Russia's Putin in Trouble
Families fleeing invading Ukrainian troops sought shelter from strangers. Russian parents feared that their children might be sent into battle for the first time.
And in a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do.
Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.
“Current events are, of course, intensifying the crisis,” Mr. Shlosberg said in a phone interview. “But we don’t know where and how this energy of dissatisfaction will go.”
In the city of Kursk, about 50 miles from the border where Ukraine invaded, the politician Yekaterina S. Duntsova described meeting people at a shelter who were so disoriented by having to flee that “they hope that this is all some kind of dream.”
To Russians opposed to the war, helping people who are fleeing the fighting has become one way to feel as if they are taking action without risking arrest. Some posted on the social messaging app Telegram offering their homes to the displaced.
In the city of Oryol, about 80 miles north of Kursk, a tailor named Anastasia, 36, said she had helped find housing for two families.
Still, there were signs of public jitters stemming from uncertainty over the involvement of young conscripts in the fighting. Since the start of the war, Mr. Putin has pledged that conscripts — Russian men as young as 18 are required to serve in the military for a year — would not be sent into the Ukraine war zone.
But battles on Russian territory could be a different matter, and an exiled Russian investigative news outlet, Important Stories, reported on Wednesday that it had identified 22 conscripted soldiers who had gone missing in Kursk.
