War Arrives on the Doorstep of Russians

A 27-year-old English teacher named Ruslan, who lives in a town near the Ukrainian border in Russia, heard the sound of a multiple rocket launcher strike for the first time. Shelling continued through the morning, shaking his house. For years, he heard explosions in distant villages and a nearby shopping mall was damaged in October. However, this time was different. “Everything changed,” he said. Fifteen months after Russian missiles began heading towards Kyiv, residents of the Russian border region of Belgorod are beginning to understand the horror of having war on their doorstep.

Ukraine has intensified attacks inside Russia, including on residential areas near its own borders. Shebekino, a town of 40,000 just six miles from the border, has effectively become a new part of the front line. The recent spate of assaults, most recently by militia groups aligned against Moscow, has sparked the largest military evacuation effort in Russia in decades.

Over the past several days, The New York Times has interviewed over half a dozen residents of the border region to fully grasp the deepening anxiety among Russian civilians. Just like Ruslan, most insisted on being identified by only their first names, citing a fear of reprisal for speaking about the war. Darya, a public sector employee, said, “Shebekino was a wonderful, flowery town on the border with Ukraine filled with happy, neighborly people. Now only pain, death, and misery live in our town. There is no power, no public transport, no open businesses, no residents. Just an empty, shattered town in the smoke.”

The hardship is familiar to Ukrainians who have seen cities obliterated and others devastated by civilian casualties. Furthermore, Russian missiles targeted Kyiv 17 times in May alone. But many Russians had not expected the war to reach their home turf.

Explosions are audible in the city of Belgorod, the regional capital, 20 miles north of Shebekino, and residents are seeking access to basements that can be used as bomb shelters. Some Russians who once went about their daily businesses suddenly discovered that they couldn’t. “We are at a turning point right now,” said Oleg, a businessman in the city. He said that the people who opposed the war there were once a minority. “Now after four days of being shelled, people are changing their minds.”

Belgorod’s regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said that as many as 2,500 residents had to be evacuated and transported to temporary shelters in sports arenas farther from the border. Thousands of others left on their own, according to residents interviewed by The Times. Gladkov said that seven residents had died from shelling in the last three days, making this week the deadliest in the Belgorod region since the start of the war.

Although flare-ups and cross-border shelling between Ukrainian and Russian forces are regular, these recent attacks were made by two paramilitary groups consisting of Russians fighting for Ukraine’s cause. These groups have claimed that they target only security infrastructure and portrayed their fight as one for liberation from President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule. However, their claims collided with accounts of widespread residential destruction described by witnesses and seen in videos posted on social media and verified by The Times. One of the two groups, the Russian Volunteer Corps, has admitted to shelling Shebekino’s urban area with “bouquets of Grads,” a Soviet-era designed multiple rocket launcher that blankets a large area with explosives.

Citizens volunteered to transport families affected by the shelling to safety, donated money, and opened homes to refugees as footage of the shelling filled Belgorod’s public chat rooms. The locals underlined what they said was the inadequacy of the local government’s response. Moreover, the crisis has made the grass-roots civic spirit more acute, with unpredictable consequences for the country’s politics, which Mr. Putin has undermined in recent years by tightening control.

Author: OpenAI