War reaches Russian border regions
“Defending people and, first of all, defending Russia,” is how Vladimir Putin explained the goal of the Ukraine invasion in January 2023. Meanwhile, according to the data posted by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian regions have been attacked over 2,000 times since the start of the war. On 1 June, the town of Shebekino in the Belgorod region, with the population of 40,000 people, was subjected to record-breaking rounds of shelling. In total, 52 civilians have been killed and 242 injured on Russian territory since February 2022 (as of June 2, 2023), Novaya-Europe estimates.
The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in May that the “special military operation” would continue so as not to let the shelling of Russian territories go on. But with each month of combat, the frequency of air attacks has only grown.
In May, heads of regions reported record-breaking 281 attacks — a number four times higher than in April. On average, about eight towns and villages get shelled daily. Over 2,000 civilian and industrial facilities, including oil terminals, multi-storey residential buildings in Moscow, and the dome of the Kremlin, became the targets of these attacks.
In total, 52 Russian civilians have been killed over the course of the war, and 242 have been wounded. Over half of the victims are from the Belgorod region.
The Russian settlements that get shelled most often are:
The Tetkino village in the Kursk region. The residents of the village asked to be evacuated a year ago, but only 29 people were moved to temporary accommodation centres. Ukraine’s Armed Forces shelled Tetkino at least eight times in May.
The town of Shebekino and the neighbouring villages of Murom and Novaya Tavolzhanka. Since the start of the war, this area has been attacked nearly a 100 times.
The city of Belgorod. On 1 June, drones flew into the city twice. One of the drones crashed into a road, wounding two men. Since the beginning of the war, Belgorod has been subjected to drone attacks 28 times.
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