Ukraine has taken more than 150 Russian prisoners of war in just a few days as part of the cross-border military operation, which a senior civilian official said was the first of “several phases” on the road to Moscow.

Oleksii Drozdenko, head of the military administration in the Ukrainian city of Sumy, said the attack went better than expected and that on the first day there were only 15 victims who required hospital treatment.

“Sometimes there are more than 100 or 150 prisoners of war per day,” Drozdenko said. Many of the Russian soldiers guarding the border are young conscripts. “They don’t want to fight us,” he added.

Several videos have circulated showing Ukrainians capturing prisoners of war, including at the border in the first hours of the invasion on Tuesday, August 6. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Kyiv is increasing its “exchange fund” to exchange prisoners of war from Russia.

Sumy is the closest Ukrainian city to the attack. Drozdenko said he was closely involved in planning the operation but was sworn to secrecy. He gestured to indicate the importance of operational security before the surprise attack.

Other local civilian leaders, notably Sumy Region Governor Volodymyr Artyukh, said they had not been warned in advance, suggesting that Drozdenko was in a circle of trust.

The city official, a Zelensky appointee who is the city’s de facto mayor after the previous incumbent was arrested last fall and charged with allegedly accepting bribes, said he could not say too much about preparations for the incursion two weeks ago because there is more to come.

“We see only part of this operation, in the future we will see several phases,” Drozdenko said, characterizing the incursion as “not like previous attacks” from Ukraine into the Belgorod region in the east, which were largely led by anti-Kremlin Russian groups.

Although Drozdenko declined to provide further information, there are signs that Ukraine has adopted a new tactic to gain more Russian territory. On Sunday morning, the Ukrainian Air Force released a video of it blowing a hole in a bridge near Zvannoe over the Seym River in Kursk Province.

A few days earlier, another bridge over the Sejm had been severed following a Ukrainian airstrike north of the village of Glushkovo, which lies near the front line of the invasion and for which the Russian authorities had issued an evacuation order for the civilian population.

Although Ukraine has not made its intentions clear, the destruction of the three bridges over the Sejm at Glushkovo, Zvannoe and Karysh would make it more difficult for Russia to strengthen a strip of land west of the current incursion area and would improve Ukraine’s prospects of taking that land if it continues to advance.

Late last week, Sumy and other neighboring regions organized a humanitarian shipment of food and medicine for Russian civilians in the occupied territory, including from “our own food stocks,” Drozdenko said. No Russian civilians have fled across the border to live as refugees in Ukraine, he said.

Drozdenko’s duties included ensuring that hospitals in Sumy were prepared to receive casualties after the attack began. “This operation will result in an unexpectedly low number of casualties being brought to hospitals,” the official said.

“On the first day of the operation, there were only 15 casualties. 60, 70 percent of them were very light, caused by bomb damage and shrapnel,” he added, referring to the fact that the cross-border attack came as a complete surprise to the Kremlin, which assumed that Ukraine would fight to defend its own territory.

At the end of last week, civilians in Sumy were asked to donate blood of group 0 negative, which is suitable for emergency transfusions of all blood types. The need was met “within an hour,” the official said, which “confirms that our people support this action.”

The city of Sumy, a quiet provincial capital in northeastern Ukraine with a population of about 250,000, had not been involved in fighting since the desperate first days of the war, when it was surrounded and defended by a civilian militia that included Drozdenko.

But the invasion has brought the war back to Sumy and the border areas in the north with renewed air, missile and artillery attacks. “If we talk about seven months of 2024, from January to July, there were about 400 attacks on border areas. But last week we had 200 attacks in just one week,” the official said.

Several thousand people have fled the frontline areas, having to be evacuated in the affected areas up to 10 km from the border. Drozdenko said the refugees would try to organize accommodation for themselves or be accommodated in hostels in the city.

Sumy was protected by air defenses. Over the past week, interception and launch maneuvers were heard and seen in the city center. On Saturday morning, a ballistic missile penetrated and landed in a street, damaging about 15 civilian vehicles and injuring two people, although not seriously.

The people of Sumy have been resilient despite the recent bombing, Drozdenko said, because the city had repelled the first Russian invasion in March 2022, when the regular army was 60 miles away.

He said of his own experience: “I was not so optimistic then. We took part in street fighting. I was almost killed twice. It was very scary to be shot at by a BTR (Russian armored personnel carrier). Now I am not afraid of anything.”