Secrecy was key in attack that has opened a new front in the war and left Russians looking leaden-footed
It was a critical and deliberate last-minute deployment on a previously unimportant part of the front. The Russians, having invaded in February 2022, had not anticipated that Ukraine would turn the tables and strike back with the first occupation of Russian territory since the second world war.
Had Moscow known that combat medics were quietly moving into the remote Sumy region, had the message gone up to the Kremlin, Russia might have been better prepared. The medics’ presence would only be required if an outbreak of heavy fighting was anticipated, in an area where none had taken place for over two years.
“We arrived on Monday last week. It had been equipped two days before that,” a surgeon told the Guardian between puffs on a cigarette. It would not be long before the first casualties arrived and days of intense work would begin: Ukraine’s audacious invasion of Russia began the following morning. Their work has been almost round the clock since. “We only get a few hours’ break a day,” another said.
Local civilian authorities, meanwhile, had no idea. Volodymyr Artyukh, the governor of Sumy region, said he found out “same time as you” and instituted an order to evacuate 7,000 people living between 5km and 10km from the border. As for the civilians, though many had seen a military buildup, giving the soldiers potatoes and other vegetables, the first they knew of the reason was when the villages were subjected to intense bombing in the daylight hours after the attack started.
Halyna Denina, 63, from Khrapivshchyna, one of a string of villages on the principal road from Sumy into Russia, said there was “really, really loud” shelling and her daughter’s grocery store was “bombed, completely bombed”. Speaking at refugee centre in Sumy, she said villagers had needed little persuading to evacuate, unlike in the eastern Donbas where there is a minority of stubborn pro-Russians willing to endure and remain.
Secrecy was paramount in an attack that had all the hallmarks of an operation planned by Ukraine’s relatively newly installed head of the armed forces, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, appointed in February by Volodymyr Zelenskiy after Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi had to carry the can for last summer’s failed counteroffensive.
It was not just the obsession with surprise, as remarked on by soldiers involved in the attack, but also striking on a diversionary axis, opening a new front a long way from the main battle on the eastern front, where Russia is remorselessly advancing on the city of Pokrovsk. The last time Syrskyi tried something similar was in the autumn of 2022 when he commanded a successful lightning counterattack in Kharkiv province.
Using drones and satellite imagery for reconnaissance, Syrskyi’s style is to carefully map the territory and positions ahead.
