Russia announced the evacuation of thousands of children from areas near Ukraine amid cross-border raids and shelling on Tuesday, as Kyiv said air defence systems were “gathering dust” in the West rather than shielding Ukrainians from daily missile, bomb and drone strikes.
Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered his FSB security service to hunt down the “traitors” fighting for Ukraine who have attacked Russian villages in the border area over the last week, and his SVR foreign intelligence agency claimed – without offering evidence – that France was preparing to send 2,000 soldiers to Ukraine.
“We’re planning to move out about 9,000 children,” said Belgorod region governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that 16 civilians had been killed and 98 injured in cross-border shelling since last week. The first group of 1,200 children would be moved to regions further from the frontier on Friday, he said.
Three groups of anti-Putin militants crossed from Ukraine into Belgorod and the neighbouring Kursk region last week and posted footage that they said showed them destroying Russian armour, capturing troops and taking over two villages during Russia’s presidential election last weekend.
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“Today there is a gradual advance, the offensive is developing,” Alexander Fortuna, chief of staff of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), told Ukrainian television on Tuesday.
In Moscow, Mr Putin said the militants who want to overthrow him were “scum”.
“When I said about these traitors ... We will punish them without any statute of limitations, wherever they may be,” he told senior FSB officers.
Russia claimed to have seized the village of Orlivka in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, in a slow westward push from the devastated town of Avdiivka that Moscow’s troops took last month. Kyiv said its forces had repelled attacks on Orlivka.
“Every day and every night, Russia is waging a terrorist war against our people, against ordinary cities and villages of Ukraine ... Since the start of March, Russian troops have used 130 missiles ... more than 320 Shaheds (explosive drones) and almost 900 guided bombs,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
During two years of full-scale war, Ukraine had proved that with enough arms, it could “save thousands of lives and enable the Ukrainian economy to function”, he said.
“But we need more protection – quite a realistic number of air defence systems that our partners have. Patriots and other systems should do what they were created for, which is to protect lives, and not gather dust in storage,” he said.
About 50 countries that are supplying Ukraine with arms met in Germany on Tuesday for their monthly meeting in the so-called Ramstein format.
“The United States will not let Ukraine fail ... This coalition will not let Ukraine fail,” US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said at the start of the meeting.
French president Emmanuel Macron spooked some allies recently and outraged Moscow by refusing to rule out the prospect of western troops serving in Ukraine.
Sergei Naryshkin, director of the SVR, claimed the agency had discovered that “a [French] contingent is already being prepared to be sent to Ukraine. At the initial stage it will be about 2,000 people”.
“So, it will become a priority legitimate target for attacks from the Russian armed forces. This means that it will suffer the fate of all the French who have ever come to the territory of the Russian world with a sword,” he said.
