‘The boomerang is returning’: life in Russia’s town with Ukrainian roots where Kyiv is now in charge

One morning recently, historian Yevhen Murza and comedian Feliks Redka, both from the city of Sumy in eastern Ukraine, hitched a lift into Ukrainian-occupied Russia. Their mission on arrival in Sudzha, the town that has been at the centre of Ukraine’s dramatic push into Russia’s Kursk region , was an unusual one: to record the latest episode of their long-running podcast series, dedicated to popularising Ukrainian history.

The deal was agreed via Instagram with a fan of their podcast who is serving in the Ukrainian army. In exchange for a drone that Redka had bought with proceeds from a recent standup tour, the soldier agreed that he and his friends would give the pair a ride to Sudzha and back.

On arrival in the town, which had a population of 5,000 before Ukraine’s incursion into Russia a month ago, Murza and Redka quickly set up their equipment and began recording.

“This is not just entertainment content,” said Redka, at the start of the podcast , his amazement audible in his tone of voice.

“Today we are ­making a historical document … We will tell you about the Ukrainian roots of the town of Sudzha.”

The occupation of Sudzha has indeed been one of the most remarkable twists in the 10 years of war between Russia and Ukraine that began with the annexation of Crimea and establishment of proxy regimes in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.

There, and in other parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022, a key part of Russia’s narrative has been to erase places’ Ukrainian history and insist that they are all “historical Russian land”.

Now the reverse is happening in the small corner of Kursk region currently controlled by Kyiv.

Murza told his listeners at length about Sudzha’s historically Ukrainian roots, expounding on the role played in its founding by the Ukrainian Cossack leader Herasim Kondratiev, and stressing that in the early 20th century, 61% of Sudzha’s residents spoke Ukrainian.

An enthusiastic tour guide and historian, Murza loves to talk: ask him a question about what’s happening today and he’ll launch into a long answer about the 17th century, using maps to back up his points.

But for him, this discourse is not so much about staking a modern-day Ukrainian claim to Sudzha as about showing up Russian claims to parts of Ukraine as absurd and hypocritical.

“They always talk about Crimea or other places they say were added to Ukraine, but they never talk about the places that were taken away,” he said in an interview in Sumy.

The Ukrainian government has said it will hold on to the land it has occupied in the Kursk region for as long as is necessary militarily, but has no plans to annexe the territory permanently. “We are not Russia. We don’t want to rewrite our constitution to add these territories,” an aide to president Volodymr Zelenskiy said in a recent interview with the Guardian .

Many locals fled further into Russia after Ukraine’s incursion, but those who remain are living without ­electricity, mobile signal or any links with the outside world. Foreign partners have been urging Kyiv to fulfil obligations to the local civilian ­population as an occupying power.

Murza and Redka were adamant that their visit to Russia was different from Russia’s cultural policy in occupied Ukraine, under which Ukrainian museums have been destroyed or stripped of exhibits. Instead of taking away exhibits they felt to be misleading from Sudzha’s museum, which explains little of the town’s Ukrainian past, they added one – a portrait of Kondratiev, the Cossack leader.

“When I put it there, I just had this incredible feeling,” said Murza. “You know the way Putin talks about ‘historical justice’? Well I just had this feeling that now the boomerang is returning.” On the podcast, the pair joked that Kondratiev had “returned to his home harbour”, borrowing a phrase Vladimir Putin used to describe the annexation of Crimea.

The idea of the “boomerang returning” is poignant for many Ukrainians taking part in the Kursk incursion. One soldier from a part of Luhansk region now occupied by Russia, said he felt a sense of schadenfreude as he rolled into Russia with the Ukrainian army: “They took my home away from me, so to go and do something on their territory, it meant a lot. Karma.”

Anatolii Teliavskyi, a volunteer driver for the Ukrainian army, stopped off on a recent visit to Sudzha to take a sarcastic photograph in front of a Russian propaganda billboard.

Before the war, Teliavskyi worked as a bailiff in Ukraine and now, ­making his first-ever visit to Russia, he tracked down the court bailiffs office in Sudzha and posed outside it, holding a copy of the Ukrainian legal guidelines on bailiffs.

But this dark humour hid a world of pain. “I was in Bucha and Irpin ,” he said. “I saw what they did to our cities, and here is a town standing more or less whole … I saw a few people there, women tending the gardens and so on, but I didn’t want to speak to them. I felt gross, I wanted to wash.”

In Sudzha, as in much of Russia’s border region with Ukraine, many of the older people still speak Ukrainian, or a mix of the two languages known as surzhyk .

“I think the old people I met there probably spoke better Ukrainian than I do,” said one ­soldier from a Russian-speaking family in eastern Ukraine who had been on patrol in Sudzha.

Many families are scattered across both sides of the border, which has caused troubles for some in recent years. Nadezhda, who asked for her surname not to be used, was born in Sudzha and lived there until she was 18, but then moved to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv to go to university, and stayed.

Until the full-scale invasion in 2022, she returned to Sudzha every year, where she would get into arguments with her mother and brother, both staunch fans of Putin. After 2022 relations broke down completely.

“At the start they were saying all these things – that we were attacking ourselves, that they didn’t believe it,” she said. “After a while we just stopped talking.”

When the Ukrainians moved into Sudzha, her mother and brother fled to the city of Kursk, where they are now staying in temporary accommodation, and got back in touch with Nadezhda.

“My mum said a lot of people have changed their mind since the Kursk operation,” she said. “On the television, it was all optimistic, and now they’ve lost their homes.

“I said, ‘Mum, I’ve been trying to tell you since the first day of the war that war is pain, it’s awful. It’s not about jolly war songs’. Now I guess they understand a bit.

“But I don’t believe they will ever fully understand what their state and their people have done.”

Nadezhda said her mother grew up speaking Ukrainian, but now mostly speaks Russian. Among the younger generation in Sudzha, almost no one speaks Ukrainian.

According to Murza, this tendency, as well as the fact that Sudzha’s museum says nothing about the town’s long Ukrainian-accented past, should serve as a warning for what might happen to other territories that are currently being Russianised.

“Look at what’s going on in the occupied areas of Ukraine, where the propaganda tells people that they are all Russians and everything Ukrainian is artificial.

“In some ­decades it will all sink in: it will be just like Sudzha, and nobody will remember anything.”