The war in Ukraine has drawn even closer for the people of Belgorod since fighting spilled over into the Russian border region in May. This triggers fears and worries – and yet a blind spot remains.
Trains are sold out, flights have been suspended since the beginning of the war – too dangerous. If you want to go from Moscow to the border area with Ukraine, you have to take the car. The journey to Belgorod, about 600 kilometers away, takes almost ten hours.
And with every kilometer, the war is not only getting closer geographically: on the way you pass white coaches that you wouldn’t tell were transporting soldiers if it weren’t for the black number plates, the license plates of the Ministry of Defense.
When overtaking, you can see men of different ages in the fully occupied buses, many with phones in their hands. You see trucks in camouflage colors, a few transporters with military technology on the loading area, and more and more cars with a large Z emblazoned in the rear window, the symbol for the so-called “special operation”, which hardly anyone calls that anymore in unofficial conversations: It’s war , and it has long since arrived on Russian soil.
A large anti-aircraft radar screen rotates in a field just before Belgorod.
A gathering point for Russian refugees
The regional capital with around 400,000 inhabitants, almost 40 kilometers from the border, is a meeting point for all those who are fleeing from places that are even closer to the border. Thousands are in the city.
Posters with portraits of soldiers from the region hang in the center of Belgorod, and signs on the walls of the houses indicate the nearest air raid shelter. “Half the town is on tranquilizers”, says a young woman in the pedestrian zone, “we are all sitting on packed suitcases”.
The concern here is palpable. But: One is concerned above all about one’s own city, one’s own country. It seems that the suffering of the people in Ukraine could not be further away.
Belgorod feels the war not only indirectly: there were multiple drone attacks here, in April even a “own” bomb fell – a Russian warplane accidentally lost it on the way to Ukraine.
The culprits are quickly identified
People from the small town of Schebekino are accommodated in the sports palace, metal beds are lined up in long rows in the hall. In early June, Schebekino was under heavy fire for days.
It doesn’t matter to the people here whether it’s by the Ukrainian army or by Russian guerrillas and right-wing extremists who are fighting on Ukraine’s side and who are active in the border region: Schebekino is now a ghost town, they report in the gym. About 3,000 of the 40,000 inhabitants are still there.
The anger is great, and for most people the culprits are quickly identified. “Aren’t you angry with Ukraine?” scolds an elderly woman in a headscarf. “This Biden makes me even angrier. He has his fingers in everything. First Yugoslavia, now he wants us. I would bang on about this America being forgotten once and for all.”
Criticism – nothing for the cameras
Two men are playing chess in a corner. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine? He’s a drug addict, claims one, everyone knows that. The propaganda of the state media has taken root in people’s minds.
But the anger is also directed at Moscow: “Where is our oh so glorious army? It’s said to be victorious and victorious in Ukraine, but it can’t protect us at home in Russia?” asks a man in his 50s, who is a transformed a bunk bed for himself and his wife into a small tent with the help of woolen blankets.
He later asked that his testimony not be shown on television, because there were heavy penalties for so-called discrediting of the army.
“Motherland is calling you” reads a poster in a hall in Belgorod where refugees from the border region are queuing for relief supplies.
“It should be”
Few question the war itself. “It had to be”, you hear that again and again. When asked whether they knew that more than 9,000 civilians had died in Ukraine since the start of the so-called special operation, and that many more people had lost their homes there, some turned away.
That’s what war is like, says a woman. She fled Shebekino with her children, aged six and seven. She fears for the future of her children, she says. The only way out now is: “We have to win.” Her voice sounds hesitant as she says this.
Images as we know them from the Ukraine
Anyone who drives further towards the border from Belgorod will see that not only Schebekino was shot at. Aleksey Roshin, mayor of the community of Urasowo, which consists of several villages, drives away the destroyed houses in his community. The community was attacked twice in the first half of June. Roschin counted three dead, seven injured, and more than 100 damaged houses.
He is standing in a one-story house whose roof has collapsed and the remains of a bullet are stuck in the wooden floor. Pictures as we know them from the Ukraine – except that a portrait of Putin is hanging crookedly on the broken wall.
The owner, an elderly man, quickly takes it off the hook. Putin in the middle of the rubble, that’s uncomfortable for him. “I never thought that they would allow the war to come to us. Now they say that the Achmat Battalion will protect us, the Chechens. We hope for them.”
Incomprehension for the reaction of the Ukrainians
Mayor Roshin tells how they used to go to Ukraine here on weekends to shop – and vice versa. He doesn’t understand why there is this hatred of Russia now. “It started back in 2014: Our dear neighbors and acquaintances over there in Ukraine suddenly saw us as enemies, for whatever reason, I don’t know why. They’re probably taught to behave like that towards us .”
2014 is the year in which Russia illegally annexed Crimea, in which separatists occupied parts of the Donbass after bloody fighting.
In the yard of a neighboring house there is a woman dressed in black, Anna. Her face is swollen from crying so much. She lost her husband in a shelling on June 10th. He was in the shed, he got hit. “My husband was ready to go to war – if the fatherland calls, he’ll go, he always said. But I was against it. And now I’ve lost him after all.” The mayor takes Anna in his arms, he cannot comfort her.
A year and a half ago, Russian troops deployed right here in the border region. On February 24, the attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv began from the Belgorod region. It is only 70 kilometers away.
A double wish
In Belgorod, when they say goodbye, they wish each other “a peaceful sky above their heads,” the phrase can be heard everywhere, in shops, cafes, offices.
Hardly anyone talks about the fact that the sky just a few kilometers away is anything but peaceful. In a street survey, a student says how much she misses trips to Kharkiv. How isolated she feels without her friends there. And adds quietly: “I know exactly who started the war. That was us. But nobody here wants to hear that.”