Following overnight attacks by Ukrainian forces on Belgorod, Russian officials offered on Wednesday to evacuate panicked residents on Friday, an unprecedented announcement made by Moscow to protect Russian citizens in the nearly two-year-long war.
“I see several appeals on social media where people write: We are scared, help us get to a safe place,” said Belgorod region’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a video message. “Of course we will. We have already moved several families.”
Ukrainian forces have been pounding Belgorod, home to more than 300,000 residents, with intense bouts of shelling for days. The attacks have so far left well over two dozen people dead and over a hundred wounded, while damaging dozens of houses and public properties.
Late last month, Russia’s Permanent Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya accused Kyiv of using internationally banned cluster munitions in a “terrorist attack” that targeted civilians in Belgorod, which lies 30 kilometers from Ukraine.
On Saturday, Ukrainian shelling in Belgorod claimed the lives of at least 25 people, the worst attack on Russian civilians since the war broke out.
Gladkov on Wednesday offered that residents of the Western city would be transported to the towns of Stary Oskol and Gubkin, further from the border, where they would be housed in “comfortable conditions.”
“You will stay there for as long as necessary,” he added, although he warned that there would not be enough temporary accommodation to house everybody. “I will appeal to my colleagues, the governors of other regions, to help us,” he went on to say.
Russia launched what it calls a special military operation in Ukraine on February 22, 2022, after the ex-Soviet republic declared its plan to join the US-led military alliance of NATO.
Since then, the United States and Ukraine’s other Western allies have supplied Kyiv with tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including rocket systems, drones, armored vehicles, tanks, and communication systems.
SD/PressTV
