A woman and a child seek shelter in a concrete bunker on a street in Belgorod. In this Russian city, air raid sirens can be heard several times a day.Image: ANDREY BORODULIN / AFP
Alarm reports are increasing in Belgorod, a Russian city near the border with Ukraine. Here’s what residents report, living to the rhythm of sirens, power outages and drone strikes.
March 27, 2026, 8:15 p.mMarch 27, 2026, 8:15 p.m
Guillaume DECAMME, Belgorod, Russia / AFP
translation
This text was written by our colleagues from French-speaking Switzerland and we translated it for you.
“Missile alert!” The alarm sounds once again from the loudspeakers in Belgorod, the sirens are wailing. However, Anastasia and her two dogs remain calm; They go to one of the shelters set up on the sidewalks of this Russian city near the Ukrainian border.
“Well, what’s going on? Are you coming to see our Belgorod?” Anastasia asks mockingly. She is one of the few passers-by who has sought refuge. She assures that she is “used” to the alarms, at least more than her small, trembling four-legged companions.
An everyday life in the rhythm of the alarm signals
Since Moscow launched its large-scale offensive against Ukraine in February 2022, Belgorod and the surrounding region have been at the forefront.
Around forty kilometers from the border, this city with 320,000 inhabitants is being bombarded by rockets and drones from the Ukrainian army. This states that it is primarily targeting energy and military infrastructure.
Belgorod is not far from the Ukrainian border.Image: www.imago-images.de
The sirens sound several times a day. The facades of some buildings are covered with anti-drone nets, and there are concrete bunkers on the sidewalks everywhere.
The region’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, announced on Telegram that he wanted to find a solution to a key problem: “lack of notifications via warning channels” during drone attacks – caused by the interruptions in mobile internet ordered by the Russian authorities.
These attacks often kill or injure civilians. On Wednesday, Gladkov said three people had died in drone strikes, including one whose car was hit by a Ukrainian drone near the border.
Children react to the sound of sirens in a residential area of Belgorod.Image: ANDREY BORODULIN / AFP
It is precisely there, along the border between Russia and Ukraine, that the Kremlin wants to create a “buffer zone” to prevent Ukrainian offensives on Russian territory – like the one in the summer of 2024 in the Kursk region bordering Belgorod.
“End of alarm!” sounds over the loudspeakers, and Anastasia leaves the shelter with her Bichon dogs. This time, as is often the case, there was no “boom” from the air defense that shook the sky when a missile was intercepted. A jazz piece by Canadian Oscar Peterson plays from the city’s loudspeakers, while teenagers on roller skates show off their tricks.
A war of attrition
In Belgorod and the surrounding area, the damage caused by Ukrainian bombings is hard to miss. Power lines have been destroyed or damaged and impacts have left craters. Interruptions in water, electricity and telecommunications supplies are also part of everyday life.
On Wednesday, the power supply for part of the population was again interrupted for several hours as a result of Ukrainian attacks, according to the governor and residents of the region.
Across the border in Ukraine, Russian attacks on power plants this winter have left millions of people in the freezing cold.
Tatiana Polianskaïa, a Belgorod resident, had power “restored fairly quickly” during the last outage earlier this month – within a few hours.
Tatiana Polianskaïa, a resident of Belgorod, Russia, lost a relative in the war.Image: ANDREY BORODULIN / AFP
Hundreds of missions every day
Tatiana experiences the war first hand. Her cousin was killed by a Ukrainian drone while “plowing a field,” says the 52-year-old chef, who calls for “peace.”
On average, emergency services carry out “about a hundred missions” every day in connection with drone incidents or fallen projectiles, explains the head of Belgorod emergency services, Nikolai Lebedev.
In the event of increased Ukrainian attacks, “this number could increase to 1,000 missions as air defense is deployed. It shoots the projectiles from which debris falls down. But the defense can’t do everything.
On December 30, 2023, a Ukrainian attack in the center of Belgorod claimed 25 lives – the highest number of civilian casualties in Russia since the start of the conflict.
Employees in the Belgorod emergency call center.Image: ANDREY BORODULIN / AFP
Separated by war
In the city, everyone AFP spoke to reported having ties to neighboring Ukraine before the war, particularly in Kharkiv – a predominantly Russian-speaking city less than 100 kilometers from Belgorod and a regular target of nighttime Russian airstrikes.
This also applies to Galina, who worked in Ukraine for a long time and whose daughter lives there. Between the measures related to the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing conflict, Galina has not seen her daughter “for five years.”
When asked about the numerous civilian victims of the daily bombings in Ukraine, Galina says she feels “pity for the ordinary people,” but immediately adds that Ukrainians have been “deceived” by the government. In doing so, she takes up a common Kremlin narrative that Ukraine and the West have joined forces against Russia and concludes with the words:
“At first our leader Putin was the villain (editor’s note: from the perspective of the Ukrainian leadership), then I realized that all this would ultimately lead to them hating the Russians.”
An overview of the city of Belgorod.Image: ANDREY BORODULIN / AFP