Yevgeny Savchenko, governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, had a worrying message this weekend. Thousands of refugees, he told Rossiya-24 television, were pouring into his region from neighbouring Ukraine, escaping what he called the chaos in the country.
As the governor spoke, the speaker of Russia’s upper house said 140,000 Ukrainians had fled to Russia in recent weeks. The English-language RT television carried an item citing Russia’s Federal Border Guard Service, headlined “675,000 Ukrainians pour into Russia as ‘humanitarian crisis’ looms”.
On Ukraine’s border with Belgorod on Sunday, 40km from east Ukraine’s biggest city of Kharkiv, things looked rather different. As occasional cars approached, they were waved through by bored-looking Ukrainian border guards.
