A Landscape of Death: What's Left Where Ukraine Invaded Russia
Russian forces are back in control of Kursk Province, where whole villages have been flattened by relentless fighting.
Tens of thousands of people fled when the fighting began, but a few thousand were stranded. Some of them have finally been evacuated. Others did not survive.
Many are waiting to see if their homes can be rebuilt.
It may be years before some can live here again.
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Ukraine's surprise incursion into western Russia last summer quickly overran Sudzha, a little town in Kursk near the border that hosts a transit station for a natural gas pipeline. Ukrainian forces also held a swath of nearby countryside dotted with villages.
Fighting raged around the civilians trapped here for months, including bombardment by the Russian military. They also endured a Russian winter with scant access to heating, medicine and other essentials.
The regional governor has put the civilian death toll of those months at more than 300 people, with nearly 600 missing, totals that could not be independently verified. Many Sudzha residents, in interviews there and in evacuation shelters, said they had helped to bury at least a dozen neighbors. Some said they had buried 40 or more.
Then there were the unburied.
When I visited the area in March, the fields were scattered with carcasses of cows and pigs, and with the corpses of civilians and soldiers. The uniforms visible among the fallen were mostly Russian.
Amid shattered homes, other bodies had lain decomposing for months, seemingly untouched, the circumstances of their deaths unknown.
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