‘The U.S. has betrayed Ukraine, betrayed our democracy – and the values of freedom’, frontline troopers inform DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

The sky is lost to Russian drones. Sometimes their buzzing sound gets so close that it seems almost to burrow into you. On the ground, their troops are swarming the Ukrainian right flank.

That was the scene last week in the Russian region of Kursk, which the Ukrainians entered last August. Today, the situation is dire. Their soldiers are dying in the mud every day.

But they are taking many Russians with them and, even as they withdraw into Ukraine under relentless drone attack, they refuse to surrender.

From his base on the Ukrainian side of the border, the voice coming over the Starlink-enabled communications system cuts in and out. The internet signal is patchy. But the words are clear enough: ‘The Russians have cut one road off but we are not surrounded. I don’t know why Donald Trump lies and says that we are.’

I am with Vitaliy, a good friend of mine who has been fighting in Kursk since almost the beginning of the operation. He left there just over a week ago. But for months he crossed over into Kursk and back again as part of the first army to invade Russia for 80 years.

As the summer of 2024 dawned, it looked like Russia was unstoppable. Ukraine’s war effort was stalling in the face of delayed US weapons deliveries. Putin was crowing. Kyiv‘s Western allies were in despair. The Ukrainians needed to do something dramatic, so they did. And it was truly astonishing.

On August 6, 2024, a battalion’s worth of Ukrainian tanks and armoured vehicles drove across the border and carried out raids in Kursk. Early reports of the operation confused Western observers. Not least because nobody could quite believe it had gone ahead.

I remember speaking to Western officials at the time. This is incredible, I told them. No, no, the Ukrainians could not possibly be invading Russia, I was told. No one would be that crazy.

Well, they were because they are.

Putin was clearly stunned – for weeks he couldn’t even bring himself to mention the incursion. He just pretended it wasn’t happening. But it made no difference. More and more Ukrainian forces crossed the border over the following days and weeks. They set up fortified positions. They did to Moscow what for so long it had done to them.

Vitaliy felt this strongly. ‘This was revenge,’ he told me. ‘You were on our territory, now we are on yours. When we arrived over the border, it was a shock to discover that the town of Sudzha was not really Russia at all. About half the people there spoke Ukrainian and the other half Russian, and most of them were ethnically Ukrainian.’

Seven months into the incursion, however, events took a decisive turn. After the disastrous Oval Office meeting between Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump and his oleaginous and unpleasant vice-president JD Vance on March 3, the US suspended its intelligence-sharing agreement with Kyiv. It was an act of moral treason and it emboldened the Kremlin’s most brutal impulses.

Early this month, scores of Russian soldiers wearing oxygen masks spent days moving several miles through an underground gas pipeline that went into Sudzha. On March 8, they emerged to ambush Ukrainian forces. Just a few days later, on March 12, Russian troops completed their capture of Sudzha, a town of 5,000 people that had served as the key logistics and command point for Ukrainian forces in the region.

A few days after that Ukraine’s general staff published an updated map that showed their forces had redeployed from Sudzha to what defence minister Rustem Umerov later called ‘more advantageous defensive lines’.

Now, the situation on the ground is horrific. Glide bombs and drones deliver death from the air. The charred vehicles littering the roads out of Kursk grisly proof of their effectiveness. 

But if the Ukrainians have taken casualties and seen organisation break down in certain areas, they have largely remained disciplined and withdrew in good order. More than this, their forces remain in Kursk, now largely, as Umerov promised, on more easily defendable high ground.

Analysts estimate that Russia has now amassed a force of up to 70,000 troops – including about 12,000 North Koreans – who conduct wave after wave of assaults in a bid to clear the Ukrainians out of Kursk for good.

Fighting North Koreans was a new experience for Vitaliy and his friends. They remember seeing them through their gun sights and binoculars for the first time last year. Vitaliy told me that what struck them most forcibly about the North Koreans was their height. They were so much smaller than the Russian soldiers, even, he told me, those from its impoverished Eastern provinces.

As time went on, though, other aspects of the North Koreans made an impression on the Ukrainians.

Speaking to me for my new podcast Apocalypse Now? Dispatches From A World On The Brink, the Mail’s weekly global news podcast, Vitaliy recalled sitting in a Kursk basement that served as his brigade’s HQ at around the time that the North Koreans began storming their positions. 

‘So the first difference is that North Koreans do not leave their wounded comrades on the battlefield like the Russians usually do,’ he told me. ‘The second difference is that the North Korean soldiers do not just run away from, for example, Ukrainian drones – they try to shoot back. Sometimes they are successful.

‘They attacked us with such massive waves. And their losses were colossal. But they kept coming and coming.’

Times are now tough. And for Vitaliy it’s about getting everyone out as best they can. Last week, he and some of the guys from his brigade heard about some soldiers from another brigade who were trapped in Kursk. They didn’t know them personally, but they decided they had to help. No one ordered them to. But they could not let them die there.

The soldiers were about six miles inside Kursk, a ten to 15-hour march with full equipment, a ‘yomp’ made all the more difficult by the need to move stealthily because of the Russian drones flying overhead. So they took dozens of cars and, despite being in what was one of the most dangerous border areas, managed to get them out.

On March 12, the day Sudzha was restored to Russian control, Putin visited a command post in Kursk, wearing military fatigues no less. This was only the second time Putin had visited the front lines since the start of the war.

This is a reflection of two things. First, Putin has always refused to be associated with any form of failure and so his appearance can be seen as a sign of the Russians’ growing confidence that the operation in Kursk is nearing its conclusion. 

Second, his arrival to ‘boost morale’ probably indicates that Russia intends to prolong the war as long as it continues to gain ground.

I asked Vitaliy to give me his assessment of the Kursk operation now that the Ukrainians are being forced to withdraw after suffering severe losses.

‘You have to understand that our invasion of Kursk was such a fundamental issue for the Russians that they were forced to divert so much manpower and resources to deal with it,’ he replied. ‘They took their best people from other fronts to Kursk. They took a huge amount of drones there.’

Strategically, Kursk was a great success for Ukraine and, in terms of morale and national pride, it was priceless.

Vitaliy added: ‘Why Trump is lying about us being surrounded, we do not understand. Why Trump – the president of America, which two months ago was a symbol of freedom and democracy – repeats Russian narratives, we do not understand.

‘I feel with my fellow citizens that the United States of America betrayed Ukraine, betrayed Ukrainian democracy, betrayed our values and, over the past two months, even betrayed the values of freedom.’

Having spent some of the last week in Kyiv, it is clear to me that Ukrainians are furious with Trump, not least for his treatment of Zelensky at the Oval Office. ‘I didn’t vote for Zelensky, but now I fully support him,’ said Anna, a waitress in a central Kyiv cafe. ‘He was standing up not just for himself but for all of Ukraine.’

Then came last Tuesday’s phone call between Trump and Putin, which the American president said would be about ‘land’, ‘power plants’ and ‘dividing up certain assets’.

Trump’s opening gambit was to propose a simple unconditional 30-day ceasefire – something Ukraine had already signed up to. But Putin was not returning the love. Peace would only happen if Ukraine’s foreign military aid and intelligence support were cut off – essentially ending not just U.S. backing but Europe’s, too.

It was an absurd demand that would amount to Ukraine essentially giving up its ability to defend itself – and Putin must have known it. So much for Trump the great deal-maker.

What was eventually agreed was a 30-day ceasefire on targeting energy and infrastructure, as well as ‘technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace’.

Another guest on my Apocalypse Now? podcast was former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba. Like everyone in Ukraine, he cannot understand Trump’s behaviour since the start of his second term.

‘Trump fulfilled the biggest dream of Putin, which is to speak with the Americans on equal terms,’ he told me. ‘Because Russia spent the past 30 years trying to prove to everyone that it is a superpower while not being one.’

He was sceptical about the proposed ceasefire. ‘No one can guarantee that this ceasefire will actually hold. But, most importantly, Putin will spend these 30 days drowning the Americans in endless conversations . . .while continuing his assaults on Ukraine and trying to grab as much territory as he can.

So, in a nutshell, whatever happened yesterday or two days ago or two months ago, the war continues to rage.’

I asked him: Who is Putin? Who is this man Trump seems to be so taken with? He is just a butcher, isn’t he?

‘He is,’ Kuleba replied. ‘But he’s not much different from most of his predecessors, the Russian tsars . . .You can only understand Putin if you see him as the culmination of a line of Russian tsars.’

He and the rest of Ukraine realise that Putin is waging a war of atavistic brutality. A war more reminiscent of the imperial fantasies of an 18th-century tsar than a 21st-century technocrat.

‘I suggest to these people to think differently and at least to take time and consider one simple fact,’ Kuleba said. ‘If Putin fails to subjugate Ukraine, he will become the first ever Russian tsar to do so. And ending up in the history books as a loser is definitely not in his retirement plan.’