How war in Ukraine has extended to Russian border region’s doorstep

Ukraine has endured nearly two years of devastating war, following Russia's unprovoked invasion of its borders.

But the contours of the conflict have stretched into Belgorod, a Russian border oblast that has been accidentally bombed by its own military, attacked by anti-Kremlin militia groups and watched hostile drones streak across its skies.

More recently, a jarring Dec. 30 attack on the city of Belgorod shocked residents, killed at least 20 civilians, and raised the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russian authorities have blamed Kyiv for that event, as well as ongoing shelling and drone attacks across the border region — including an exploding drone that the regional governor says hit a gas pipeline on the outskirts of Belgorod city on Saturday. Ukraine typically has not confirmed its efforts to retaliate against the Russian aggressions outside its borders.

Analysts say Belgorod lies on a part of the map that is within Ukraine's reach and also where Russia has placed logistical and military elements worthy of disruption by Kyiv.

Add that all up, and it becomes apparent why the bounds of the conflict have extended into this particular border region, no matter what motive Moscow attributes to Ukraine's publicly unacknowledged countermeasures.

"They try to frame legitimate Ukrainian military activity as inherently escalatory," said Riley Bailey, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think-tank.

What Riley sees unfolding in Belgorod lately is not an intensification of events, but a greater emphasis in Russia on the fact that they are indeed happening.

WATCH | Zelenskyy pushes allies to support Ukraine, uphold sanctions on Russia:

Zelenskyy pleads for support at World Economic Forum

4 days ago

Duration 2:10

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hoping his message for more military and humanitarian aid at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, gains traction as Russia’s war with his country closes in on the two-year mark.

Living on the edge of a war

The Belgorod region sits atop Ukraine's eastern border with Russia.

The regional capital of the same name is home to 340,000 people and lies about 100 kilometres north of Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine.

This proximity to Ukraine puts it both near the front lines of the war and within reach of easily moveable weapons. This vulnerability has been a focus of commentary from Russian military bloggers to the point where the ISW's Bailey said it has become an apparent source of "discontent" for the Kremlin.

Bailey said these bloggers have called for Russia to enact a sizeable "buffer zone" by seizing swaths of Kharkiv-area lands in Ukraine to protect Belgorod.

Putin, meanwhile, has signalled his "simmering anger" over civilian deaths in Belgorod and has vowed retaliation.

Russia's attacks on Ukraine over the past 23 months have left at least 10,000 civilians dead, according to the United Nations, which also says the rate of these casualties has been increasing.

Under-the-radar region

The Belgorod region hasn't normally been a magnet for major international news.

In 1969, a Belgorod bus driver made the news after being fined for kissing his fiancée — herself a bus conductor — while on the job. She, on the other hand, was fired — a punishment that even the Communist party's Pravda newspaper deemed harsh, according to what the Toronto Daily Star reported at the time.

A 1985 New York Times report mentioned Belgorod as a place where hundreds of illegal stills had been destroyed amid a police crackdown and as wider alcohol reforms were being brought forward by then-Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1996, Boris Yeltsin, visited the region ahead of the presidential election that year, and nearly two decades after that, Russian authorities ordered the bulldozing of a pile of illegally imported cheese wheels and other foods in a Belgorod landfill in 2015.

Changes to daily life

Across Russia, Orthodox Christians were celebrating Epiphany festivities on Friday, by plunging into icy pools and ponds — but not in Belgorod, where authorities called off those activities over safety concerns.

Already in January, local authorities had taken other security-minded steps in the wake of recent events, including piling sandbags and cement blocks at city bus stops and shortening the hours of commercial shopping centres.

Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regional governor of Belgorod, has said schools located within 20 kilometres of the border will soon switch to remote learning. More students in the wider region may do the same.

Reuters reported that Belgorod residents are divided about the effectiveness of some of these changes.

The ISW's Bailey is unclear if such measures will have "any practical effect" on the defence of potential targets in Belgorod, which have typically had a military- or logistics-related connection.

William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the nonpartisan RAND Corporation think-tank and a former U.S. ambassador, said the more that authorities highlight these restrictive measures in Belgorod, the more it may drive home the capabilities Kyiv has to strike back against Russian aggression.

"[Kyiv] might not be as weak as the Kremlin likes to portray it," said Courtney, who noted Ukraine has surprised its opponent on repeated occasions with its ability to strike high-profile targets, such as the now-sunk Moskva warship or the damage done to the Kerch bridge in occupied Crimea.

Moscow itself has had to defend against drone threats over the course of the war, despite the fact it lies hundreds of kilometres from the more accessible border region of Belgorod.