Living among the occupiers: Natalia & Alexander's story

The Floutist

Natalia, 52, and Alexander, 49, were small farmers living in the tiny agricultural village of Cherkasskoye Porechnoye, twelve kilometres northeast of Sudzha, which lies a hundred kilometres southwest of Kursk inside Russia. They lived through the Ukrainian invasion from the first day, in August 2024, until almost the very last, surviving for seven months amid the ruins of their home.

Here is Natalia’s account of those months.

We had a small farm with a vegetable garden, a barn, cows, and chickens. Our house stood at a crossroads on the road from Sudzha to Kursk. Our village had 176 inhabitants, twenty-six of whom lived on our street. On the morning of 7 August, the day after the invasion, while we still did not know what was happening, we went to Kursk to buy an electric generator. On our way back in the evening, the road was blocked by concrete barriers. The next day we tried to contact our daughter in Kursk, but there was no longer any mobile network.

That was when it began. The Ukrainians arrived from two directions at once. Many cars were trying to flee towards Kursk. Ukrainian armoured vehicles fired on them, injuring and killing many of the occupants. We stayed in our house.

A month later, while retrieving our livestock one evening, we saw tanks and mines on the road. We came across a company of Russian soldiers who had taken refuge in the woods. There were twenty-two of them. They gave us a grenade for our protection. We showed them the route they should take to escape, but it was already too late.

A battle began, and they were all killed by incendiary shells while trying to escape. The next day, we counted twenty charred bodies. We managed to recover their survival kits, which proved extremely useful afterwards. And because they had had time to cut the rope of our cow’s halter, we were able to recover her. Thanks to her and her milk, we were able to survive throughout the winter months. We stayed inside for almost a month, too afraid to go outside.

At the end of September a young Ukrainian soldier came knocking at our door with his rifle to tell us that we had nothing to fear, that he and his comrades were setting up in our street and that they would not fire on civilians. He belonged to a drone unit. They moved into abandoned houses further up our street. They were young men aged twenty to twenty-five.

We sometimes spoke with them. They told us not to go outside at night because of thermal cameras. They were kind, and one day one of them even lent his mobile phone to one of our neighbours, who was celebrating his birthday, so that he could call his family in Russia. He told us that we could flee if we wanted to, but only by going into Ukraine. He would have faced serious consequences if his commander had found out what he had done.

In October we saw an aircraft very high above us releases a large bomb with fins. It fell on a depot containing inflammable fertilizer a kilometre from our house. The explosion was so powerful it blew off the roofs of surrounding houses. We often saw drones, and we quickly learned to distinguish Russian drones from Ukrainian drones.

For six months, we ate potatoes and vegetables from our garden and drank the milk from our cow. In November, the fighting moved northwards, and we were able to recover food abandoned in the shops and neighbouring houses, cooking it on our wood-burning stove while trying not to be detected. An uncle who lived on the same street managed to bake some bread by cooking it on the sheet-metal roof of his house. There was no electricity, and we had to save the generator’s fuel.

A destroyed house in Sudzha, Russia by Ukrainian attack. March 12, 2025.

Several houses were occupied for a long time by Ukrainian drone operators. These Ukrainians were very decent towards us, while the others—mercenaries, judging by their voices—fired at us. We survived because our house was relatively isolated and had no antenna on the roof.

On 22 February, a Russian drone flew over us and we managed to wave to it. We wrote “khleb” [bread] on a piece of cardboard. For one week, every morning and evening, Russian drones from the Akhmat regiment brought us bread, drinking water, matches, chocolate bars, canned food, and messages of encouragement, also urging us, “Share this food with all those who were suffering with us.” We thanked them by writing “Spassiba” [Thank you] on a board. Then the aid suddenly stopped.

On 3 March, both of us were wounded by fire from a Ukrainian Mavic quadcopter drone. We had gone out to the well to try to find water by breaking the ice. We were bleeding heavily and could no longer continue living in those conditions, but, once again, luck was on our side. Thanks to the survival kits, we were able to make bandages, and we decided to escape the following morning. At dawn, we wrapped ourselves in white sheets so that we would not be spotted in the snow, and we set off along the road with our dog. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, for quite some time we were able to follow the tracks of a Ukrainian armoured vehicle in the snow and thus avoid mines. Then, thanks to our dog sniffing the ground, we were able to avoid anti-personnel mines hidden beneath the snow.

After six hours and twenty-six kilometres, around noon we finally came across Russian soldiers, who could not believe that we had managed to travel all that way without being blown up by a mine. We are very religious, and I prayed throughout the entire journey. I believe that the icon we had taken with us saved us.

We were then transferred to the Kursk hospital to treat our wounds and see our children again. The commander of the Akhmat battalion came to see us and told us that they had been forced to stop their deliveries because they had been requisitioned for the counterattack on Sudzha, which took place a few days later. [Russian forces retook Sudzha on 10 March by infiltrating through a pipeline.]

Even the F.S.B. [Russia’s domestic intelligence agency] came from Moscow to question us and ask us how we had survived. The media were also interested in our story. Our cow, calf, and bull are doing well, and the neighbours looking after them send us photographs. Of the people living on our street, twenty were killed or died of hunger or illness; only six survived.

Alexander and Natalia now live in a Kursk apartment building recently constructed to house refugees who lost their homes during the Ukrainian invasion.