Putin might end up in The Hague for his Ukrainian war crimes. I doubt it; prolly has poison in a fake tooth
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Fear and Mayhem as Russia’s War Comes Home
Attacks from Ukraine have killed at least a dozen Russian civilians and displaced thousands. But they have not fundamentally changed the calculus for Vladimir Putin
By Roger Cohen
Photographs by Nanna Heitmann
Roger Cohen and Nanna Heitmann traveled to Shebekino, Russia, to write and photograph this article.
June 12, 2023
excerpt:
Abandoned cats and dogs roam vacant streets lined with blasted apartment buildings, rubble and crumpled cars in Shebekino, a Russian border town pounded by shelling from Ukraine.
A hair salon still smoldered last week. Every window in the blackened carcass of the police headquarters was blown out. Almost all of the 40,000 inhabitants had fled, officials said.
“I need insulin! I need insulin!” cried Lyudmila Kosobuva, 56, who said she was taking care of a diabetic friend too old to move. Her eyes blazed. She was defiant. “We will not leave our land.”
Such desperation and scenes of devastation are familiar to millions of Ukrainians confronting the Russian invasion of their country. But this was not Ukraine, it was Russia — a western sliver of the vast country where Ukrainian-backed forces have lobbed shells and missiles on residential areas.
Because of Moscow’s hostility toward the Western news media, this is a less visible aspect of the war that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia started 15 months ago. Mounting attacks on the Russian side of the border have killed more than a dozen civilians and pushed tens of thousands of people into Belgorod, the capital of a region whose rich soil and manicured streets once earned it the sobriquet “little Switzerland.”
Shebekino is a ghost town after days of shelling. Perhaps a thousand residents linger on. Last week, they included a single man who dragged twisted metal onto the sidewalk in a forlorn cleanup effort.
If the intention has been to shake support for Mr. Putin, or Russian resolve in his war, or to make ordinary Russians feel the pain of the conflict for themselves, then the attacks from Ukraine may have had some marginal effect, but they have not changed anything fundamental.
A century of intermittent disaster and oppression have induced in many Russians a form of passive acceptance and patience that serve Mr. Putin well. As the contours of a much-touted Ukrainian counteroffensive begin to be drawn, he can still count on support from most of a population cowed by his increasingly repressive 23-year-old rule.
Russian resolve to win the war is undiminished. There are dissenting voices, and some stirrings of discontent in Belgorod, but an estimated one million of those opposed to the war have fled the country. ?
“I don’t know why Russia can’t defend us,” said Sergei Shambarov, 58, a Shebekino resident who shunned the mass exodus because he has older relatives. He fingered shrapnel shards he had collected. They were piled in a bowl on a table beside him in his apartment, which is reached via a cement stairwell littered with shattered glass.
“Hundreds of shells a day!” he said. “Factories hit! I can’t explain this.” He shrugged.
None of the Russians interviewed drew a connection between their plight and the 8.2 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled Mr. Putin’s brutal war. Constant propaganda has twisted the conflict into a defensive Russian war against the “Nazis” and “Fascists,” backed by the United States and Europe, who, in the Russian telling, gave Moscow no choice but to take military action.
On the ghostly streets of Shebekino, Viktor Kalugin, 65, complained that Wagner mercenaries and Chechen fighters, both renowned for their ruthlessness, had not been allowed to take care of things.
“I hope our forces will not allow the Fascists to enter here,” he said. “As long as we have Putin, nobody will be able to take Russia. If only he could deal with the generals.”
[....]
Russia still insists, although increasingly halfheartedly, that a “special military operation” is underway in Ukraine, rather than a real war. But the term war is now used all of the time in Moscow, most often to describe the all-out confrontation with the West that Russia sees in the conflict.
“This is Russia against the collective West,” a senior official in Moscow, who declined to be named, said in an interview. “Ukraine is just the land where the performance is going on.”
Asked about the situation in Belgorod, the official said: “It is a disaster.”
Though battle lines in Ukraine have been nearly frozen for months, the shelling could be stopped, he insisted, if Russia chose to destroy Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine. This is only 50 miles from Belgorod and is used, he said, as a rear base by the paramilitary forces. But, he continued, “we’re trying to demilitarize Ukraine, not eliminate it from the map.”
more text and photos at nytimes.com |
