A region of western Russia on the border with Ukraine is evacuating around 9,000 children after a series of shelling and missile attacks which have been blamed on Kyiv, an official announced.
Vyacheslev Gladkov, the governor of the threatened Belgorod region, said the children would be moved further to the east away from the border. The decision comes amid constant attacks in the area, where anti-Kremlin Russians have also recently attempted to make armed incursions into Russia.
A total of 16 people have been killed and another 98 wounded throughout the region this week, Gladkov said, according to the BBC. Students were kept home from school on Monday and Tuesday in Belgorod City while shopping centers were also ordered to close on Sunday and Monday. The first cohort of 1,200 children are set to be evacuated on Friday.
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The latest round of attacks injured at least two teenagers on Tuesday, Gladkov claimed on his Telegram channel. A 14-year-old boy had a limb partially amputated as a result of shelling in the village of Razumnoye which also left his mother seriously injured, Gladkov said, while a 15-year-old “received multiple shrapnel wounds to the soft tissues of the torso, upper and lower extremities” and was taken by ambulance to a regional children’s hospital.
The day before, four members of one family were all killed in the village of Nikolskoe in a direct hit from a shell on their home, Gladkov claimed. “A terrorist act by the Ukrainian Armed Forces claimed the lives of almost an entire family: a grandmother, mother, her common-law husband and son, a young 17-year-old boy, were killed,” he wrote. The family’s “little granddaughter” survived the incident, according to Gladkov, but she suffered a head injury and needed to be given treatment in an intensive care unit and was put on a ventilator.
Moscow’s Defense Ministry separately said Tuesday that a Ukrainian drone had been “destroyed” over the Belgorod region, and that Russian forces are continuing to “take measures to prevent the penetration of sabotage and reconnaissance groups of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the border territory.”
Ukraine has recently launched multiple attacks using long-range weaponry to target oil facilities deep into Russian territory, while incursions from Russians opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule have led to firefights with Moscow’s forces.
Putin on Tuesday told his Federal Security Service (FSB) to identify the “traitors” who had been taking part in the border skirmishes. “We must not forget who they are, we must identify them by name,” he said at a meeting of the FSB board. “We will punish them without statute of limitations, wherever they are.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has not commented on the latest Belgorod attacks, called on his allies to supply more air defense systems to Kyiv. “Every day and night, Russia uses drones, missiles, and guided bombs to wage a terrorist war against our people, against ordinary Ukrainian cities and villages,” he posted on X on Tuesday. He said the defense systems “must do what they were designed for: protect lives, not collect dust in storage.”
