‘Tanks, tanks' On the border with Ukraine, citizens sense onset of war

The military train lurched into the rail depot at Kursk, carrying more snow-dusted main battle tanks, self-propelled artillery and other heavy weapons to within a few hours’ drive by car of the Ukrainian border.

- Andrew Roth KURSK and MASLOVKA

At the depot, the flatbed railcars parked between heavy containers carrying chemical products, leaving them visible only from a small pedestrian footbridge overhead. There, military police with red armbands kept watch as locals looked on at the latest arrivals in Russia’s vast military buildup.

A recent trip by the Guardian to the Voronezh and Kursk regions in Russia found a hive of barely hidden military activity as Russian troops continue to position themselves for a potential assault on Ukraine, with reports that personnel are being transferred to forward staging areas nearer the border.

In the regional capitals of Voronezh and Kursk, which each sit about 160km from the border, the heightened military activity has become increasingly impossible to ignore. As jets roared overhead last week during a military training exercise, locals in Shilova, a district of Voronezh, were stunned to see a Pantsir air defence missile system emerge into a snowy field right next to the local primary school. (The western military district announced that it was just a training exercise.)

In the nearby suburb of Maslovka, months of offloading of tanks, artillery and other equipment at a railway station has put local residents on edge.

“My wife came back from her errands yelling about tanks, tanks, tanks,” said Oleg Romanenko, a mechanic and metal shop worker who lives in Maslovka. “It is hard to walk outside your home and see this and not think a war could happen. Everyone has thought about it, at least.”