the Russian positions in November.
Another woman named Natalia, 69, who uses a wheelchair, recounted a similar experience.
She said Ukrainian soldiers initially brought her bread, water and insulin for her diabetes after occupying her village of Novoivanovka. The soldiers stopped occasionally to chat over a cup of tea.
The treatment worsened as the fighting drew closer.
She said in an interview that her husband had died after being summarily shot by a Ukrainian soldier. Her account could not be independently verified and Ukraine has repeatedly said that it adheres to humanitarian laws in Kursk.
By November, Natalia was sheltering in a basement in no man’s land. One day, she said, a Russian reconnaissance group reached her house and told her that her only chance of survival was escape.
“They said, ‘Please leave, however you can — otherwise you will die,’” said Natalia.
She said other surviving residents helped to carry her to another village, where their group was eventually rescued by Russian troops.
Sudzha residents now fear similar hardships are coming to their trapped relatives.
Earlier in February, a missile hit Sudzha’s boarding school, which sheltered about 100 people displaced from the outlying villages. Both sides have blamed each other for the strike. Ukraine has released evidence that appears to show that Russia was responsible.
The attack killed at least four people; Ukrainian soldiers evacuated survivors to Ukraine.
“We don’t know where the rocket came from,” said Yulia, a Russian woman whose parents survived the strike. She said that Ukrainian soldiers “came and helped dig people from the rubble, and saved our people.”
A Russian man named Sergei said that video messages from family in the town had sometimes reached him following its occupation. Over the months, he said, he watched their hair grow white, their bodies grow thin and the sounds of explosions grow louder.
“I’m sorry that I am crying,” said his sister in a video that was viewed by The Times, congratulating Sergei on his birthday. “I wish I could’ve done it in person, at least by telephone. You have always complained that I call too little.”
“Mother can’t congratulate you, because she struggles to come up the stairs. She is almost always in the basement,” the sister added. “She joins my congratulations.”
Eventually, the videos became too painful to watch, said Sergei, leading him to switch to passing occasional texts.
Constant Méheut and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Kyiv and Milana Mazaeva from Tbilisi, Georgia.
