Inside the Russian town where Kyiv is now in charge

One recent morning, historian Yevhen Murza and comedian Feliks Redka, both from the city of Sumy in eastern Ukraine, hitched a lift into Ukrainian-occupied Russia.

- Shaun Walker

Their mission was to record an episode of their long-running podcast dedicated to popularising Ukrainian history.

On arrival in Sudzha, the town that has been at the centre of Ukraine's push into Russia's Kursk region, Murza and Redka quickly set up their equipment and began recording. "This is not just entertainment content," said Redka, at the start of the podcast. "Today we are making a historical document...

We will tell you about the Ukrainian roots of the town of Sudzha." The occupation of Sudzha, which until the incursion had a population of 5,000, has been one of the most remarkable twists in the 10 years of war between Russia and Ukraine that began with the annexation of Crimea and establishment of proxy regimes in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.

There, and in other parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022, a key part of Russia's narrative has been to erase places' Ukrainian history and insist that they are all "historical Russian land".