Air raid sirens wailing, explosions blasting, car alarms blaring,
and people trying to evade the debris in makeshift shelters and behind concrete blocks.
It’s March ‘24, and this is what life looks like in Belgorod, formerly one of Russia’s most livable cities.
In 2020 and 2021, Belgorod made national news headlines as people debated the administrative
tug-of-war policies on a sweeping public transit reform and promising urban innovations.
The biggest story in 2021 had to do with the once most accident-prone street
that had been revamped to improve lane capacity while bringing down car crash injuries by 30%.
That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
A populous regional center is supposed to be making the news talking about improved safety and welfare.
Even under the current corrupt and lawless system, Belgorod was miraculously thriving.
But it’s no longer true. Today, Belgorod is being constantly shelled, as are Grayvoron,
the embattled Shebekino, Razumnoye, and other towns and villages in the region.
Air raid sirens can also be heard in the nearby regions of Kursk and Voronezh
Dozens of civilians were killed, with hundreds injured and thousands losing their homes.
Young conscripts are, too, getting killed in the regions bordering Ukraine.
The war Putin started in February ‘22 has come back to Russia again.
Our channel rarely quotes radical pro-war publications,
but this time we just have to resort to such media outlets.
“The Belgorod residents are going through the daily horrors of missile strikes and holing up in shelters,
with many killed or wounded.
But while the shelling is something people eventually get used to,
indifference can be more painful than a shrapnel injury.
As the region was battered by a series of strikes, the rest of the country was celebrating
the Pancake Week and making fun selfies at the polling stations.
They acted as if Belgorod had no problem dealing with air strikes or a mounting civilian death toll.
It seemed if you shut your eyes and plugged your ears, their problems would suddenly dissipate.”
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
In this case, the ultra-loyallist Tsargrad channel seems to have conveyed
the prevailing sentiment of Belgorod residents, one of aloofness.
It’s the first time since WW2 that a foreign army has been using shells, landmines, missiles,
and loitering munitions to strike Russian cities and towns. And it’s been almost 80 years of peace.
The population of Belgorod and its metropolitan area is close to 500,000. Millions live in nearby regions.
These people are waiting for their president to respond.
They demand that he get involved on social media and in the comment sections of news programs.
The governor vowing to evacuate several thousand kids isn’t nearly enough for them.
Taking the local schoolkids to safety is, of course, the right thing to do, but what about the rest of them?
What’s unhappening is unheard of. The president must address the nation.
The Russian propaganda likes to bring up the U.S. problems every now and again.
Okay, what happened to George W. Bush as he made his belated comments on 9/11?
People were shocked and insulted. These precious few hours nearly cost the president his career.
Belgorod and the nearby towns, on the other hand, have been under attack since 2023.
Starting Mar. 12, the region has been beleaguered by strikes.
This period has already been dubbed a “week of hell.”
But up until Mar. 17, the authorities remained tight-lipped in light of the election weekend.
Reporting a 100% vote was a more pressing matter for them. These guys redefined cynicism.
As the city was being shelled and people couldn’t shop for groceries,
they reported a Shebekino precinct posting a 100% turnout (2,500 out of 2,500 registered voters)
with a 100% pro-Putin vote, of course.
Just imagine that. People were putting their lives on the line to support the beloved president.
Was there any chance of him weighing in on the attacks after the election?
He indeed offered a terse comment while responding to Svetlana Nemtseva,
a medical doctor who thanked him for helping build a new infectious disease hospital in the Belgorod Region.
Ms. Nemtseva, above all, I’m deeply grateful to, and profoundly amazed by,
the residents of the Belgorod Region and nearby provinces. Your courage is worthy of admiration.
We’ll do whatever we can to support these people, those who lost their businesses
and who lost their homes for various reasons.
It requires a lot of effort, but we’ll do our utmost. Sure, our biggest job is to ensure their safety.
There are different ways of doing it, it may be hard, but we’ll do it.
I’ve already mentioned it, and I don’t want to go into detail again here, at this pageant event.
We’ll undoubtedly do whatever it takes. I’ve said why our opponents are doing this.
Of course, we can respond in kind. How exactly? Well, we can hit civilian infrastructure and suchlike.
But we have a different outlook and our own plans. We’ll be following them.
Putin’s final three phrases sounded incredibly callous. But let’s look at them from another angle.
Ever since the invasion began, the Russian army has been consistently shelling the Ukrainian
cities without giving them a break.
International headlines only covered the deadliest of those missile attacks in Vynnytsia, Dnipro, Uman,
Odesa, and Hroza. The Ukrainian news stories, though, are awash with routine reports of Russian strikes.
Some may be bewildered to hear that the official Kharkiv authorities’ website and The Industrial Banner,
one of Ukraine’s oldest newspapers, keep posting updates in Russian.
Both publications cover Russian artillery strikes on predominantly Russian-speaking cities.
The Kostiantynivka community was shelled on Mar. 11, 12, 13, 16, 19, and 20.
In the fall of 2022, the Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov made a case for the total annihilation
of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.
He argued Ukrainians should’ve been left without access to heat, electricity, water, and sewage.
Smaller-caliber propagandists, like Sergei Mardan, dreamed of seeing
the “smoking ruins of Kharkiv and Kyiv.”
Given the above, what does Putin mean when he says “we can respond in kind”? It’s simple.
The Russian army won’t do to the peaceful Ukrainian cities anything it hasn’t already done
over the past two years. They just can’t escalate things any further.
For various reasons, the Ukrainian side refrained from striking residential neighborhoods in Russia
for more than a year. At first, it was talked out of it by its Western partners.
Scholz, Macron, and Biden warned Ukraine in no uncertain terms that they’d cut out military aid
if Ukraine engaged in striking the internationally recognized Russian territory.
Secondly, the then-popular Ukrainian public figures Oleksiy Arestovych
and Mykhailo Podolyak kept saying Ukraine didn’t need to engage in war crimes, responding to war crimes.
But it’s over. Western leaders must’ve been fed up defending the Russian borders.
That’s not part of their job description, after all.
A lot of Ukrainians know someone who’s been either killed or wounded, and they’re fed up, too.
Their sentiment must be in line with what Podolyak is saying now:
Russians should know what it feels like to live in bomb shelters to the constant tune of air raid sirens.
Ukraine now has a right to do whatever it feels is right.
The Ukrainian army may step up its attacks on the Belgorod Region.
They bump up the degree of violence, while Putin can’t.
His army has been shelling the Ukrainian cities for 756 days straight. Some of them were wiped off the map.
What else can he do? It’s hard to say. Hence his lack of messaging.
He has nothing to offer to Belgorod residents or other Russians, for that matter.
The only thing he can say, while talking about the infectious disease hospital, is, “We have our plans,
and we’ll be following them.”
In other words, “I have a plan, and I’ve been following it, but I won’t tell you what it is.”
Help Belgorod
Last spring, I was warning everyone that the war might pivot to what we’re witnessing right now.
One day, missiles might start traveling in both directions.
War crimes against the Ukrainian civilians might prompt war crimes committed against Russian civilians.
Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, and Emmanuel Macron aren’t responsible for Russian lives and cities.
Why would they? They could’ve supplied military hardware to Ukraine with no strings attached.
Looking at the recent raid into the Belgorod Region, we should all understand something.
Russian cities are still in one piece and Russian civilians aren’t dying left and right
thanks to the goodwill of foreign countries.
Vladimir Putin didn’t just start a war.
He set such a bar on atrocities that Ukraine could’ve returned five percent of what Russia did to it to plunge
it into chaos. Ukraine has the capability to do it.
That’s what’s happening right now. What can be done about it?
Some hot heads are already calling for the capture of the Kharkiv Region.
That’s where the Ukrainians are launching their strikes from.
But this will entail a new recruitment drive and new meatgrinder-style assaults, with no certain outcome.
It takes months and dozens of thousands of casualties for the Russian army to capture a small town.
They spent 18 months capturing Maryinka and two years capturing Avdiivka.
By the standards of this war, the nine-month-long Bakhmut meatgrinder that, according to Prigozhin,
cost the Wagner Group 20,000 lives is now considered almost a textbook offensive.
Pushing the frontline away from Belgorod, if feasible, would take ages
and claim an unimaginable number of lives.
Another option is evacuating people.
But how can anyone evacuate a city of 340,000, a metropolitan area of 500,000,
and a region of 1.5 mln, let alone the nearby regions?
The answer is simple: unless your country is the USSR run by Stalin or even
by Gorbachev (they evacuated the town of Pripyat in a day), it’s unfeasible.
The only way to normalize the life of Belgorod residents is by ending the pointless war.
People would be hard-pressed to say why it broke out in the first place.
It may have sought to thwart NATO’s eastward expansion or Zelenskyy’s alleged oppression
of the Russian-speaking population in the cities that by now have been razed.
It may have sought to protect the DPR and LPR that had eight persons killed in 2021 and a further dozens
of thousands of people following the invasion.
It may have sought to beef up the security of Russian people who hadn’t been attacked since 1945,
save for domestic terrorists and militants.
But now they’re getting killed by the army of Europe’s second-largest country.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the Ukrainian army’s war crimes against the Belgorod residents
(striking a city from multiple rocket launchers constitutes a war crime) will be used by the Russian propaganda
to justify the war. The propagandists are in the habit of putting the cart before the horse.
They’re already bawling that the war was started in 2022 because the Ukrainian army is shelling Belgorod
and Shebekino in 2023 and 2024.
If this rationale is to be accepted, the war will drag on forever and people will keep dying
on both sides of the fence.
The rhetoric messing up the cause and effect relationship will come
at a heavy price for both Ukrainians and Russians.
The real cause of Belgorod’s deadly woes is Putin’s deadly misadventure.
Before the special operation, no one could even conceive of striking Belgorod.
The government must stop its diversionary war.
That’s the only way we can attain peace and people can stop getting slaughtered.
People in Donetsk, Luhansk, Belgorod, and all over Russia don’t need this war.
The only one who needs it is Putin, while Russia keeps paying the price.
The Belgorod residents are absolutely right as they try to avoid being given up on.
The government doesn’t want anyone to talk about this tragedy.
They jeopardized the lives of hundreds of millions of Russians.
They’ve just given up on 300,000 mobilized recruits from last year.
They will try to apply the same treatment to the Belgorod residents.
But when people don’t want to keep their mouths shut.
They seek to be heard. It’s essential that they be not forgotten by the rest of the Russian people.
The TV is hard at work scaring their viewers into believing it’s Europe, the U.S., and the liberals
that are hell-bent on destroying Russia.
In reality, though, the state will collapse if and when the country starts ignoring its part
and the region’s residents realize they’re left to deal with the disaster on their own
and the rest of the country doesn’t have their backs.
Unlike the Ukrainian cities our army has invaded uninvited,
Belgorod and Shebekino are the integral parts of Russia.
We can’t just turn away and pretend nothing is happening.
Join the choir of those desperate people, attend to their needs, and don’t let the authorities off the hook.
See you tomorrow!