Sumy

Sumy is the capital of Sumy Oblast in north-eastern Ukraine, a city of about 250,000 people some 50km from the Russian border. In 2026 Russia has struck the region's power network as part of a campaign that First Deputy Energy Minister Artem Nekrasov said had turned to the high-voltage lines linking Ukraine's regions. For Sumy, that campaign turned deadly on 8 October, when a Russian strike on a regional energy site killed a power worker and wounded three others.

Russia opened a buffer-zone push into Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts at the start of 2026. Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, said Vladimir Putin ordered it to shield Kursk and Belgorod oblasts from Ukrainian cross-border raids, citing Ukraine's August 2024 incursion into Kursk. Fighting in the oblast has been close-quarters: on 3 March both armies declared the same village, Bobylivka, liberated.

The city was besieged but not taken in the 2022 invasion, and Russian troops left the oblast that April. Its distance from the border leaves it exposed to drones, glide bombs and ground pressure at once, and any settlement that leaves a Russian buffer zone in place would keep it on the front line.