April 6 – A Russian regional official said on Wednesday that border guards in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine came under fire, while schools in nearby Belgorod were being evacuated after a bomb threat, the city’s mayor said.
Moscow, which dispatched thousands of troops to Ukraine on February 24 in what it described as a “military special operation,” has accused Ukraine of attacking Russian targets across the border.
“Yesterday … they tried to fire mortars at the position of our border guards in the Sudzhansky district,” said Roman Starovoit, the governor of the Kursk region.
“Russian border guards returned fire… There were no casualties or damage on our side.”
Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did not yet have details on the incidents in the two Russian regions but described the reports as “serious”.
When asked about the border incident, a spokesman for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said: “We have no such information.”
Starovoit said officials are in contact with the defense ministry and urged citizens to remain calm. In separate comments to the RIA news agency, he said the mortars fired at the Sudzha border crossing failed to reach Russian territory.
The mayor of the Russian city of Belgorod, some 35 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, said schools were evacuated after receiving bomb threats.
“We understand that this is part of the information pressure (campaign) against our region,” Mayor Anton Ivanov said, without saying who he believed was responsible for the threats.
Russia last week accused Ukrainian military helicopters of carrying out an airstrike on a fuel depot in Belgorod, one of Russia’s key logistics hubs for its military campaign in Ukraine. A senior Ukrainian official denied responsibility.
The Kremlin said at the time that the incident did not create comfortable conditions for the continuation of peace talks with Kyiv.
Reuters reporting; Edited by Conor Humphries and John Stonestreet