On Russia’s Border, Fear and Defiance: ‘No One Will Chase Us Out of Here’

On the day Ukrainian soldiers began their encroachment into Russian territory last week, Viktor Baidak set out from his home in the frontier town of Sudzha to run some errands. He hasn’t been heard from since.

Baidak is among hundreds reported missing in the chaos that ensued when Ukrainian troops staged a surprise attack on a small part of Russia’s extensive western edge on Aug. 6.

“The town started emptying out as part of the evacuation,” said Baidak’s daughter Viktoria, but the pair decided to stay put. “This is our land, and no one will chase us out of here,” the lawyer said from her home in Sudzha on Monday, while Ukrainian troops patrolled the streets outside.

A mixture of panic, confusion and defiance has spread through the region’s population after Ukraine’s troops breached the frontier to take control of at least 74 settlements in Russia’s Kursk region, according to Kyiv’s tally.

The probe gave Russian residents a taste of what Ukraine’s population has endured for more than two years at the hands of Russian forces. Ukrainian officials say they have no intention of occupying the territory long-term and that the operation is necessary to secure Ukrainian border areas that have come under attack from Russian forces based in the Kursk region.

The incursion is the most serious challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin since paramilitary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin   marched on Moscow with a thousands-strong contingent of armed fighters in June 2023, only to stand down before reaching the Russian capital. Putin has vowed to oust the Ukrainians from Russian land, but a week in Ukraine continues to consolidate control of some settlements.

Russia is withdrawing some of its military forces from Ukraine to respond to the situation inside the Russian border, U.S. officials said Tuesday, the first sign that Kyiv’s incursion is forcing Moscow to rejigger its invasion force.

On Wednesday, a senior Russian military commander was quoted by state news agency TASS as saying that Russia’s military had the situation in Kursk under control.

“We are completing the blockade of those forces and assets that entered the territory of the Kursk region,” said Maj. Gen. Apty Alaudinov, commander of the Akhmat Special Forces from Russia’s Chechen Republic. “We are slowly beginning, as they say, to close all the gaps that existed.”

Russian forces are starting to hit back, striking supply lines within Ukraine, seeking to squeeze the flow of men and equipment into the Kursk region. A crater on the main road to the border marked the spot where Russia dropped a guided bomb near a checkpoint overnight, destroying houses and killing two people. A local official overseeing Ukraine’s Sumy region on Wednesday said Russian warplanes had dropped more than a dozen bombs in 24 hours on the Ukrainian border district that serves as a staging area for Kyiv’s offensive.

The Ukrainian offensive has displaced thousands of people and allowed Kyiv to establish its first toehold in Russia since that country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The first major foreign military invasion of Russia since World War II has also embarrassed the Kremlin, which retains the upper hand in its wider, bloody war on its smaller neighbor.

Kyiv’s forces have carved out and occupied an area 25 miles wide and at least 20 miles deep in a week of fighting as they seek to divert Moscow’s resources away from the Ukrainian battlefield. At least 12 civilians have been killed and more than 100 injured in an area of Russia that has until now been largely insulated from the war. One in nine residents of the region is now displaced, according to local officials. A frantic search is under way for the missing, including an 11-month-old baby.

Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, said Wednesday that his forces had moved a further two kilometers into Russia in some areas, and had ousted Russian soldiers from Sudzha, taking more than 100 troops captive. Ukrainian television has been broadcasting triumphant reports from inside the town, showing Ukrainian soldiers raising the national flag and distributing aid to local residents.

Still, the impact is a tiny fraction of the devastation that has engulfed Ukrainian towns and cities that have come under almost daily aerial bombardment and shelling during the war. Fourteen people, including three children, were killed in a single Russian missile strike last week that hit a supermarket in the eastern city of Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials.

Kursk, the site of World War II battles that are seared into the collective memory of its residents, had been largely spared active fighting in this war. Its residents have followed news of drone and artillery attacks on neighboring Belgorod, where civilians complain of being forgotten and taking the brunt of Ukrainian assaults.

On Wednesday, Belgorod declared a state of emergency in response to the disruption there. Meanwhile, the nearby region of Voronezh, where hundreds from the beleaguered border region have sought refuge, came under attack from drones overnight, local officials said. There were no reports of injuries.

Kursk region residents say the arrival of the war on their doorstep has caused a surge of defiance.

Many have remained in the area against the advice of regional officials but are staying inside for fear, they say, of coming face-to-face with Ukrainian troops. So far no footage has emerged from the region of Russians fighting back in the way some Ukrainians did when their territory was invaded.

In Kursk city, the regional capital, just 70 miles from the Ukrainian border, air-raid sirens are sounding regularly and locals report an increase in Ukrainian shelling and a lack of bomb shelters. Liza Alert, a volunteer-run search-and-rescue group, says more than 200 people have disappeared in the Kursk region since Ukraine launched its attack.

Kursk resident Sergei Prilepsky said he and his wife took in a family of five who had fled Sudzha. They arrived with just the clothes on their back, clutching only a packet of important documents.

“Of course people are worried,” said Prilepsky, 41. “They abandoned their homes. They left everything.”

The family spent the night and he gave them food and clothing before they found a house to remain long term through a friend.

Putin, who has staked his leadership on providing security for Russians, has blamed Kyiv’s Western backers for inciting the operation. The White House said it wasn’t given advance notice of the incursion.

For Russians, Kursk represents a turning point of World War II when in 1943 Ukrainians and Russians fought side by side and the Soviet Red Army began to repel the Nazi occupiers in some of the bloodiest battles ever fought.

“Ukrainians used to be our brothers,” said Viktoria, who says her grandmother in another part of Kursk region speaks Ukrainian with fellow villagers, just like many residents of a border area where family ties have long spanned borders. “Ukrainian, or Russian, it didn’t used to matter.”

Across Russia, videos of fleeing residents and Ukrainian soldiers raising their flags in border villages are being shared widely by the country’s community of nationalist war analysts. Footage posted by the pro-Kremlin war bloggers on Friday showed a Russian military column that had been blown up.

But the Kremlin has played down the scale of the incursion. When the acting head of the Kursk region, Aleksei Smirnov, told Putin in a televised meeting on Monday that Ukraine had seized a sizable swath of Russian land, Putin interrupted him, instructing him to talk instead about the help being provided in the region.

With close to half a million residents, the city of Kursk is attempting to house evacuees in recreation centers, homes and a vast tent city. During multiple air-raid sirens each day, people run for cover from the threat of incoming shells or drones, said Yevgeny Razinkov, 34, a father of two small children who works in a repair shop and as a driver on the side.

Razinkov said the recent attack on the region had rattled residents.

“Naturally, they don’t see anything good in this,” he said. “Nobody reacted well.”

Anastasiya Babir, a pro-Kremlin journalist working in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Kherson region, said her former in-laws fled their home in Sudzha after the attacks began and stayed with her parents in Kursk before moving on to Moscow. People in areas that came under attack “initially didn’t realize how dangerous it was,” Babir, a former fighter for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, said in a voice message Sunday.

Those who understood what was happening left in their own cars toward Kursk, Moscow or where they have relatives, she said. “Most of the people who left expected this to last only a short period, one night,” she added.

Ukrainian troops say the Russian border was manned by inexperienced conscripts who mostly fled or surrendered when faced with superior forces. Ukrainian media has published footage of captured Russian conscripts claiming they were equipped with only rifles and grenade launchers.

A petition addressed to Putin from the mothers of Russian conscripts, asking for their sons to be kept away from the fighting on the border, has gathered almost 8,000 signatures online.

Despite being wrong-footed by the recent incursion, Russia continues to gain ground in eastern Ukraine, the main theater of battle, and has accelerated its attacks on Pokrovsk, a town in the Donbas area that is a key logistics and rail hub. Kyiv’s offensive has been diverting its own troops and equipment from those areas, according to Ukrainian soldiers.

Ukraine’s ability to maintain its presence inside Russia remains to be seen, with stretched supply lines and limited manpower. Locals in the Kursk region say that when their land is under fire, they won’t hesitate to take up arms.

“We’re waiting for our army,” said Viktoria. “But if needed, we’ll go fight ourselves.”

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com and Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com