NPR’s Adrian Ma speaks with Nick Connolly, who covers kyiv for German news outlet DW, about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Ukrainian military forces continue to control hundreds of square kilometers of territory in Russia’s Kursk Territory. It’s been more than a week since they launched an invasion that took Russia by surprise. Few journalists have been able to get directly to the front lines of the fighting today. But one did get up close: Nick Connolly of Germany’s DW News.
Earlier in the day, I met Connolly in Sumy, a town on the Ukrainian side of the border where the Ukrainian military has deployed equipment for the operation. I asked him what the scene was like in a town just 30 kilometers from the front line.
NICK CONNOLLY: It’s about 6pm local time on a Saturday night, and people are walking around with a huge number of children. It’s not really something we’re used to seeing in Ukrainian cities so close to the Russian border. It’s much livelier than cities like Kharkiv. I can’t really explain it because it’s a city that’s constantly being hit. This morning, an Iskander ballistic missile hit less than a mile from where I’m sitting right now, in the city centre. And you couldn’t really tell from all these people out and about. We saw a wedding earlier, people taking pictures – now, people having coffee, drinking drinks.
It’s quite an idyllic feeling. It’s a really confusing feeling. Just a few hours ago we were near the border and Russian bombs were coming, these are devastating and very cheap weapons that weigh about half a ton and can destroy houses in a matter of moments. And here in Sumy, it feels like the war is quite far away if you ignore the military vehicles that you see passing by almost all the time.
MA: And I also hear children in the background.
CONNOLLY: It’s really weird, because, you know, you’ve seen so many families leave Ukraine for Europe. All the ones with young children, especially in kyiv, which is actually much safer than Sumy, where we are now – and we’re less than 20 miles, in a direct line, from the Russian border. This is a city that’s under attack by cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, drones. And yet it seems very alive. And it’s strange. Sumy is actually maybe a little bit less on the radar than Kharkiv. It has less symbolic importance to the Russians. So they’ve really focused on Kharkiv, which is not very far away. But it’s, you know, something that we didn’t expect, even though we’re in Ukraine all the time.
MA: So what do you think about this change of mood?
CONNOLLY: I think people are really happy to have something else to talk about, to have some reason to be optimistic. There’s a real sense of pride, you know, that Russians now have to understand what war is and that it’s not all going in one direction. There’s hope that ordinary Russians might pressure their government to end this war if they see the real cost of it, if it stops being some kind of colonial war that Russia can just wage on another country’s territory.
But there’s also a lot of concern, you know, if this goes wrong, if the Ukrainian troops get surrounded or captured by the Russians. But right now, it really reminds us of the first year of the war, from late summer to the fall of ’22, when the Ukrainians were retaking territory and really pushing the Russians back. You really feel that here.
MA: I’m curious about the Russians who live in the region. I understand that some Russians, fleeing the fighting, have crossed the border into Ukraine rather than fleeing further into Russia. Why?
CONNOLLY: We spoke to a mother and son who were here yesterday in Sumy. They are Russian-American citizens from Sumy, who lived in the United States in the 1990s, became citizens of the United States, and came back for family reasons. So they wanted to leave the Kursk region of Russia to join their family back in the United States. So this was a fairly unusual case, but we’re now hearing that more and more people are trying to come to Ukraine because they decide that it’s worth it, that crossing the front lines between Ukrainian and Russian troops to reach Russian-controlled territory is just too dangerous. But so far, the numbers are pretty small, and most of the people we’re seeing coming to Sumy are Ukrainians from villages along the border who are seeing the Russians step up their aerial bombing campaign and are trying to escape.
MA: Do you see any signs that the Ukrainian military is considering moving or, potentially, giving up some of this territory?
CONNOLLY: Actually, it’s quite the opposite. In the last few days, we’ve seen reports that they’ve set up military authorities, which are administrations to deal with the Russian civilians who are left behind. We’ve also seen them blow up bridges across strategic rivers, which would make it easier for them to defend the territory and prevent the Russians from coming back. So it seems that the Ukrainians don’t want to annex these territories, as the Russians did with parts of occupied Ukraine, but they want to hold on to them for a period of time and then trade them for other territories that Russia has conquered in Ukraine.
MA: That was Nick Connolly of German media outlet DW News, speaking to us from Sumy, Ukraine.
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