The Ukraine border village facing up to Russia’s wrath over Kursk attack: ‘The worst bombing I’ve faced’

Askold Krushelnycky hears from residents in Bilopillia – four miles from the border – about the aerial assault by Putin’s forces in recent days, and how they are still glad that Ukrainian troops are attacking inside Russia

Alla, 52, and her husband Sasha, 61, in their home close to the Russia border, which has been damaged by Russian glide bombs (Askold Krushelnycky)

The Ukrainian village of Bilopillia is about four miles from the border with Russia, opposite the Kursk region, where Kyiv’s troops are two weeks into an attack that caught Russia by surprise.

Bilopillia is now paying the price for that audacious assault, as Vladimir Putin’s forces carpet the border region with aerial strikes.

Piotr Kaszuwara – the head of a Polish humanitarian aid group called UA Future, which has been delivering food and medicine to Bilopillia – says the village has suffered intensive airstrikes involving rockets and deadly glide-bombs. “I’ve been coming to Ukraine since 2022, and this was the worst bombing I was under. At times I thought I wouldn’t get out alive,” he says.

Bilopillia lies northwest of Sumy City, the region’s capital, and the road there was suspiciously free of any military traffic when The Independent arrived. Soon afterwards, four glide bombs hit the village, but it was unclear why it had been targeted, given it was free of any visible Ukrainian military presence.

A little later, we learnt that Ukrainian forces, who had probably been hiding in forests and deserted houses for days, had attacked the Russian town of Tetkino, just over the border, to throw the Russian troops responding to the incursion into Kursk off kilter. There had not been any military traffic so as not to arouse the suspicions of Russian forces monitoring the area with surveillance drones.

A Su-34 bomber belonging to the Russian air force drops a glide bomb on Ukraine’s Sumy region, in video released by the Russian defence ministry (Via AP)

In recent days, Alla, 52, and her husband Sasha, 61, have seen their house damaged by the strikes. The glide bomb fell some 80yds behind their home – a 40-year-old man sustained bad leg and head injuries and was taken to the hospital. Windows in their home are blown out, and plaster from the ceilings and walls covers the floor.

The people of the village have set up an alert system of their own, monitoring the many official and unofficial websites that assess the military situation and provide warnings about aerial threats. While we are there, Alla’s neighbour tells her that another alert has gone out, saying that six glide bombs are heading in their direction.

As we hurry inside the house, Sasha suggests: “Let’s go to the cellar, but there’s no light.” Alla is concerned, too: “This place is so rickety that if anything hits it, it is going to collapse on top of us and we’ll be buried alive.”

The group disperses across a number of ground-floor rooms, avoiding large windows that could splinter into dangerous shards. Alla sits on the edge of the bath in the couple’s bathroom, trying to adhere to the “rule of two walls”. Ukrainians are advised to shelter with an outer wall and at least one inner wall between them and the potential blast.

She is trembling uncontrollably, and holds out her hands to show how much they are shaking. “Sorry,” she says, struggling to summon a smile. “It’s been like this whenever there’s an alert since our house was hit.”

Residents work to fix damaged homes in Bilopillia (Reuters)

Within a few minutes, there are four big explosions. Perhaps the other two bombs exploded far away, or they were duds, or the information was wrong. Whatever the case, they have done their job – to instil terror. Later, we hear that two people were wounded in that strike, and the village railway station was damaged.

Some time after my colleagues and I left, a glide bomb landed near Alla and Sasha’s home, shaking it and shattering some of the remaining windows. They were unhurt, but a male neighbour who had greeted us was killed, and his daughter was seriously injured. Emergency services dug the two out from beneath the rubble of their home, and said it appeared that the father had sheltered his daughter with his own body, creating a protective cavity that enabled her to survive.

The Independent contacted Alla and Sasha to check on them. They said they were unharmed, but asked for a replacement phone, as theirs had been damaged, and for some modest supplies – tea, coffee, tinned food.

Ukrainian forces say their assault on Kursk is still gaining ground – albeit at a much slower pace than during the first days of the attack – as Moscow sends in more of its own forces backed by large quantities of armoured vehicles, artillery and planes. The situation around Tetkino is unclear, with Moscow denying that Ukraine has made substantial inroads in that area.

Ukrainian servicemen ride atop an armoured vehicle at the Russian-Ukrainian border in Ukraine’s Sumy region (AP)

While the Kursk incursion has definitely been a morale booster for Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, it’s too early to call it the total success that Kyiv is trumpeting. It has likely achieved one of its main aims – to show that Ukraine can use the equipment supplied by the West superbly if allowed to use it freely, thereby prompting Western allies to give more... much more.

However, the operation has not yet fully succeeded in another of its major aims – to force Russia to redeploy its troops to Kursk from the Donetsk area of eastern Ukraine, where the Russians are pushing on relentlessly and making small, but cumulatively important, advances (albeit at a very high cost to themselves in men and materiel).

The Kursk operation was intended to shake up and break out of this almost static but bloody attritional situation – which currently favours Russia, because Putin appears indifferent to how many Russians die.

Some Russian forces have apparently been redeployed from battlefields in Ukrainian occupied territory, but not in the kind of numbers that will significantly relieve the situation for Ukrainian defenders, who have lost a string of small villages and ground in the past week.

The Ukrainian military has prepared fallback positions from important locations such as Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk, with some units who have spoken to the press warning that they may have to withdraw in the coming weeks. Remaining civilians in Ukrainian-held areas close to the intense fighting have been urged to evacuate as rapidly as possible.

But on the border between Sumy and Kursk, Sasha, an ethnic Russian, says he is pleased that the Ukrainians have gone into Russian territory: “Let [the Russians] feel some of the pain they have been inflicting on innocent people here for years.”