‘Russia is planning to evacuate over 9,000 children from a border region because it is being shelled consistently by Ukrain’ said an official on Tuesday, highlighting Kyiv’s increasing focus on targets behind a front line that has barely shifted in recent months.
Vyacheslev Gladkov said, ‘The children will be migrated from the Belgorod region farther east, away from the Ukraine border’.
The announcement came just after a day when Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Kremlin wants to create a buffer zone to help protect border regions from long-range Ukrainian strikes and cross-border raids more than two years into the war.
Ukraine has used its long-range firepower to hit oil refineries and stores deep inside Russia and has sought to unsettle the Russian border regions.
Ukraine-based Russian opponents of Putin and the Kremlin have launched cross-border raids. Vladimir Putin discussed the cross-border raid during a meeting with top officials of the Federal Security Service, the FSB.
Civilian areas of Belgorod have been battered in the fighting. ‘16 people died and 98 were injured over the last week alone, according to Gladkov. On Saturday, he ordered the closure of shopping malls through Monday and schools through Tuesday because of the security situation.
Since the war began in February 2022, the planned evacuation of children is one of the biggest publicly announced in the Belgorod region.
Last June about 1,000 people, including children and their families, were evacuated to other Russian regions and there have been other reports of evacuations over the past year.
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