Speed and secrecy How Kyiv turned the tables on Moscow in daring Kursk attack

It was a critical and deliberate deployment on a previously unimportant part of the front.

- Dan Sabbagh

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 Ukraine's 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 Ukrainian 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 three and six miles from the border. As for the civilians, though many had seen a military buildup, and given the soldiers potatoes and other vegetables, the first they knew was when villages were subjected to intense bombing 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 a refugee centre in Sumy, she said villagers had needed little persuading to evacuate.