It was midnight and a fire was ravaging the apartment building where a Russian drone had attacked minutes before. Through the smoke, residents descended the stairs of their apartments and told firefighters, who were trying to account for all the inhabitants, that a young woman was renting the apartment on the top floor.
Artem, 37, was one of several officers on duty that night of March 13 who rushed to try to find her. On the fifth floor, the metal door of the woman’s apartment was broken and thick black smoke rose up the stairs. On the other side of the door, they stared into space.
“There was no apartment,” said Artem, who only gave his name for security reasons. “There was a meter of floor and then nothing.”
That attack, which killed four people in the building, was one of many that have rained down for months on the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, just 40 kilometers from the border with Russia and its surrounding region. Ukrainian officials have warned with increasing urgency that Sumy is the target of a new offensive by Russian forces massing across the border.
“The atmosphere is very anxious,” said Capt. Dmytro Lantushenko, 38, spokesman for the 117th Territorial Defense Forces Brigade, based in Sumy. “People read the news, they read the Telegram channels and they cannot ignore the news about a possible attack on Sumy.” Telegram is one of the most used social media channels in Ukraine.
Villages and towns closest to the border are already being shelled daily, and guided bombs, rockets, missiles and drones have hit factories and power plants in the Sumy industrial district, Captain Lantushenko said. Damage is piling up and Sumy, like much of Ukraine, lives under continuous power outages.
The five-story apartment block destroyed on March 13 was hit by an Iranian-made Shahed drone, said Artem, the fire official. The Russians have begun to attack the city center with bursts of several explosive drones, which have hit several residential buildings.
Firefighters worked for four days putting out the fire and removing debris, Artem said. A soldier who lived alone in one apartment and a pensioner in another were among those killed in the attack, Artem and a relative of the soldier said. A family of four was trapped under a fallen roof. Firefighters pulled the wife and her two children out, but said the husband did not survive. Rescuers never found the young woman in the upper apartment.
On a recent morning, a resident named Lyubov, 71, was having new windows installed in her apartment after a drone strike took them down just a week earlier. She was not injured because she stopped on the stairs when she heard an air raid siren, she said. Like Artem, she only provided her name for security reasons.
With its tree-lined avenues and lush riverside parks, Sumy has the feel of a quiet, provincial city. Shoppers wait at bus stops and young women push their babies in strollers in parks.
However, the city has suffered heavy attacks before and its inhabitants put up fierce resistance. When Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022, the tanks arrived in Sumy on the first day, February 24.
The Ukrainian army and security services had been ordered to withdraw, leaving behind only a small number of people from the territorial defense forces, along with members of the emergency services and medical staff in hospitals.
Artem was one of the first to encounter the Russians when driving back to their base around five in the afternoon. He saw four tanks approaching down the main avenue. “I stopped at a light,” he said, “and they stopped at the light, too.” He laughed as he remembered the surreal moment.
The Russian soldiers seemed relaxed, he said. One of them had his rifle slung across his back and his legs crossed over the tank’s barrel, he recalled. The Russians began setting up checkpoints on the outskirts of the city, he said. But that night, members of the Ukrainian territorial defense forces attacked the Russian forces and burned some of their vehicles.
Residents united to defend the city, said Captain Lantushenko, who volunteered for the territorial defense forces shortly before the invasion.
“There was incredible unity,” he said. “We realized that we had to defend our homes on our own. And thousands of people like me went and took weapons.”
Faced with such strong resistance, Russian troops abandoned their plans to occupy the city as they had done elsewhere. In those other areas, the occupations had brutal consequences for residents.
“We had guys on bikes with rifles on their backs,” Artem recalled. Two of his friends who ran a café had dozens of people making Molotov cocktails on his patio, he said. “From the first days I thought, ‘Just dare to try and come here.’”
In the first days, the Ukrainians attacked and burned Russian vehicles at two entry points to the city. Russian troops withdrew and opted to blockade the city, establishing positions on the perimeter and firing artillery from afar.
“They shelled and bombed” Liubov recalled. She only gave her name for security reasons to avoid repercussions for her or her family. During that time she moved in with her daughter and her grandchildren for two months so the family could be together. “There were often air raid alarms,” she said. “We all sat in the hallway.”
Within a month, the Russian army abandoned its push into the north, withdrawing from an entire stretch of territory around the capital, kyiv, and the northeastern cities of Chernihiv and Sumy, to focus on seizing the eastern Donbas region.
Later in 2022, Ukraine scored new successes, forcing Russian troops to withdraw from another part of northeastern Ukraine, around the city of Kharkiv, as well as the Kherson region in southern Ukraine.
But since then, momentum has swung in favor of the invading Russian forces. Ukraine has failed to make much progress on a counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 and has suffered from troop and ammunition shortages as hardliners in Congress delayed U.S. support.
In early May, Russia began a new incursion into Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city after kyiv. The troops took a dozen villages and approached the city within artillery range. More forces are gathering near the border to attack Sumy, Ukrainian officials said.
There is fatigue and a sense of fear among residents as they face the ordeal of another Russian attack.
People who had cars and means were leaving, Artem said. But those who had jobs or family commitments stayed, hoping for the best.
“I don’t think they will come to Sumy,” Lyubov, whose windows were shattered by the drone attack, said of the Russian forces. “But I’m afraid.”
Captain Lantushenko expressed confidence that the army’s preparations and fortifications would be sufficient to withstand a new Russian assault. Unlike the early days of the war, Ukraine’s defense forces are now trained and organized, he said.
But people were exhausted, he said, even if the feeling of unity was still present.
“No one knows when the war will end,” he said. “I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have a friend, family member or neighbor in the military, and there are more and more people in the military every day. It is incredibly difficult to continue holding on.”