Russia Masses 50,000 Troops Around Sumy In Effort To Overwhelm By Sheer Numbers

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday covered the ongoing advance of Russian forces beyond and west of Donetsk, describing that troops are now within 12 miles of the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy.

“Having almost entirely ejected Ukrainian forces from the Russian Kursk region earlier this year, Russian forces have now poured over the border in the opposite direction toward Sumy,” the report describes. “With 50,000 troops in the area, they outnumber the Ukrainians roughly 3-to-1, according to soldiers fighting there.”

It should come as no surprise to longtime observers of the war that Moscow taking a slow victory by attrition approach and exhausting the abilities of the other side.

A Ukrainian top military commander has said of the Russians that “Their main strategy is to “wear us down with their numbers.” This also goes for Russia’s superior artillery supply, which earlier in the war was said to outpace Ukraine’s quantity of shells by ten to one.

The WSJ says Ukraine has deployed the “Timur” Special Forces Unit to positions near Sumy in a desperate effort to slow the Russian advance.

One Ukrainian unit commander conceded in a statement to the publication that “numbers are a big problem for us, though not enough to overrun us.” It remains that “The enemy is losing 300 to 400 people per day across the region,” he said. “But they can deal with that level of casualties…They keep bringing in reserves.”

Ukrainian officials believe in Sumy oblast Russia is mainly reliant on poorly trained, large groups of “meat assaults” which seek to simply overwhelm the Ukrainian side.

However, there have been mixed and contradictory reports from the front lines. Ukrainian commanders at the end of last week claimed to have halted Russia’s advance into Sumy.

The Associated Press has pointed out that the Russian incursion into Sumy was made possible after Kursk was regained:

In March, Ukrainian forces withdrew from much of Russia’s neighboring Kursk region, parts of which they had controlled after a surprise cross-border attack in August.

That retreat enabled Russia to launch a counteroffensive that advanced between 2-12 kilometers (1-7 miles) into Ukrainian territory, according to different estimates.

And the fresh WSJ reporting links the situation poor defenses outside of Sumy with risking too much on Zelensky’s Kurk invasion gambit:

During the half-year that Ukraine held territory in Russia’s Kursk region, soldiers who fought there said they assumed the military would be preparing strong defensive positions on the Ukrainian side of the border. Instead, after a chaotic and costly retreat from Kursk, they found outdated trenches, with no overhead cover from drones. The soldiers are now digging their own positions under drone fire in some cases.

Starting in late May, Russian forces took control of the border villages of Novenke, Zhuravka, Veselivka, and Basivka, Hryhorov just inside Sumy Oblast as part of work on Putin’s declared buffer zone plan.

Fresh footage over Sumy via Russian state media:

RUSSIAN STRIKES DESTROY UKRAINIAN MILITARY BASE
“Geran” drones hit hard in Sumy region—Ukrainian military positions and drone storage wiped out near the town of Konotop. pic.twitter.com/JU6TA3q8aj

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) June 30, 2025

As for the city of Sumy, it lies just 18 miles from the Russian border and has suffered from intermittent aerial attacks and shelling since the war’s start. The Russian troop surge greatly expands what both sides consider to be the front lines of fighting.