Last summer, Artem Kariakin was among the first Ukrainian soldiers to cross the border and capture Russian territory in the Kursk region — in a surprise offensive aimed at strengthening Kyiv’s hand in any talks on ending the war.
Now, as those talks finally begin, he finds himself racing to retreat. With Russian forces closing in on Sudzha, the biggest town Ukraine had captured and where he was based, Kariakin piled gear and fellow troops into a pick-up truck and sped for the border.
“We put a guy in the back with a machine gun to try and shoot down any drones above us, switched on our jammers, crossed ourselves, and set off,” he told the Financial Times. “The main thing was just to get out of there.”
On Thursday, hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin toured nearby in fatigues, the defence ministry claimed it had taken Sudzha back, while state media shared images of Moscow’s soldiers hanging flags in the centre of the town.
Kariakin, 27, said he continues to cross into the Kursk region every day to evacuate Ukrainian troops — many of whom trek dozens of kilometres on foot to ride out in his truck, as the main road is under constant Russian fire. Still, he said he was not surprised at Russia pushing them out.
“Our problems started long before this,” he said.
Ukraine caught its adversary off guard when it began its incursion on August 6, more than two years after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Kyiv’s forces managed at one point to seize some 1,300 sq km of Russian territory. But over the first few weeks the area they were able to hold became a narrow wedge.
“It is no secret that the zone of our incursion, it should have been wider,” Kariakin said. “A wide area along the border would have been much more comfortable.”
Instead, Russian troops surrounded Ukraine’s occupying forces on three sides. It was a precarious position and became increasingly difficult to hold.
“The pocket was always relatively small,” said Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Russia then repeatedly just chipped away at it at the flanks.”
The operation’s goals changed on the go, said a person familiar with the original Ukrainian plan for the incursion. Initially, it was intended as a deep but short-term raid, the person said. But then the plan shifted to holding land — exposing Kyiv’s troops to bigger risks.
Kariakin said soldiers also had to deal with unexpected setbacks such as the realisation that Starlink, a key tool for communication, did not work on Russian soil.
The soldiers set up positions across the area they were holding, prompting an exodus by Russian villagers and small town dwellers. Hundreds of civilians remained trapped and many dozens were killed, according to Russian authorities.
Kariakin, who hails from a town in the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine that has been occupied by Russia since 2014, said he felt satisfaction but also discomfort finding himself part of an occupying force. “Most of all we wanted to be in the Donbas, fighting for our own land,” he said.
Sudzha, where the Ukrainians set up a command post, remained quiet for the first months of the incursion, Kariakin said. But in battles on the fringes of the Ukrainian-held territory, Russian forces were inching in. Soon, Kyiv’s troops were left with just one road out to Ukraine.
“Russian forces were steadily compressing the pocket and interdicting the main resupply routes,” military analyst Michael Kofman said. “At a certain point, it was simply no longer tenable to sustain these forces.”
“Day X” came in late December, when a vehicle on the single remaining supply road was hit by a Russian drone, Kariakin said.
“Before then, they’d never reached the motorway,” he said. “This was the beginning of the end of our logistics in the Kursk region.” His account was corroborated by at least one other Ukrainian soldier stationed in the area.
From that point on, swarms of drones would target anything that moved on the road, Kariakin said, making it extremely difficult to resupply troops. Medical evacuations soon became almost impossible, he said, and ground forces got stuck in trenches for weeks on end, unable to rotate.
Russia brought in its top drone teams, Lee said, who made several trips to Ukraine’s Sumy region on the border with Kursk to speak to Ukrainian commanders.
It also began using fibre optic cable drones, Kofman said. These are connected to the drone operator via a spool of cable, making them immune to the electronic interference used by Ukrainian troops.
In December, looking at the battlefield on his screen from above, Kariakin spotted a new development: North Korean troops.
“It was this huge crowd running across the field,” he said. “Russians don’t do that, they move mostly in small tactical groups of up to three infantrymen, from tree cover to tree cover. But here they ran just 15 meters apart, in some places 140-150 men. It was very noticeable.”
Russia had a manpower advantage across the frontline at the time, and the arrival of North Korean forces in Kursk further tipped the balance in its favour, Lee said. The North Koreans swiftly adapted to the conditions, Lee added, becoming an effective fighting force.
By February, the situation seemed increasingly untenable. “It was getting worse and worse,” Kariakin said. The single road was now under constant Russian fire, and slow and muddy back roads through fields were also getting hit. “Making the journey was always 50-50, and unfortunately not everyone made it,” he said.
A defeat in the settlement of Sverdlikovo in late February set off “the most recent cascade of events”, Kofman said.
Ukraine had begun some withdrawals when Russian troops repeated an operation that had worked for them elsewhere during the war — getting behind Ukrainian lines by walking through a disused gas pipeline.
A Russian commander involved in the operation who goes by the call sign Zombie later claimed in a video that 800 Russian soldiers trekked for four days through a 15km tunnel that had been pumped full of oxygen and kitted out with ammunition, food supplies and even toilets.
Ukraine claimed many of the men who appeared out of the tunnels were killed.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky on Wednesday acknowledged a withdrawal from some parts of Kursk had taken place, but battles continued.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said military command in the area was “doing what it should do — preserving as much as possible our soldiers’ lives”.
Lee said “Ukrainians will keep fighting for a part of Kursk, because obviously if they pull across the border, then Russia might just follow them across.”
He underscored that despite the deterioration of Ukraine’s position in Kursk, this was not reflected across the rest of the frontline, which remained relatively stable.
For Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defence minister of Ukraine, the Kursk operation “served its purpose”: it diverted elite Russian forces and prevented them from opening up another front, he said.
Others question whether the benefits outweighed costs to Ukraine’s defence effort on the eastern front.
Kariakin said he believed the Kursk incursion brought some benefits: it gave Ukraine time to build up its defences in the neighbouring region of Sumy, and capture Russian prisoners of war that were then exchanged for high-profile Ukrainian fighters.
History books will probably see the incursion as a “gamble”, Kofman said. “The operation proved a tactical success, but it did not change the overall dynamic in the war.”
Additional reporting by Fabrice Deprez in Kyiv; cartography by Steven Bernard in London
