SHEBEKINO, Russia — Abandoned cats and dogs roam vacant streets lined with blasted apartment buildings, rubble and crumpled cars in Shebekino, a Russian border town pounded by shelling from Ukraine.
Shebekino is a ghost town after days of shelling. Perhaps a thousand residents linger on. Last week, they included a single man who dragged twisted metal onto the sidewalk in a forlorn cleanup effort. On the ghostly streets of Shebekino, Viktor Kalugin, 65, complained that Wagner mercenaries and Chechen fighters, both renowned for their ruthlessness, had not been allowed to take care of things.
Russia still insists, although increasingly halfheartedly, that a “special military operation” is underway in Ukraine, rather than a real war. But the term war is now used all the time in Moscow, most often to describe the all-out confrontation with the West that Russia sees in the conflict. It has attributed the attacks, which had no apparent military target, to Russians fighting for two paramilitary groups, the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, that have embraced the Ukrainian cause as a means to “liberate” Russia from Putin. The militants advanced into several Russian border villages last month, before the Russian Ministry of Defense said it pushed them back.
Above him was a giant billboard declaring, “Glory to Our Air Defense!” Beside him, one man wore a dark blue NYC hat and another a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Los Angeles.” Russia’s radical turn away from the West is still a work in progress. Its armed forces have not yet managed to stop the shelling. The government has devoted little time on the main state-controlled TV channels to the debacle in Shebekino, an apparent attempt to avoid alarming people. It has made little or nothing of the bombardment and killing of civilians in attacks from Ukrainian soil, as if any official outrage would be destabilizing. That has not gone down well in Belgorod.
Prigozhin concluded with a threat: “We give the Ministry of Defense two weeks to liberate Belgorod, and if not, Wagner is going there ourselves!” But to Rogatiya, whose pension is just $110 a month, they symbolize the home she has lost, leaving her, she said, with nothing to live for.
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