On the day Ukrainian forces started rolling into Russia’s Kursk region, a group of about 40 people, mostly women, filmed a video about what was happening in their town.
“We were left alone. With children, without shelter, without money. Our kids are afraid to sleep at night,” said one woman, her voice breaking into tears.
The video appeared on a Telegram blog called “Our native Sudzha” on the evening of August 6th. By then, more than 10 hours had passed since Ukraine had launched its shock attack, allegedly capturing some neighbourhoods of Sudzha.
“There is no evacuation from the Sudzha area. People cross the river on boats, under shelling, and walk through the forest. These are ordinary people, help them evacuate!” another woman said on the video.
Several residents who fled under constant shelling and drone attacks to Kursk, the regional capital, told the Financial Times that in the first days of the attack, there was no organised evacuation. People left however they could, often leaving behind all their belongings, documents and sometimes even bedridden relatives and pets.
Russian authorities have since ordered the evacuation of areas near the border, with more than 200,000 people reportedly moved to safety, including to occupied Ukraine.
Ukrainian troops claimed to have seized control of Sudzha, including a transit station on one of the last functioning gas pipelines to central Europe.
By Wednesday Russian officials had confirmed 12 people had been killed and 120 injured, but the real numbers were likely to be far higher. Liza Alert, an NGO that helps families find missing relatives, said hundreds of people were unaccounted for in the Kursk region. The youngest missing person was 11 months old and the oldest was 101 years old.
“It wasn’t pretty,” said Evgeny Bakalo, a resident of neighbouring Belgorod region, also bordering Ukraine and which declared a state of emergency on Wednesday after coming under increased drone and missile attacks.
Bakalo has volunteered to help civilians in Kursk. “We should call it a war, a full military operation. Not some counterterrorism or a special military operation. That’s all wrong,” he added. “Special military operation” is the Kremlin’s official term for the war in Ukraine.
Most state-controlled media in Moscow describe the Ukrainian offensive, which is the largest land grab of Russian territory since the second World War, as a “terrorist attack,” “military action” or simply the “situation in Kursk’s borderlands”.
But in the first days of the operation, the Russian state remained largely silent. The FSB, the country’s security service, said the military had taken “measures” against an “armed provocation”. Kremlin-backed media did not report on it and with internet down in many areas near the border, residents were left in an information vacuum.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], tell your officials responsible for truthful information to show the real situation. These lies are causing civilians to die,” a grey-haired man in a black T-shirt appealed in the video.
The Russian president addressed the attack on the second day, calling it “that situation”, a “large-scale provocation” and other euphemisms. He has since accused Ukraine of trying to seize land to use as a bargaining chip in any upcoming peace talks.
Putin’s slow reaction is reminiscent of his behaviour in August 2000 when a submarine, also named Kursk, sank with its entire crew on board. Despite learning of the tragedy a day after it happened, Putin went on holiday before showing up at the scene six days later. “Putin has always been known for his tendency to disappear from the public eye in critical situations. He opts for a wait-and-see approach,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “In an autocratic system, this can work, but the question is, for how long can you ignore the outside reality before it gets to you?”
In the case of the current Ukrainian offensive Putin does not want to alarm citizens, and instead keep them in a state of “hibernation” about the war, Schulmann added.
Unlike the residents of Belgorod region, who have grown accustomed to constant attacks from Ukraine, the inhabitants of Kursk region were caught off guard, said Elena Koneva, a Russian sociologist and founder of the ExtremeScan project surveying residents who live close to the border.
“Just before the start of the Ukrainian offensive, 80 per cent of Belgorod residents were involved in volunteer activities, 10 per cent were in territorial defence, and 17 per cent helped in hospitals,” she said. “In the Kursk region, all these figures are 3-4 times lower.”
She added that in Belgorod region, residents had time to adapt to the military situation. “Many started to feel a sense of unity that wasn’t there before.” The support for the war in the region has grown, according to official polls.
But according to OpenMinds, an English-Ukrainian outlet surveying public discourse, pro-war sentiment shifted from minus 0.25 to minus 0.47 within a week on a scale where minus 1 is the most negative attitude towards the conflict and 1 is the most positive.
“There are less cheerful posts about the war and more negative content targeted at Russian authorities, including the defence ministry and local officials,” said OpenMinds chief executive Sviatoslav Hnizdovskyi.
Bakalo, the local volunteer from Belgorod, said in his home region, “people are opening their homes and dachas to soldiers, feeding them, bringing them whatever they need, washing their clothes, setting up bath houses for them”.
But the reaction in the Kursk region is likely to be very different, Koneva said. “Being forced to flee is one of the worst factors of stress for anyone, but especially for post-Soviet individuals who are deeply attached to their possessions, which were once so hard to come by.”
Bakalo said people in the border regions felt the threat because of their proximity to Ukraine – and were less surprised than Moscow when troops started pouring across the border.
“The only ones who didn’t know were the defence ministry,” Bakalo said.
On Monday, during a meeting with the authorities of the bordering regions, Putin abruptly cut off Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of Kursk region, who had started to give details about the death toll and the Russian territory that had been seized by Ukraine. The president said this was a matter for the military and ordered Smirnov to focus on the “socio-economic situation”.
The exchange sparked excitement in Z-community, an ecosystem of hundreds of pro-war Telegram channels in Russian with a combined audience of several million people.
“Some are pleased that Putin reprimanded Smirnov, while others are happy that the president was finally made aware of the full scale of the problem,” said Ivan Philippov, a Russian researcher who monitors the activity of pro-war bloggers.
Z bloggers cite “lies at all levels” as the main reason for the Ukrainian incursion and blame the Russian defence ministry and its top general Valery Gerasimov for intelligence failures, Philippov said.
So far, Putin has succeeded in insulating himself from any criticism.
“There are many things that the pro-war bloggers are unhappy about. But Putin still remains a sacred figure for them.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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