Secrecy was key in attack that has opened a new front in the war and left Russians looking leaden-footed
t was a critical and deliberate last-minute deployment on a previously unimportant part of the front. The Russians, having invaded in February 2022, had not anticipated thatHad Moscow known that combat medics were quietly moving into the remote Sumy region, had the message gone up to the Kremlin,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.
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 refugee centre in Sumy, she said villagers had needed little persuading to evacuate, unlike in the eastern Donbas where there is a minority of stubborn pro-Russians willing to endure and remain.
The plan was to rely heavily on tanks and faster-moving armoured vehicles, marked with painted or taped white triangles, to surge across the border up the roads, rushing through until they reached resistance. A Russian military blogger, Rybar, semi-independent of the Kremlin, summarising the approach, said: “While one-third of them are restraining the stronghold, the others are bypassing it by entering nearby settlements and organising ambushes.
Between Thursday night and Friday morning last week, Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian convoy on a highway 25 miles inside the border, in a strike whose accuracy and absence of artillery craters suggested it involved Himars rocket artillery. Dozens were probably killed in an ambush that contrasted Russian leaden-footedness – leaving a convoy exposed on the road – against Ukrainian agility.
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