Kyiv, Ukraine – Small groups of infantrymen backed by armoured vehicles, multiple rocket launchers, drones and fighter jets are trying to seize a village.
They have been attacking it for days despite heavy counterattacks, shelling and drone strikes, spring rains, wet ground and the lack of life-saving foliage on the trees around the village that hides camouflage-clad soldiers.
“The situation remains tense,” a war correspondent concludes.
What sounds like a bland, repetitive report from eastern Ukraine is in fact a dispatch of pro-Kremlin war correspondent Yuri Kotyonok from the Russia-Ukraine war’s brand new front line.
The region is Belgorod in western Russia, a pancake-flat area of oak groves and iron ore mines 700 kilometres (435 miles) south of Moscow.
The village is Demidovka, an unremarkable backwater of fewer than 300 inhabitants, where Soviet forces clashed with Nazi Germans during World War II.
Demidovka is a stone’s throw away from the border with the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, where Russian forces failed to advance and retreated three years ago.
The village is also about 50km (31 miles) north of Sudzha, another forgettable town in the neighbouring Russian region of Kursk that was retaken earlier this month after more than six months of Ukrainian occupation.
Ukrainian forces still control about 100sq km (40sq miles) between Sudzha and the Ukrainian border – and seem determined to seize a toehold in Belgorod, Ukrainian observers say.
“This is not an offensive. These are counterattacks to distract part of Russian forces from the fighting in the Kursk region,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
Ukrainian civilian or military officials have not commented on the Belgorod operation, similar to the silence they kept about the May 2023 excursion by two small groups of Russian nationals fighting for Ukraine.
The groups crossed into Belgorod, briefly seizing the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka some 150km (93 miles) southeast of Demidovka.
The takeover shocked the Kremlin, showing how unprepared Russian border regions were for attacks even by small groups of soldiers, as regional authorities misplaced federal funds for reinforcing their areas and failed to organise the evacuation of civilians.
These days, analysts agree that Kyiv needs the new Belgorod operation to create a buffer zone that would prevent Russian forces from crossing into Sumy or intensify pressure on the strategically located eastern city of Pokrovsk.
The Ukrainian forces “absolutely don’t need these forces advancing towards Sumy or appearing near Pokrovsk”, Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.
The Belgorod district, where Ukrainians are advancing, is a “relatively easy target as it lies lower than the heights controlled by Ukrainian forces in Sumy”, he said.
The Belgorod operation is a mini-replica of the Kursk offensive that began in August and distracted tens of thousands of Russian soldiers from the front line in the eastern Donbas region.
“It would be good to replicate Kursk, but I think we don’t have enough forces,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.
“But these are asymmetric actions related to Kursk and Sumy to force the enemy to stretch their forces, to show that we, too, can form buffer zones,” he said.
Moscow responded to the operation by shelling Sumy’s administrative centre on Wednesday.
The attack damaged a school and several apartment buildings, wounding at least 99, including 17 children, officials said.
The Belgorod operation is also a sobering reminder to Moscow that Ukraine is capable of calculated, pinpointed strikes on Russian soil as the Kremlin stalls negotiations on a 30-day ceasefire proposed by US President Donald Trump.
The first round of talks in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh lasted for 12 hours.
“The discussion was productive and focused – we addressed key points, including energy,” Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov wrote on X late Sunday.
“The dialogue was tense, uneasy, but useful for us and the Americans,” head of the Russian delegation Grigory Karasin told the Kremlin-funded RIA Novosti news agency.
On Tuesday, Russia and Ukraine agreed to halt attacks on vessels in the Black Sea and on energy infrastructure, Washington said.
Earlier on Tuesday morning, the besieged village of Demidovka was almost deserted as a Russian war correspondent admitted it had been taken over by Ukrainians.
Russian servicemen “missed the moment when the enemy demined the road and unclenched the dragon’s teeth,” antitank fortifications shaped like pyramids, pro-Kremlin war blogger Vladimir Romanov wrote on Telegram.
Another Russian war reporter tried to see a silver lining in the Ukrainian advance.
“Yes, it will result in the distraction of some of our forces and meanwhile, multiplies enemy losses as it has to advance in very uncomfortable conditions,” Yuri Podolyaka wrote on Telegram.
Moscow commented on the Belgorod operation on March 18, when the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed it “thwarted a provocation” in Belgorod before a phone conversation between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
It said some 200 Ukrainian servicemen tried to cross the border “to create a negative background for the talks”.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian servicemen gloat.
“The one who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind and has his face smashed in,” Kirill Sazonov, a Ukrainian political analyst-turned-soldier who fought in Kursk, quipped on his Telegram channel.
The panicked flight of civilians and the absence of Russian law enforcement triggered reports of widespread marauding.
One of them involved Russian soldiers who looted two dozen houses in the village of Repyakhovka, 15km (9.3 miles) south of the seized Demidovka.
“Our servicemen are doing such a good job, they protect us by getting into other people’s houses,” one of the locals told the Pepel Belgoroda Telegram channel.
