Over the last five days of May, Ruslan, an English teacher in a Russian town near the Ukrainian border, heard the distinct sound of a multiple rocket launcher strike for the first time.
He had heard the thud of explosions in distant villages in the past, he said, and in October, shelling damaged a nearby shopping mall. But nothing like this.Fifteen months after Russian missiles first roared toward Kyiv, Ukraine, residents of the Russian border region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horror of having war on their doorstep.
“Shebekino was a wonderful, flowery town on the border with Ukraine filled with happy, neighborly people,” said Darya, 37, a local public-sector employee. “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 smoke.”
Belgorod’s regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said 2,500 residents had been evacuated and taken to temporary shelters in sports arenas farther from the border. Thousands more left on their own accord, residents said in interviews. As footage of that shelling filled Belgorod’s public chat rooms, citizens volunteered to drive affected families to safety, donated money and opened homes to refugees. In doing so, they underlined what they said was the inadequacy of the local government’s response and the growing realization that they had only themselves to rely on.
Despite an uptick of attacks on Russian soil, only 1 in 4 Russians is following the war closely and most likely going beyond state media to seek information about it, according to a May poll conducted by the independent Moscow-based public opinion firm Levada Center. Almost half of respondents said they don’t follow the conflict at all, or only cursorily.
They eventually left the town in their private car, leaving behind an older relative who could not be easily moved.
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