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STETS’KIVKA: Despite the driving rain, a few elderly residents wander into the streets of Stetskivka in northeast Ukraine to catch a yellow bus to go shopping in nearby Sumy, the regional capital.
They are worried about the Russian drones that have been striking the area with increasing regularity, more than three years into Moscow’s invasion.
“I’m afraid. Nobody knows what could happen to the bus we take,” Galyna Golovko, 69, told AFP at the small shop she runs near the bus stop.
Golovko said she never goes out in the morning or evening when Russian drones criss-cross the sky.
“It’s scary how many drones fly in the morning.... In the morning and in the evening it’s just hell,” she said.
The border with the neighboring Russian region of Kursk is just 17 kilometers (11 miles) away.
The Sumy region was the starting point for a Ukrainian incursion into Kursk last year.
Ukraine held swathes of the territory for eight months, until a spring offensive by Russian forces supported by North Korean troops pushed them back.
Moscow has since advanced toward the city of Sumy, taking several villages along the way and forcing mandatory evacuations of civilian residents.
At the Stetskivka bus stop, an elderly woman said she had packed up in case Russian troops arrive in town, where Ukrainian soldiers have replaced a pre-war population of 5,500 people.
The town is just 10 kilometers from the front line, and residents said there is heavy fighting nearby.
Beyond Stetskivka, “everything has been destroyed, there is not a single village,” Golovko said.
On her shop counter, there was a plastic box with a few banknotes — donations for a local family that lost its home, destroyed by a Russian glide bomb.


Ten kilometers to the south lies Sumy, a city that had 255,000 inhabitants before the war.
So far, restaurants are crowded and there seems little concern about the Russian advance.
But buildings in the city bear the scars of Russian bombardments.
And, when the sounds of car horns go down in the evenings, explosions can be heard in the distance.
The streets are lined with concrete bunkers against the increasingly frequent strikes from Russia, which has said it wants to set up a “buffer zone” to prevent future Ukrainian incursions.
“The enemy is trying to advance,” said Anvar, commander of the drone battalion of the 225th regiment, which is leading the defense of the region.
“We are pushing them back. Sometimes we advance, sometimes they do,” he told AFP in an apartment that serves as a base for his unit.
“We still have troops in the Kursk region. Nobody has tried to drive them out,” he said, calling the conflict in the region a “war of positions.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday said the Russian offensive in Sumy had been stopped, just a day after Russian forces said they had captured another village in the region.


Sitting next to Anvar, one of his men soldered microprocessors in silence, except for electronic clicking that made the room feel like a laboratory.
Surrounded by 3D printers and piles of batteries, the members of the brigade are busy transforming Chinese drones into flying weapons.
“It is now a drone war,” the commander said.
Anvar said that Russia was continually sending “cannon fodder” along this part of the front to try and overwhelm Ukrainian troops.
“I know people who have gone mad because of the number of people they manage to kill in a day.”
Russian soldiers “continue marching calmly” amid the bodies of their fallen comrades, he said.
In Stetskivka, Golovko voiced confidence that Ukrainian soldiers would hold the line and said she was “not going anywhere.”
“I will stay at home,” she said tearfully, beating the counter with her fist.
“I have traveled to Russia. We have friends there, and relatives. Everything was fine before.
“One day, this madness will end. The madness that Putin unleashed will end,” she said in a shaky voice.
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DUBAI: Iran did not send any message to Israel via a third country, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said on Sunday, after Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides said earlier Tehran had asked Nicosia to convey “some messages” to Israel.

President Nikos Christodoulides said Sunday Iran has asked Cyprus to convey “some messages” to Israel, as the east Mediterranean island appealed for restraint in a rapidly escalating crisis in the Middle East.
Christodoulides spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and he has also spoken to the leaders of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Greece, his office said Sunday.
Christodoulides told journalists Iran had asked Cyprus to convey ‘some messages’ to Israel but he did not say who specifically the messages were from or what they said.
Cypriot officials offered no clarity on the nature of the messages, which came after the Cypriot foreign minister spoke to his Iranian counterpart on Friday night.
Christodoulides also said he was not happy with what he said was a slow reaction by the European Union to the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.
Cyprus, the EU member situated closest to the Middle East, had asked for an extraordinary meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, he said. Projectiles sent by Iran to strike Israel were visible from various locations across Cyprus on Friday and Saturday night.
“It is not possible for the EU to claim a geopolitical role, to see all these developments and for there not to be at the very least a convening of the Council of Foreign Ministers,” Christodoulides told journalists.
Cyprus has offered to assist in the evacuation of third-party nationals from the region, and has called on all sides to refrain from actions which could escalate the conflict.