Sumy, Ukraine · 30 km from the Russian border · prepared for the Nantes Local News Festival and the Le Télégramme visit, September 2026
Cukr publishes a news site, four social channels, a membership club, a shop, a yard in the city centre and one printed magazine a year. This page holds 35 clips filmed over the past two years by our reporters and our readers — the week we actually work through, the day a strike reached our own office, and everything we keep making anyway. Nothing here is stock footage.
Measured 17 September 2026. Site: 1,391,711 users on cukr.city over the previous 12 months (GA4). Channels: Facebook 40,877 · Instagram 28,753 · Telegram 20,288 · YouTube 5,910. Club: 794 active paid subscriptions. Shop: a separate Instagram account with 2,338 followers.
Act I What a normal week looks like
Sumy is 30 km from the Russian border. Guided bombs, ballistic missiles and FPV drones reach us in minutes — often with no time for an alert. Everything below was filmed by our reporters, published on our channels, and is a normal working week for this newsroom.
4 July 2026
A night strike, and a day of mourning
Four people were killed, among them a mother and her child. The city declared a day of mourning. Our reporters filmed the aftermath the same morning.
Instagram21 July 2026
The Epicentr hypermarket burns down
A large fire at a hardware hypermarket. Rescue work was slowed because Russian drones kept circling above the site.
Instagram6 August 2026
Over 500 windows blown out in one night
Guided bombs hit residential blocks, shops, a petrol station. By 9 a.m. two schools were operating as aid points for residents.
Instagram6 August 2026
An FPV drone hunting a man on the street
A civilian tries to run. He takes cover from the first blast — a second drone arrives seconds later. We asked the police to establish the circumstances.
Instagram13 March 2024
From the impact site, same day
The State Emergency Service spokesman explains what happened while rescue work is still going on behind him. Two years before the clips above — the pattern has not changed.
Instagram17 July 2026
People still come out to protest
Sumy joined nationwide protests over anti-corruption legislation. “Despite constant shelling and guided bombs 24/7, Sumy is unbroken,” wrote the reader who filmed it.
InstagramAct II 13 April 2025
On Palm Sunday, 13 April 2025, missiles hit the centre of Sumy — the part of the city where our newsroom is. The first clip is our own security camera at the moment of the blast. The rest was filmed by the team over the following hours: our windows, our desks, our street, and our reporter going live from the cordon. None of it was published as a package until now.
CCTV · 53 s
Our security camera, 13 April 2025
The timestamp is running in the corner. The orange flash is the blast wave reaching the room.
24 s
The façade, from the street
Windows gone on the upper floors of the historic building. A colleague is standing inside what used to be a window frame.
12 s
A desk, an hour later
Dust and glass grit over everything — monitor, table, a phone that was left behind.
11 s
Looking out through what is left
Glass on the sill, glass on the floor, traffic going past below as if nothing had happened.
6 s
A crack across the ceiling
Checking how far the arch has moved.
9 s
A café chair and a carpet of glass
The pavement outside. Red tape marks the cordon.
10 s
The street while rescue work goes on
An ambulance, the cordon, and a camera already on a tripod.
12 s
Our reporter goes live from the cordon
Filming a stand-up on a phone, in a Cukr hoodie, with the damaged building behind him. This is what “local media” means here.
Act III The city adapts
A front-line city builds things other cities never have to think about. We cover that as service journalism — what changed, where, and what it means for the people who live here.
25 July 2026
12 kilometres of roads under anti-drone netting
Our weekly video digest. Nets over the roads, a strike on the hypermarket, a furniture chain closing temporarily — and three Nova Poshta drivers killed the evening before.
Instagram12 September 2026
An underground school for 500 children
Built so that lessons do not stop during alerts. In the same digest: three attacks on the Manufaktura shopping centre, new loudspeakers installed across the city.
Instagram8 September 2026
The unit that keeps things from reaching us
An air-defence battalion of the 68th Brigade. Over 1,000 drones shot down in July and August. Our journalists spent time at their positions.
Instagram10 September 2026
And a Wednesday morning in the park
A municipal worker fixing a street lamp. A man walking with a suitcase. Filmed by a colleague the same week as everything above, and sent to our newsroom chat with the note “just in case”.
Act IV The bright side
150 pages, five issues so far. Photo reportage from streets and courtyards, long interviews, and the stories of people who keep building a life around themselves anyway. It is the clearest statement of what this newsroom is for — and it sells.
26 April 2026
What it feels like in your hands
We spent months explaining the ideas behind the magazine. This one just shows the object.
Instagram29 May 2026
150 pages, a person behind every spread
“The Bright Side of Sumy” — the title is the argument.
28 June 2026
Making the fifth issue so every page carries weight
Not only in print quality.
19 May 2026
We walled one copy into a building
A time capsule made out of the magazine.
3 July 2026
If the magazine matched our love for the city
It would be this big. Yours will fit on a shelf.
22 August 2026
35 film photographs by 35 locals
For the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, we asked 35 residents for one frame each.
3 September 2026
“Proyav”, our photo exhibition
Reactions from the opening. Four rooms in an unfinished building in the centre of Sumy.
27 March 2026
A theatre premiere in a front-line city
The Shchepkin Theatre staged KoLo — a cycle of Ukrainian ritual songs. The director wants to play it at the city stadium after the war.
Instagram28 May 2026
Spring here works as therapy
We asked readers for their own favourite place to be calm. The comments filled up.
Instagram31 July 2026
“The Sumy Maldives”
An episode of our YouTube show “Where do you live?” — a boat trip up the Psel, why the city is called Sumy, and where four of the five bridges on Kharkivska went.
Instagram30 August 2026
Warm August, before it left
Filmed for no reason other than that it was worth filming.
InstagramAct V Ц.Крамниця — our shop
A physical shop and an online store selling our own designs and products from local makers. It is one of the three legs we are building the newsroom on, alongside membership and grants.
14 July 2026
A 100-piece puzzle of your Sumy
Illustrated by Vitalia Murai: Pokrovska Square, unhurried locals, the life we mean when we say peaceful.
17 August 2026
An embroidered shirt for Independence Day
“The best way to get ready is to put your meanings on.”
13 August 2026
“A place of strength and quiet”, now in black
A new drop of our best-selling t-shirt. The line comes from a song by a Sumy singer.
22 September 2025
“I carry Sumy confidence”
A tote that works for a walk, a grocery run or a trip.
12 May 2026
Our designs and local makers on the same shelf
The shop is also a distribution channel for small producers in the region.
3 February 2026
The Sumy people want to come back to
Pokrovska Square, unhurried passers-by, and Cherry the cat.
Act VI Why we are showing you this
We are building towards roughly a third grants, a third commercial revenue, a third our own products — because in a front-line region none of those three can be relied on alone. Everything in the acts above is also, quite literally, the product line.
794 people pay for the Cukr Club every month. Our clearest signal that local journalism here is worth paying for — and our hardest growth problem.
A physical shop and an online store — our own designs plus products from local makers, which makes us a distribution channel for the regional economy too.
Five annual issues of “The Bright Side of Sumy”, 150 pages each. Print is a small line by revenue and a large one by what it does for the brand.
Institutional support that funds the reporting in Acts I–III. The part we are deliberately trying to make smaller as a share of the whole.
Let’s talk Contacts
How we run a newsroom under air alerts, how the membership funnel actually performs, what a printed magazine does for a local brand, how we use AI across editorial and back office, and what we got wrong on the way.
Dmytro Tishchenko — founder, chair of the supervisory board. Cukr has been publishing since 2019. All video on this page was produced by the Cukr team or submitted by our readers and published on our own channels.