How war in Ukraine has extended to Russian border region's doorstep

Ukraine has endured nearly two years of devastating war, following Russia's unprovoked invasion of its borders.

Butthecontours of the conflict have stretched intoBelgorod, a Russian border oblastthat has been accidentally bombed by its own military, attackedby anti-Kremlin militia groups and watched hostile drones streak across its skies.

Morerecently,a jarringDec. 30 attack on the city of Belgorodshocked residents,killed at least 20 civilians,and raised the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russian authorities haveblamedKyivfor that event, as well asongoingshelling and drone attacks across the border region including an exploding drone that the regional governor says hit a gas pipeline on the outskirts of Belgorod cityon Saturday. Ukraine typically has not confirmed its efforts to retaliateagainst the Russian aggressions outside its borders.

Analysts say Belgorod lies on a part of the map that is within Ukraine's reach and also where Russia has placed logistical and military elements worthy of disruption by Kyiv.

Add that all up, and it becomes apparent why the bounds of the conflict have extended into this particularborder region, no matter what motive Moscow attributes to Ukraine's publicly unacknowledged countermeasures.

"They try to frame legitimate Ukrainian military activity as inherently escalatory," said Riley Bailey, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think-tank.

What Riley sees unfolding in Belgorod lately is not an intensification of events, but a greater emphasis in Russia on the fact that they are indeed happening.

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Living on the edge of a war

The Belgorod region sits atop Ukraine's easternborder with Russia.

The regional capital of the same nameis home to 340,000 people and lies about 100 kilometres northof Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine.

This proximityto Ukraine puts it both near the front lines of the war andwithin reach of easily moveable weapons.This vulnerability has been a focus of commentaryfrom Russian military bloggersto the point where the ISW's Bailey said it has becomean apparent source of "discontent" for the Kremlin.

Bailey said these bloggers have called for Russia to enact a sizeable "buffer zone"by seizing swaths ofKharkiv-area lands in Ukraine to protect Belgorod.

Putin, meanwhile,has signalled his"simmering anger" overcivilian deaths in Belgorodand has vowed retaliation.

Russia's attacks on Ukraine over the past 23 months have left at least 10,000 civilians dead, according to the United Nations, which also says the rate of these casualties has been increasing.

Under-the-radar region

TheBelgorodregion hasn't normallybeen a magnet for major international news.

In 1969, a Belgorod bus driver made the news after beingfined for kissing his fiance herself a bus conductor while on the job. She, on the other hand, was fireda punishment that even the Communist party's Pravda newspaper deemed harsh, according to whatthe Toronto Daily Star reported at the time.

A 1985 New York Timesreportmentioned Belgorod as a place where hundreds of illegal stills had been destroyed amid a police crackdown and as wider alcohol reforms were being brought forward by then-Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1996, Boris Yeltsin, visited the region ahead of the presidential election that year, and nearly two decades after that, Russian authorities orderedthe bulldozing of a pile of illegally importedcheese wheels and other foodsin a Belgorod landfill in 2015.

Changes to daily life

Across Russia, Orthodox Christians were celebrating Epiphany festivities on Friday, by plunging into icy pools and ponds but not in Belgorod, where authorities called off those activitiesover safety concerns.

Already in January, local authorities hadtaken other security-minded steps in the wake of recent events, including piling sandbags and cement blocksat city bus stops and shortening the hours of commercial shopping centres.

VyacheslavGladkov, the regional governor of Belgorod, has saidschools located within 20 kilometres of the border will soon switchto remote learning. More studentsin the wider region may do the same.

Reuters reported that Belgorod residents are divided about the effectiveness of some of these changes.

The ISW's Bailey is unclear if such measures will have "any practical effect" on the defence of potential targets in Belgorod, which have typically had a military- or logistics-related connection.

William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the nonpartisan RAND Corporation think-tank and a former U.S. ambassador,said the more that authorities highlight these restrictivemeasures in Belgorod, the more it may drive home the capabilities Kyiv has to strike back against Russian aggression.

"[Kyiv]might not be as weak as the Kremlin likes to portray it," said Courtney, who noted Ukraine has surprised its opponent on repeated occasions with its ability to strike high-profile targets, such asthe now-sunkMoskvawarship or the damage done to the Kerch bridge in occupied Crimea.

Moscow itself has had to defend againstdrone threats over the course of the war, despite the fact it lies hundreds of kilometres from the more accessible border region of Belgorod.