Chapter 1. Time until impact

Zhuravlyovka is a large village in Russia’s Belgorod region with a population of 1,193, just three miles away from the Ukrainian border. It is considered pretty well-off by Russian standards: the village has its own school, a kindergarten, a medical station, a recreation centre, a music school, a post office, two shops and a bakery.

Or used to have, to be precise. Many of these places are now shut down.

For the fifth month in a row, the fields where the locals usually grow wheat have been used as a parking lot for Russian military equipment. There are two roadblocks on the way to the village, guarded by armed soldiers. The locals are used to the shelling at this point: according to official information, the village has been shelled at least 11 times since the start of the war, when in fact, not a day goes by in Zhuravlyovka without exploding projectiles. Two local residents were killed in the shelling, and over a dozen were injured. The locals say that many of the injured do not seek medical attention.

Since the start of the hostilities, the majority of local residents have left the village. They can be considered internally displaced persons, or essentially refugees. The village infrastructure shut down shortly after that. The locals are saying that they are afraid to live here now. They are scared of dying under the rubble. About 50 houses have been destroyed in Zhuravlyovka, and hundreds have been damaged by shelling.

Still, many people refuse to leave: they cannot abandon their gardens and livestock. How would they survive the winter without it? Dozens of people are choosing to stay despite the danger.

‘Turns out that we’re volunteers’

Ukraine’s Kharkiv is closer to Zhuravlyovka than Russia’s Belgorod. A significant chunk of the local population are Ukrainian. No one thought much of the nearby state border until February.

In the winter, Zhuravlyovka residents were first baffled by the never-ending convoys of military equipment setting camp right near their homes. On the day the “special operation” was announced, they were one of the first people in the country to find out what real shelling sounds like.

Their lives changed in an instant.

The first reports of “incidents” (that’s how local officials referred to the shelling of Zhuravlyovka and other villages) started to trickle in back in February. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov offered to evacuate those who wanted to leave the village. About a hundred people moved to the Belgorod Hotel. More evacuees continued to flee to Belgorod as the attacks escalated. People did not just leave to save their lives: many needed to find new jobs.

“The bakery that I worked at shut down: the owner left for his homeland, Georgia,” local resident Tatyana Barabash says. “Our cooks and cleaners were left with nothing: there are no other jobs here. We were asked to help out at the school canteen that served the soldiers. We spent 8 to 12 hours working: cooking food, doing the dishes. We even asked the old ladies to help, we couldn’t do it alone. On 8 March, we were given ‘an incentive’: the soldiers found some blankets and brought them to us. And then we found out that some people were paid about 20,000 [rubles, about €350], and some weren’t paid at all. Turns out that we’re ‘volunteers’, although we worked there for three weeks.”

Tatyana worried a lot that the bakery had closed down: she moved to Zhuravlyovka from Kharkiv 20 years ago, and to get a residence permit, she needs to present an income report once a year. She has been essentially unemployed for eight weeks. The woman asked Vladimir Pertsev, the head of the Belgorod district administration, to help speed up her citizenship application process, but her request was ignored. No compensation payments were provided to other people who lost their jobs either.

In late March, the shelling of the village resumed: the governor declared a state of emergency and called on local residents to evacuate. Tatyana says that in the afternoon of 24 March, a projectile exploded 200 metres away from her house. Her family decided to evacuate the kids: Tatyana left with her daughters, while her husband and mother-in-law stayed at the house to take care of the livestock. On the same evening, a projectile exploded even closer to the house, shattering the windows and damaging the roof and the fence.

Tatyana and her daughters encountered difficulties right from the start of the evacuation. They were transported to a children’s camp seven miles away from Belgorod, where a temporary accommodation centre had been set up.

“It was a summer house with several rooms. My daughters and I lived in one of the rooms, and other families lived in the same house. There were no locks. So, you go to the canteen and you think: what if something happens to your things or your money? And how could I leave my children alone there? War is war, but I still need to feed them and buy them clothes, so I got a job at a bakery in Belgorod.”

Tatyana had to wake up at six in the morning to make it in time for her shift. She had to wake up the children to take them to her sister’s apartment in the city. In the evening, she came by to get the kids and take them back to the camp. They made it a week in the camp, after which Tatyana came back to the village and sometimes even brought the children there. But in May, another wave of explosions started.

“We had just put in new windows, and then in early May, the shelling resumed, and the windows got shattered again. The same thing happened to our neighbours, who had also done some repairs. We were so scared. So, we decided to evacuate again,” Tatyana recalls.

This time, Tatyana and her daughters were taken to Hotel Patriot, where they spent a couple of days before leaving.

“The men brought in alcohol. They were drinking and walking around drunk. The front desk completely ignored this. Five men lived in the room next to us: they spent the entire night making a racket and swearing. I had work in the morning. There is one shower and bathroom for the entire floor. How could I have left my teenage daughters there alone for the whole day? I don’t know what those drunkards have on their mind.”

“I fought with the head of the administration to transfer us to a different hotel, but she ignored us. I had to move in with my sister. I threatened the administration that I’d come back to the village then, and it worked: they moved us to Hotel Belgorod, where things are more or less okay,” the woman says.

However, evacuation does not solve every problem: Tatyana says that many people have lost their jobs in Zhuravlyovka or in the customs office located in the neighbouring village of Nekhoteevka: although they are allowed to pass the roadblocks, spending 2 to 2.5 hours driving to work is very hard. Many of the evacuees could not find a job in Belgorod. People are confused, because they do not know what to expect. They do not know what to do with their children: Belgorod schools and kindergartens do not accept their kids, saying that the situation might resolve itself by autumn, and then they would have to transfer them back. Tatyana also worries about her daughters’ mental health.

“It’s hard for us, the adults, to live with this, imagine how hard it is for them! They are away from home, they miss their dad, their pets. They get decent food, but they still lost weight. It’s very hard for them mentally.”

Tatyana says the locals worry about their gardens and livestock the most.

“My friend told me: I’ve got a garden.

In May, hundreds of houses were damaged by shelling. Several local residents were injured in the attacks, but they either refused to leave or came back from time to time.

By late May, evacuation became obligatory for everyone. After local resident Elena Ushakova was killed in another attack on the village on 26 May, the officials banned entry to the village even for local residents. The shops closed: those who failed to store up on groceries had to spend two weeks without bread and fresh food. Currently, only one shop is open for a few hours a day, selling only the essentials: bread, meat, milk. Tatyana’s husband stays in the house: he does not mind evacuating, but who will look after the animals?

“We’ve got chickens, a piglet. He also looks after the rabbits left behind by his brother, who had to evacuate. When we arrived here after our first evacuation, the neighbours asked us to feed their birds. My daughters had a look and said that there’s no one left to feed anymore, everyone died of hunger. Another old lady’s ducks disappeared somewhere,” Tatyana said.

Before the first evacuation, the locals were promised that community volunteers and the police would look after their livestock. There were pictures of them published in local social media groups. Whenever she came back to the village, Tatyana had never seen anyone checking on the locals’ gardens or feeding the animals. The streets were empty, “you could even walk naked around the village,” she said.

Food and bombs

The people’s fear of losing their livestock often trumps their fear of bombs. This is one of the paradoxes brought about by the war. The logic is simple: if you do not go outside to tend your garden despite the bombs (that might not even get you), you will go hungry in autumn (which will definitely happen).

Many residents of Zhuravlyovka would be happy to leave if they got any guarantees from the government that they would not be left on their own. And no one can promise them that.

On 26 May, Elena Ushakova, a 54-year-old resident of Zhuravlyovka, came back to the village from the hotel that she had been evacuated to. Her niece Tamara Kuznetsova says that she needed summer clothes: she left Zhuravlyovka back in the winter, she could not take all her things with her. Besides, she needed to feed the animals, to check the house, to throw out spoiled food: Elena hoped that nothing bad would happen in just a couple of hours. But then, she was gravely injured in another attack on the village. The emergency services could not even transport her to the hospital right away. She died the next day.

“I’m out of words at this point. People are risking the only thing that they must cherish, their own life, over some chickens and two buckets of potatoes,” Belgorod regional governor Gladkov said, commenting on Elena’s death. But he did not promise to provide those two buckets of potatoes to the locals.

Tamara Kuznetsova left a comment under Gladkov’s statement asking why the officials could not find any rural houses that the locals could move to with their belongings and livestock. Her question was left without an answer.

Another local resident Valentina Aleksandrovna, 55, chose to stay in Zhuravlyovka because the vegetables grown in her garden are the only thing that she can live off after she was let go from the local bakery.

“The situation is critical. The garden is our only lifeline: ten acres, how can we just abandon it? The winter is long. I’m growing everything that can be stored in the basement: potatoes, carrots, beets, onions. They postponed my retirement (in 2018, Russia raised the retirement age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women — translator’s note), so I’m taking odd jobs looking after the neighbours’ animals: ducks, chickens, dogs, cats — they are not allowed at the hotel, but they still need to be fed somehow.”

Valentina Aleksandrovna says that even after the shop started working again after a two-week break, the problems did not subside. You need money to buy food, and there’s nowhere to get it.

“The head of the administration made a list of everyone who is still here. I asked her: some people get free food three times a day at the hotel, and what about me? She told me to take it up with my employer. I told her: my employer has left, how am I going to find him? She looked at me like I was Jesus Christ in the flesh and went on her way.”

The administration is well aware that some of the residents are staying in their houses.

The locals stayed inside in fear of going out and running into the officials. Tatyana’s husband was forced to sign a statement saying that he “refuses to leave the territory of the village for another safe location.” He is lucky that he was not slapped with a fine: on 30 December, 2021, a new law entered into force, according to which local residents must leave the area by themselves if there is an emergency situation. Those who violate the law face a fine of up to 30,000 rubles (€530).

Chapter 2. Life in the line of fire

‘Go fight in an open field’

Vitaly Luchnikov, 35, did not sign any statements. He is outraged by the situation that he has ended up in. He starts off his monologue over the phone assuring us that he “actively supports the special operation” and only has some issues with the way it is organised.

“They parked the equipment right behind my garden! There’s a field there, the soldiers found it convenient. KAMAZ trucks were parked right in my garden. And then the mortar fire started. I was hiding in the basement to escape the shelling, and then I went outside: 10 metres away from my garden, a smoking missile was burrowed a metre deep into the ground. The second missile fell 70 metres away from my property. And then the military packed up their things and left for another place.”

Vitaly thinks that the Ukrainian troops are looking at satellite images to strike military targets.

“Many residential buildings were damaged here. A projectile was launched right into my neighbour’s room, they had to fix the roof. I don’t think anyone would just waste a projectile like that, it costs money. I used to serve in an artillery unit myself: when you take a shot, you need to leave fast, because then your coordinates can be traced. Why would you destroy a house or a garage of some random Vasya, Petya or Kolya? All these projectiles target military equipment, but the trajectory may change because of the wind or the gunner’s mistake.”

According to recent data, approximately 359 houses have been damaged in the Belgorod region, many of them in Zhuravlyovka.

“When they were setting up the equipment in our village, we often heard this: the Ukrainian military deploy their tanks in people’s yards, and the Russian troops are urging them to withdraw their equipment from residential areas. If you want to go to war, go fight in an open field. But we did the same thing! Our artillery is set up in a village. Alright, if they placed checkpoints here or cordoned off the area to avoid saboteurs, we wouldn’t be a target. But when you park tanks here, we become a target. When they parked their equipment here, we’ve become a target for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and my life is now in danger.

Vitaly and his brother were evacuated to the same children’s camp where Tatyana Barabash and her family stayed. However, he came back to the village, as he is afraid of leaving his property unsupervised, although the head of the administration said that volunteers would be assigned to check on their houses and livestock.

“Today, they drove around the streets to make sure that no one was stealing fridges. But who knows what’s inside every house? How will we appraise our property? If someone steals a washing machine from me, how will I prove that I had it? And what if I had ten cows that escaped to Ukraine? This issue must be regulated,” Luchnikov says.

Government bodies must ensure the security of people’s property in case a “red” terrorist threat level is declared. So far, the Belgorod region has only declared a “yellow” threat level. In total, there are three of them: “blue” (elevated), “yellow” (high) and “red” (critical).

Multiple media outlets and social media groups reported several times in April and May that a “red” terrorist threat level might be declared in the region, however, Governor Gladkov refuted these reports. He also dismissed the information on special payments for citizens wishing to leave the border areas as “nonsense”. It is worth noting that the “yellow” terrorist threat level does not even suppose the establishment of temporary accommodation centres.

Vitaly Luchnikov is not satisfied with hotel accommodation either: he thinks that it would be fair to compensate the rent of a room or a flat, which is unlikely to be much more expensive than a hotel room, but will not have noisy neighbours or just one bathroom for the entire floor. He mentioned this proposal to the head of the village administration, but to no avail.

“The villagers are unsatisfied, but still, they say: we were given a roof over our heads, a bed, something to eat, so everything’s fine. But we are in the same conditions as prisoners. What’s the difference between me and a prisoner then? If I come back to see that my household equipment or furniture are missing, or the sowing time is over and I haven’t had time to plant potatoes, who will compensate me? I’m not going to be able to store up on any food for the winter. So, I’m going to go out to the garden, there are bombs flying, and if a projectile falls while I’m digging up potatoes, I’m supposed to just risk my life?”

Over the course of the phone call, we can hear dull thumps: at some point, they drown out Vitaly’s voice, and we have to wait a minute until everything quiets down.

“It’s like this every evening. Sometimes it’s air defence, sometimes… Why should I be listening to the thumps and thinking: is this us shooting or is it them shooting at us? It’s frightening. I’m scared of waking up under the rubble and choking because I’m under a pile of rocks and I cannot move. I need to stay away from the windows and spend all my time in the basement, hoping that they won’t hit me with a 152-mm high explosive fragmentation [projectile]. If it hits my basement, even if I’m not wounded by shrapnel, there’s a chance I might be buried under floor slabs. I also have a 100% chance of getting a concussion from the blast wave. Or even blowing up to pieces, because the force of the detonation is enormous, especially in a small confined space.”

Vitaly is adamant in his demands, fearing for his life.

“If there is an order that says the government is responsible for what happens to my property and must compensate me if anything happens, I’m ready to leave. But no one wants to vouch for my property, so they don’t have the right to demand that I leave my house. I can’t even leave for some time and then come back: they are telling me they won’t let me back in, and there’s no transport here at this point, we’re like the Indians on a reservation.”

Local residents must be compensated both for the material and moral damage they have suffered, Vitaly added.

“A military serviceman stationed in my village gets paid regularly: he gets combat pay, bonuses, quarterly payments. Every day is added to his length of service, and after the special operation ends, he will receive special status and privileges. There’s just one difference: he signed up for this, and I was made a prisoner of the situation. By the way, no one even gave me any protective gear: a bulletproof vest or a helmet, for example.”

Currently, there are about 40 to 70 people staying in Zhuravlyovka despite the shelling. In June, soldiers stationed at the checkpoints started to allow local residents to enter the village on a regular basis. Aleksandra Petrovna (she asked us to change her name in the article) says that she and her family try to visit the village every weekend.

“I need to check that everything is intact, to see if the windows are damaged or if there is water dripping through the roof. There are still no reconstruction works, because it’s too dangerous. We also feed our cats and dogs, what else can we do? This is our house. We need to take care of it. The border guards tell us that we have no more than two hours to do everything that we need. Every time, we hope that nothing bad happens.”

‘The pain and fear will stay with us forever’

Zhuravlyovka is not the only Russian settlement in the line of fire. Golovchino, Bezymeno, Khotmyzhsk, Politotdelsky and other villages were damaged by shelling, too. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of the Belgorod region, reports that 359 houses and 112 vehicles were damaged in the attacks.

The village of Solokhi, located about 7 miles from the border, is one of the most affected areas. The attacks on 11 May and 18 May damaged 61 houses and 31 cars.

The vendors all thank the local officials for quickly launching reconstruction works.

“They put in new plastic windows, fixed the façade. It’s not just our building, practically every house was damaged in this area, and all of them are as good as new now.”

The locals refer me to Margarita, telling me that she took the brunt of the attacks. Her property is across the road from the shop. There are two brick houses that look brand new peeking out from behind a steel gate. I ask the children running around the garden to get their mother. A woman with her hands covered in flour comes out to greet me, saying that she was in the middle of kneading dough. Still, she agrees to talk to me.

This is not the first time Margarita has been interviewed by a reporter: she was quite famous even before the war as a mother of fifteen children.

“We were hit the hardest on the 11th. A projectile hit the roof, broke the ceiling, damaged the furniture. The windows were shattered, even the walls were damaged,” the woman says, recalling one of the most terrifying moments of her life. “Before it happened, we had brought out the carpet to wash it in the garden and unloaded the new fridge to set it up later. And then it hit the car, it went up in flames, along with the carpet, the fridge, and even the trees. The aluminium covers looked like they got chopped up with an axe.”

The second attack took place a week later, on 18 May. The residents of the village were evacuated after that. Margarita thanks Aleksandr Syromyatnikov, the head of the local administration, several times for his help, noting that he was always in contact with her family. Solokhi is the first village where reconstruction works have already finished. However, damaged property is not the highest price you can pay for living near the border: a teenager died in the 11 May attack. Margarita’s children were also injured in the shelling.

“Two of my children got hurt. One of my sons got four shrapnel wounds: on his leg, his arm, his face. My other boy got a severe concussion, he even lost his hearing. My husband managed to get the other boys inside. He dropped to the ground by the car when the cluster munitions started to fly, and the car exploded. Nikita [her son] ran out from the house and covered his dad with his body. This is how he got four shrapnel wounds. The dad is fine, he only got a concussion.”

Margarita says they are all considered evacuees. They usually live at a hotel in Belgorod.

“The small children are all there, and the older boys and I still have to come here to tend the garden and so on. It’s still so scary. You listen to every thump and think: where will it land? The pain is still here. They fixed everything up, but there’s no joy anymore. Everything was going well, and now the pain and fear will be with us forever.”

A school located not too far from Margarita’s house has also been damaged in the attack. Its windows are still shattered. Construction works have not started yet. The village seems dead: there is no one walking around the streets. Military vehicles are seen more often than regular cars. In the time I was there, military KAMAZ trucks parked twice near the place where the projectiles hit: the soldiers were buying snacks in the grocery shop.

It is hard to convince a taxi driver to take you to Solokhi: no one wants to come under shelling.

‘They sold everything for cheap’

Residents of the Sereda village were evacuated on 5 May. They were transported rather far, by local standards: to a sanatorium thirty minutes away by car. The locals often came back to the village to take care of their gardens and livestock. Border officials usually tried to meet them halfway and let them in for a couple of hours.

“My family, my wife and I left at 8 in the morning every day to feed our livestock. If everything was quiet, they let us through,” local resident Suleyman Isfandiev says. “They gave us no more than an hour to do everything.”

An hour was enough for Suleyman to get injured in an attack on the village on 15 May. A piece of shrapnel pierced his leg right through. After that incident, the residents of Sereda were banned from visiting their houses. The local administration took the livestock to a farm, where the residents had to sell the animals.

“I had four heifers and three bulls. I bought them for 10,000 [rubles, about €176] each, and had to sell them for 7,000 [rubles, about €120] a head. What else was there to do? We were forced to do it. I didn’t want to give them away, I wanted to fatten them up: a grown bull usually weighs about half a ton, live weight is sold at 190 rubles per kilo, so you can count it (one bull can be sold at about 95,000 rubles, or €1,660 — A.A.). The rest [of the villagers] also sold them for cheap.”

Now the locals have no reason to come back, Suleyman says. And even if they wanted to, no one would let them in.

Chapter 3. No one owes them anything?

Back on 10 June, I sent a list of questions from local residents to the head of the Zhuravlyovka village administration Anzhelika Samoylova. They asked her about the conditions of the evacuation, compensation payments and whether the government can guarantee the safety of their property. However, there was no response.

We were unable to reach the official by phone. She did not respond to our questions on social media either.

The locals note that Samoylova does not seem very eager to talk to them. Aleksandra Igorevna says that she has been unable to reach the official for several weeks now.

The press service of the Belgorod regional governor was not very helpful either: we could not reach the press service by email, but after several calls, we managed to register our request, which was assigned a number. Irina, a representative of the administration, contacted us to offer help, but she declined to visit Zhuravlyovka to talk to the local residents who were refusing to evacuate. When I mentioned the number of my request, she said that they had not received such a letter.

Novaya Gazeta. Europe directed some of the villagers’ questions to Ruslan Lapshin, an attorney from Belgorod and a managing partner of Lapshin, Tkachenko and Partners law firm.

Novaya Gazeta. Europe: Are the local officials obligated to issue an evacuation order and to send a written notice to all the residents of the affected area?

Ruslan Lapshin: No, it’s just a measure taken in accordance with the presidential decree and the current legislation. The local government is not obligated to issue a separate order.

The residents cannot go back once they leave the village: the officers stationed at the checkpoints do not let them through. They do not cite any regulatory act when they do that. Does the border service violate the law?

In this case, law enforcement officers are acting in accordance with the current legislation and the measures stipulated by the “yellow” terrorist threat level. The border service does not violate the law.

How can the local residents get compensated for moral, physical or property damage?

All matters related to compensation payments are deliberated based on Article 5.1 of the federal law on countering terrorism by regional executive bodies. As far as I am aware, property damage is currently compensated from the state budget: the houses are reconstructed. Injured citizens receive free medical care. Unfortunately, the law does not provide for moral damage payments, however, the federal or regional government can make certain payments if they wish to do so.

Are there any social benefits available for those who lost their jobs due to the evacuation or for those who continue working in the line of fire?

Those affected by the situation are provided with temporary accommodation, food, and basic necessities. They can contact the employment service to apply for benefits or to find a new job.