The authorities of the Sumy region call on the locals to evacuate immediately

In the Sumy Oblast near the Russian border, the situation is becoming more and more hellish. Most of the settlements suffer from massive shelling. The authorities call on local residents to evacuate immediately.

However, not everyone wants to go. Nina Skorkina initially refused to leave the house, but when explosions rang out all around, the police took the 87-year-old woman away.

Other elderly and infirm residents of one of the villages are carried on blankets across a bridge already damaged by airstrikes.

And while Vladimir Putin celebrates the next six years of his presidency and promises to continue the great war against Ukraine, attacks on its northern border have increased dramatically.

According to Volodymyr Zelenskyi, since the beginning of March, the Russians have dropped almost 200 guided bombs on the communities of Sumy Oblast.

"The Russian army is trying to simply burn our border villages to ruins," the Ukrainian president said.

The police and employees of the State Emergency Service have already rescued hundreds of people in the border Sumy region, moving them to safer places deep in Ukraine.

Many of them are residents of Velika Pysarivka, a village five kilometers from the border, as well as the surrounding villages

Nina Makarenko said that she left her already destroyed home.

"They destroyed our houses. There is nothing."

All Nina took with her were some clothes and homemade jam.

Before the war, she regularly went to Russia for purchases. And now the Russians are shelling her house.

"It's scary. And they do it during the day, and they do it at night."

The bus takes people to the small town of Okhtyrka, where local authorities have set up a temporary shelter in a kindergarten and school.

It is cozy here, psychologists work with children, there are many smiles and laughter.

But elderly women are sitting motionless and confused on the folding tables arranged in the classroom. They lost everything they had and believed in.

The first thing I hear when I enter the room is a call for more help to Ukrainian soldiers.

"Give them weapons to knock out the Russians. This is our main request! - says Valentina. - Their planes drop bombs on us, and we have nothing to shoot them down!"

The next outburst of her anger concerns Vladimir Putin, who unleashed this war and has just been re-elected for a fifth term.

"Putin is our enemy! He said he would destroy Ukraine! - passionately pronounces Tatiana and mocks the triumphant re-election of the Russian leader. "He chose himself!"

"What did we do to him? How many people were killed, how many were tortured, how many lost arms and legs. And for what?"

While Tatiana is speaking, her elderly mother is sobbing uncontrollably next to her. Looking around, I realize that almost everyone in the room is crying.

Many people have left the border areas of Sumy Oblast since the summer of last year, when the authorities announced an evacuation there due to danger.

Now it is almost impossible to stay there. Footage taken by police rescue teams shows streets where houses have been reduced to rubble.

One of the possible reasons for the serious escalation in Sumy Oblast is the increase in Ukrainian shelling of Belgorod, a Russian border town located 80 km from Kharkiv.

Recently, Vladimir Putin promised to respond to the shelling of the Belgorod region, ignoring, however, the fact that for two years Russian missiles have been mercilessly hitting Ukrainian homes and civilian infrastructure.

Mayor Okhtyrka has a different theory of escalation.

"I understand that the enemy wants to create some kind of gray zone, into which equipment could not enter and into which large groups of people could not move freely," Pavlo Kuzmenko suggests.

We met with him in the city library, because a Russian airstrike destroyed the city council building, where his office was.

"Along our entire border, the enemy is systematically creating a zone where Ukrainians will not be able to set foot," the mayor believes.

The increase in shelling of Sumy Oblast is also associated with raids by Russian volunteer formations on the territory of Russia (Kursk and Belgorod regions).

These forces probably wanted to show that Putin had lost control of his border. It was then, according to the locals, that the Russians began actively bombing Velika Pysarivka.

"The explosions did not stop for a second," says Tetyana and adds that life in the village has turned into "hell."

The composition of Russian volunteer groups includes various people: from representatives of right-wing forces to the Siberian battalion, formed from the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation. They are united by the conviction that only armed resistance can change Russia and overthrow Putin.

The number and military effectiveness of these forces, which are based in Ukraine and have the support of Ukrainian military intelligence, remain clearly unclear.

On Thursday, at a press conference in Kyiv, a representative of one of the groups stated that their raids on Russia's regions bordering Ukraine had tied up the "Kremlin military machine", thwarting plans for a new attack on Ukraine.

However, my own sources suggest that there may be no less hype than real action here.

When I asked if their achievements were worth destroying Ukrainian villages, another representative of the Russian volunteers said, "It's a shame" that civilians are suffering. And he added: the fight against such an enemy as Russia is impossible "without sacrifices and destruction".

People flee not only from shelling.

There is a single checkpoint on the border with Russia in Sumy Oblast.

Dozens of people returning from the temporarily occupied territories use this route every day.

Zoya Vypirailo and her husband Mykhailo took three days to get here. Their village in the Kherson region is now full of Russian soldiers.

"There are many of them. They live in houses. They settle in the fields. Their transport moves to and fro. And we are worried," Zoya admitted when she finally reached the reception point.

She says that life under occupation changed her a lot: "I had no desire, no strength. We are morally killed."

That is why they and Mykhailo left everything. They handed over the house in which they had lived for 53 years to a neighbor, leaving ducks, chickens and dogs.

"We want the entire Kherson Oblast to be under Ukraine. We really want to. But we've already given up," Zoya tells me quietly and tiredly.

To get to Ukraine, pensioners had to drag their bags across a two-kilometer neutral strip.

The non-governmental organization "Pluriton" takes people from the border to the reception center, where they are given the opportunity to call their relatives, organize tickets for further travel, treat them with tea and a hot lunch.

In the same place, those who have arrived also undergo a document check.

"When I look at these people, I remember myself," says the head of the organization, Kateryna Arisoi.

She herself left her home in Bakhmut not so long ago, and now she helps other displaced people. "I can't find the words to explain that their former lives, unfortunately, will never come back," she says.

"When we were driving here, I started to cry. I breathed fresh air, our Ukrainian air," says pensioner Zoya quietly, but clearly.

In the last two years, she was forced to give up her own identity. And in the last presidential elections of the Russian Federation, vote for Vladimir Putin.

"We are Ukrainians. We want our country to prosper. So that our children and grandchildren live in peace," says Zoya and begins to cry.

"Sorry. It is very difficult".

Gradually, she realizes that she is now free. But Ukraine, unfortunately, has not yet come close to peace.