Russia has begun to evacuate residents from the border region of Belgorod following a surge in deadly Ukrainian strikes. <\/p>\n
Approximately 300 residents of Belgorod city \u201cdecided to temporarily move\u201d to accommodation centers in cities elsewhere in the region, governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said Monday. <\/p>\n
Gladkov on Friday offered to help any Belgorod residents worried by the recent spate of Ukrainian attacks on the region, which borders northeastern Ukraine, in a rare admission of the dangers posed by a once-distant war from which Russia has sought to isolate its citizens. <\/p>\n
Kyiv resumed its targeting of the Russian region after Moscow on December 29 unleashed its biggest air attack on Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. The next day, retaliatory Ukrainian strikes on Belgorod killed at least 25 people, prompting more waves of Russian strikes in a bloody start to the new year. <\/strong> <\/p>\n In Monday\u2019s message, Gladkov said his office had received 1,300 applications to send children from Belgorod to school camps in other regions, and that his colleagues from the regions of Voronezh, Kaluga, Tambov, and Yaroslavl \u2013 some distance from Belgorod \u2013 are \u201cready to help us.\u201d <\/p>\n Belgorod authorities have begun restoration works following the recent Ukrainian shelling attacks, Gladkov said, and promised to update residents on the progress of these efforts. <\/p>\n Russia launched another wave of air strikes across Ukraine on Monday morning, killing at least four people and injuring 38, Ukraine\u2019s National Police said in a statement. The attacks targeted Kharkiv region in the east of the country, Dnipropetrovsk in the center, Zaporizhzhia further south and Khmelnytskyi in the west. <\/p>\n Ukraine has consistently targeted Russian regions near the border, but its December 30 attack on Belgorod is thought to be one of the single deadliest incidents reported. <\/p>\n The strikes came after Russia fired 158 drones and missiles, including hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, at civilian targets across Ukraine, killing at least 47 people. <\/p>\n Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had used \u201cnearly every type of weapon in its arsenal\u201d in the \u201cterrorist strikes,\u201d to which he pledged Ukraine\u2019s military would respond. <\/p>\n The deadly strikes on Belgorod, while not comparable to the destruction wrought on Ukraine, are the latest in a series of efforts by Ukraine to bring the war home to Russians. <\/p>\n \u201cPeople realized there really is a war going on and it\u2019s come now to Belgorod, maybe not for the first time but the most grave and frightening,\u201d a Belgorod resident told Reuters in the wake of the December 30 strike. <\/p>\n In the wake of the attack, Gladkov said Friday he had received messages on social media from residents saying: \u201cWe are scared, help us go to a safe place.\u201d <\/p>\n Friday was the first time the top Belgorod official had offered publicly to relocate large groups of the local population affected by the war. Evacuation efforts continued over the weekend into Monday, with some residents reportedly traveling nearly 100 miles away from their homes. <\/p>\n Also on Friday, Ukraine\u2019s Defense Intelligence claimed to have made an incursion into Belgorod region, where its troops destroyed a Russian stronghold and mined the roads used by Russians in Grayvoronsky district. <\/p>\n The Defense Intelligence said it had obtained information that the \u201ctop Russian military leadership\u201d had planned an inspection of Russian positions in the area after personnel had complained about \u201cpoor service conditions.\u201d In response, Ukraine planned a \u201cspecial operation\u201d which it said had inflicted losses in the enemy, without providing casualty figures. <\/p>\n The relative peace in Belgorod compared to Ukraine\u2019s neighboring Kharkiv region has on a number of occasions been shattered. The most dramatic instance came in May 2023, when the Freedom of Russia Legion \u2013 a group of anti-Putin Russian nationals who are aligned with the Ukrainian army \u2013 mounted a surprise attack on the region, temporarily <\/strong>taking control of a border post and giving the world dramatic images of Russians taking up arms against the Kremlin. <\/p>\n\n Russia has begun to evacuate residents from the border region of Belgorod following a surge in deadly Ukrainian strikes. Approximately 300 residents of Belgorod city \u201cdecided to temporarily move\u201d to accommodation centers in cities elsewhere in the region, governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said Monday. Gladkov on Friday offered to help any Belgorod residents worried by the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13719,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}