The Russian special forces commander has served in four theaters of operations across eastern Ukraine since joining the Russian invasion nearly three years ago. He said the fiercest fighting he has seen is now taking place at home, as the Russian army he serves in struggles to liberate a small sliver of territory from Ukrainian forces.
The protracted battle for the occupied Russian town of Sudzha and the surrounding countryside has unexpectedly become one of the flashpoints of the war for the fate of the Ukrainian state. Both sides have committed a significant portion of their limited reserves to seize control of Sudzha, a once-sleepy administrative center in Kursk Oblast, near the border between the two countries.
“This is the most brutal fighting — I have never seen anything like it in the entire special military operation,” the commander, who leads about 200 men in the fighting in Kursk, said in an interview near the front line late last year, using the Kremlin’s euphemism for war. He asked to be identified only by his call sign, Hades, in accordance with military protocol.
Both sides see Kursk as key territory, an important element in the expected peace talks promised by US President Donald Trump. Military analysts say Ukrainian forces have sent some of their best reserves to Kursk, hoping to gain a negotiating edge by capturing it.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian incursion, the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II, is a permanent source of humiliation. He is determined to push Ukraine aside so he doesn't have to make any concessions to regain the territory, and Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of troops, including conscripts and North Korean allies, to repel the invaders, according to U.S. officials.
The Ukrainians “wanted to negotiate from a position of strength,” said Lieutenant General Apti Alaudinov, commander of the Akhmat special forces unit in Russia’s Chechen region, in an interview in Kursk Oblast in December. “When the time comes for negotiations, it’s not clear whether they will still be able to say they are here.”
Given the high stakes, Russian soldiers fighting in Kursk believe the fighting will become even bloodier.
“We are expecting Bakhmut 2.0,” said Had, a Russian commander serving in Akhmat, a unit largely made up of remnants of the Wagner mercenary forces.
Bakhmut is a Ukrainian city whose ruins were captured by Wagner in 2023 after a nine-month offensive, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. The conflict was symbolic of Ukraine's strategy of stubborn resistance, despite Russian numerical and firepower superiority.
Putin is determined to push Ukraine back so he doesn't have to make any concessions to retake Kursk, and Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of troops, including conscripts and North Korean allies, to repel the attackers.
Another Russian commander, who insisted on anonymity for security reasons, said the cost of the clash would be enormous. The bloodshed, the casualties, it was “unimaginable,” he said.
A photographer working for The New York Times was granted access to Kursk late last year and was allowed to interview and photograph Russian soldiers in the hospital and near the front lines, as well as civilians, some who had fled their villages and others who had chosen to stay.
Some of the soldiers interviewed were Wagner veterans who joined Akhmat after the failed uprising by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. They said the Chechen special forces unit most closely resembled the loose structure of their former paramilitary formation.
Other soldiers interviewed were newer volunteers who had joined to take advantage of rising enlistment bonuses. They said the opportunity to fight in their own country gave them added incentive to join a war whose broader goals and causes they could not clearly explain.
Since the Ukrainian offensive began six months ago, both sides have suffered heavy losses on the exposed, flat terrain of Kursk, dotted with small villages, although the armies are tight-lipped about casualty figures. Russia, through slow and gradual advances, has managed to regain about 60 percent of the roughly 1.300 square kilometers that Ukraine initially seized.
It is estimated that there are two to three thousand Russian civilians trapped between the two armies, who were trapped due to the speed of the initial Ukrainian advance and the failure of the Russian government to carry out an evacuation.
The two sides accuse each other of failing to provide conditions for the evacuation of the remaining residents, forcing them to endure the Russian winter with dwindling food supplies and without running water, heating or electricity. As Russian forces approach, they are subjected to increasingly intense bombardment.
Analysts and relatives of Sudzha residents fear that Russia's reliance on heavy bombing and Ukraine's determination to defend the city threaten a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale not seen in Russia since the Chechen civil war of the 1990s. By the end of January, Russian forces were just a few kilometers from the city center.
In Ukraine, the Russian invasion caused civilian suffering on a much larger scale, with strikes on residential buildings, hospitals, churches, and various energy facilities.
Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst at the Finnish research company Black Bird Group, said that a Russian attack on Sudzha would be costly for both soldiers and civilians, as Ukraine has deployed its strongest forces in Kursk.
Lyubov, a mother of four, is part of a group of Kursk residents who have been publicly calling for months for a humanitarian corridor to be established to evacuate relatives trapped in Sudzha. She said she fears the impending attack on the city will leave her parents and other residents with little chance of survival.
“By the time Russian troops enter the settlements, only rubble and ash remain of the houses,” she said in an interview, adding: “This is a terrible rescue system.”
The apocalyptic scenes described by civilians who fled the villages around Sudža hint at the intensity of the upcoming battle for the city.
In interviews, these civilians told different stories about the Ukrainian occupation.
Zoya, 64, described the initial kindness of Ukrainian soldiers who took over her village, Pogrebki, on August 12. She said the first soldiers to reach her house gave her husband a pack of cigarettes and offered help.
"They were really nice guys," she said.
(Zoya and the other civilians interviewed were identified only by name to protect them from Russian censorship laws.)
That camaraderie disappeared as the fighting intensified, according to those who escaped. Ukrainian soldiers began to view Russian civilians as a nuisance - or worse, as potential informants who could give away their positions.
Zoya and her husband ran out of food and were surviving on frozen potatoes they occasionally dug up from the garden. During one such outing, a drone exploded near her husband. He died in her arms minutes later, she said.
Zoya spent most of her time hiding in her basement from the constant bombing, in a darkness that caused her to hallucinate and temporarily lose her sight and sense of time. Hunger eventually forced her to try to escape.
“There was no place to live - it was so terrible, everything was destroyed,” she said in an interview.
She said she walked about eight kilometers through fields covered with destroyed Russian tanks and dead soldiers before reaching Russian positions in November.
Ukrainian soldiers began to view Russian civilians as a nuisance - or worse, as potential informants who could give away their positions.
Another woman, named Natalija (69), who uses a wheelchair, said she had a similar experience.
She said that Ukrainian soldiers initially brought her bread, water and insulin for her diabetes after they took over her village of Novoivanovka. They would occasionally stop to chat over a cup of tea. The relationship deteriorated as the fighting got closer.
She said in an interview that her husband was killed after being shot at the scene by a Ukrainian soldier. Her account could not be independently verified, and Ukraine has repeatedly stressed that it is adhering to humanitarian law in Kursk.
Until November, Natalia was hiding in a basement in no-man's land. One day, she said, a Russian reconnaissance group arrived at her house and told her that the only chance of survival was to escape.
“They told me, 'Please, go however you can - otherwise you will die,'” said Natalia.
She said that the remaining residents helped her reach another village, where their group was eventually rescued by the Russian military.
The residents of Sudža now fear that similar troubles await their captured relatives.
In early February, a rocket hit a boarding school in Shuja, where about 100 people displaced from surrounding villages were taking shelter. Both sides have blamed the attack. Ukraine has released evidence it says shows Russia was responsible.
The attack killed at least four people; Ukrainian soldiers evacuated the survivors to Ukraine.
“We don’t know where the rocket came from,” said Yulia, a Russian woman whose parents survived the attack. She added that “Ukrainian soldiers came and helped pull people out of the rubble and saved our people.”
A Russian named Sergei said he received occasional video messages from his family in the city after he was taken hostage. Over the months, he said, he watched their hair turn gray, their bodies grow thinner, and the sounds of explosions grow louder.
"Sorry I'm crying," his sister said in a video obtained by The Times, wishing him a happy birthday. "I wish I could do it in person, at least on the phone. You've always complained that I don't call you enough."
"Mom can't congratulate you because she can barely climb the stairs. She's in the basement almost all the time," the sister added. "She joins in my congratulations."
Eventually, the video messages became too painful to watch, Sergei said, so he switched to sending occasional text messages.
Translation: A. Š.
Bonus video:
