What Is Ukraine Doing in the Town of Shebekino, Belgorod Oblast and What Consequences May We Expect?

Possible evolution of the conflict to total destruction of Kherson and annihilation of the Kiev regime

Allow me to draw the attention of readers to the ongoing Ukrainian artillery attack on the border city of Shebekino in the RF oblast of Belgorod. This is not the sporadic shelling that the city of Donetsk has undergone over the course of years from fortified positions of the Ukrainian army that were put in place since 2014. No, it is an assault measured in hundreds of artillery shells during the past 24 hours as well as attempted armed incursions of Ukrainian fighters across the border. Several hundred residences and apartment buildings in Shebekino have been damaged or destroyed in the past several days.

Children have now been evacuated to further points in the oblast and in neighboring Voronezh oblast if not further still, where they are being put up in summer camp facilities. Adults are now being moved out as well from the entire border region of which the town of Shebekino, with its population of 39,000 is a part. Those who can are leaving in their own vehicles. Others are being moved by emergency workers.

The intensity of the attack on Shebekino is made possible by its proximity to the Kharkov oblast of Ukraine, which is under Kiev’s control. And that is front and center in the thinking of Russian decision makers as they consider what to do next. This is the territory that Kiev retook in its famous offensive of September 2022.

The widely watched host of Sixty Minutes, Olga Skabeyeva, this afternoon on live television called for notifying residents of Kharkov to leave their homes and not look back, because Russian forces will flatten the city and its surroundings to the ground. Meanwhile experts on the same program are repeating the call by Dmitry Medvedev yesterday for the annihilation of the “terrorist government” in Kiev.

Let there be no confusion here. The Ukrainian attack on Shebekino, a purely civilian town with no military value whatsoever, IS the long awaited Ukrainian “counter offensive.” It is the action of a spent military force which cannot engage the Russian armed forces on the field of battle. Evidence on Russian television suggests that day by day their advance west from newly conquered Bakhmut/Artyomovsk is proceeding relentlessly. The entire line in Donbas is pushing back the Ukrainian forces, which have not brought into play their much touted Western tanks and other top supplies, since they would be destroyed for lack of air cover and for lack of the munitions that the Russians have been systematically eliminating through missile strikes on weapons caches over the past several weeks.

Meanwhile, the Russian Talking Heads are paying close attention to President Biden’s fall on the podium yesterday during an awards event. They find it utterly shocking that this senile creature called Joe holds the fate of the world in his unsteady hands.

German and French translations available on Gilbert Doctor’s website.

Gilbert Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book is Does Russia Have a Future? Reprinted with permission from his blog.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2023