Lyubov Antipova last spoke to her elderly parents almost two weeks ago, when she first heard rumours of a Ukrainian incursion and begged them to leave their village in Russia’s Kursk region.
The threat seemed unreal – Russian soil had not seen invading forces since the end of the second world war – and Russian state media initially dismissed the invasion as a one-off “attempt at infiltration”, so Antipova’s parents, who keep chickens and a pig on a small plot, decided to stay in Zaoleshenka.
Next day, Antipova saw photos online of Ukrainian soldiers posing next to a supermarket and the office of a gas company. She recognised the place immediately: her parents live about 50 metres away.
“All those years my parents didn’t think they would be affected,” Antipova told the Observer by phone from Kursk, carefully avoiding using the word “war”, which has been officially outlawed in Russia. “We were sure the Russian army would protect us. I’m amazed how quickly the Ukrainian forces advanced.”
Ukraine’s incursion into Russia has laid bare the apparent complacency of Russian officials in charge of the border. Many local people accuse the government of downplaying the Ukrainian attack or misinforming them of the danger.
By Friday, Ukraine’s military claimed to have dispatched about 10,000 troops to capture about 1,100sq km of the Kursk region, mostly around the town of Sudzha. If true, the incursion captured more territory than that seized by Russia in Ukraine this year, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
The Kursk incursion caught Alexander Zorin, a custodian of the Kursk Museum of Archaeology, at an excavation site in the village of Gochevo, where he and his colleagues have been digging the 10th- and 11th-century burial mounds every summer for three decades.
Zorin thought the buzz of drones, jets and thud of artillery was routine since his team had witnessed a similar activity during two previous summers. Sudzha, the epicentre of the offensive, was 40km away.
“Officials’ reports were not scary at all: ‘100 saboteurs went in’ – but then it went up to 300, 800 … It was impossible to get a clear picture,” he said. “We decided to leave only after we saw locals who had been evacuated from there and told us to go.”
The official evacuation from the area was declared a day later.
Many in Kursk blame the government and state media for keeping them in the dark in the face of mortal danger, with outraged residents sharing messages on social media.
“I don’t even know who I hate more now: the Ukrainian army that captured our land or our government that allowed that to happen,” Nelli Tikhonova wrote on a Kursk group at the VKontakte website.
On Tuesday evening, when Ukrainian troops were already in Sudzha, Channel One news claimed the Russian army had “prevented the violation of the border”.
The next day President Vladimir Putin kept referring to a “situation in the border area of Kursk”, eschewing any mention of the incursion into Russian territory.
For days, state television has been showing military bulletins, reporting successful Russian attacks on Ukrainian troops in the “border area” without specifying if a foreign army was still on its soil. State media has covered the plight of tens of thousands of displaced Russians who fled their homes before any evacuation was organised – but state TV mostly calls them “temporary evacuated people”, not refugees or IDPs (internally displaced persons).
Russia’s emergency officials eventually put the number of IDPs from Kursk at 76,000. Air raids have become routine in Kursk, a city of about a million people, with many locals ignoring the sirens or sheltering in safer spots, said Stas Volobuyev.
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But it was the influx of displaced Russians from the border areas that brought home the reality of war just a few dozen kilometres away.
“Things happened in the past two and a half years but the scale was completely different,” Volobuyev said. “I work in the city centre, and every day I see people queueing for humanitarian aid. There are so many refugees, they have nothing. People had to flee in shorts and flip-flops.”
Volobuyev, whose wife is volunteering to help the IDPs, and Antipova, whose parents have not been heard from since the day of the attack, lament the failure to help the refugees and to stop the incursion.
The Kremlin has earmarked 3bn roubles (£26m) on a fortification line in the Kursk region, and a new territorial defence force was supposed to ward off the incursion. Antipova recalled seeing a high number of border guards during her last visit to Sudzha in May but spoke bitterly of the community having to crowdfund for troops stationed there. “Locals were bringing them supplies. I’m really annoyed that the government and the army keep saying the troops have all they need – while we had to chip in for drones and underwear.”
As Sudzha plunged into a communications blackout, Antipova went to IDP centres in Kursk to look for her parents. Liza Alert, a nationwide charity for missing people, said on Friday it has missing notices for nearly 1,000 people in the region.
The last thing Antipova heard from the village was that an elderly neighbour had also stayed put, which makes her hope that the man and her parents would “go to the basement and sit it out”. She had little hope of the official response after others saw “there’s a war on, and officials were doing nothing”.
“It’s scary when you see you’re on your own and you have no one to turn to,” she said. “Volunteers are doing the work. Local authorities are nowhere to be seen.”