The war Putin wanted to keep at bay is coming home to Russia | Today’s news

Olga was awakened by an explosion so powerful that her apartment building shook, shaking windows and furniture. Looking outside, she saw a plume of thick black smoke rising from a military equipment factory that had just been hit by a missile.

Residents panicked, said 49-year-old choreographer Olga. “We didn’t know if we should run for cover,” she said. According to the local governor, the strike on the power plant left six dead and another 26 injured.

Olga does not live in Kyiv, Kherson, or any other Ukrainian city that has been plagued by President Vladimir Putin’s forces for years. This is Kirov, a Russian city about 800 kilometers northeast of Moscow, better known for its 16th-century onion-domed monastery than a war zone.

The missile attack was one of many that have claimed a growing civilian toll in Russia in recent months. They are bringing Putin’s war home to his own people after he promised a swift and glorious victory.

As Ukrainian strikes intensified in mid-summer, people in Russia are being killed almost every week, according to a Bloomberg analysis of statements by regional authorities on their Telegram channels.

Meanwhile, as Russia prepared this week to resume trilateral talks with the US and Ukraine on a potential peace deal in Abu Dhabi, confidential data hacked from the Russian Statistical Service showed that some 400,000 of its people had been killed in the fighting in Ukraine. It is the scale of military deaths the country has not seen since World War II.

The Kremlin tightly controls the narrative of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now nine months into its fifth year. While the death toll affects a large number of families in Russia, it will not necessarily have political consequences for Putin, who is using historical memory to justify what he says is a casualty in an existential struggle with the West in Ukraine.

Kremlin propaganda routinely tries to draw parallels between Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the fight against Nazi Germany in World War II, whose defeat cost an estimated 27 million Soviet lives, while overlooking Ukraine’s part in that victory.

In many ways, Russian society absorbs the losses of the current war on this benchmark, and there are increasing indications that Russians are now getting used to civilian casualties with the same passivity.

Olga declined to give her last name because she feared repercussions for speaking openly about the conflict. He lives near Kirov’s Avitek plant, which makes cruise missiles, ejection seats and other aviation equipment and was targeted by Ukraine in July. But everyday life in a growing number of Russian cities, including Moscow, can no longer be described as peaceful.

Air raid sirens signaling the threat of missile or drone attacks have become a daily occurrence for millions of residents in most regions of central Russia. In some cities, you can’t simply turn them off because they are broadcast through street speakers and house phone systems.

In the Moscow region, the sounds of war are heard every day, said Ksenia, 71, a retiree from the town of Kolomna, about 120 kilometers southeast of the capital. “Every night we hear air defenses, windows shaking, car alarms going off and dogs barking in fear,” she said. “The other day I saw a drone shot down over the stadium. I was watching a movie at night and I saw this fireball through the window.”

Ukrainian drones and missiles can now also strike up to 3,000 kilometers from the border, putting almost half of Russia, the world’s largest country, within range.

At least 487 civilians have been killed in Ukrainian attacks on internationally recognized Russian territory, roughly double the number for all of 2025, Bloomberg Economics estimates from publicly released data.

“The war is penetrating deeper and deeper into Russian territory and becoming more and more deadly for the civilian population,” said Alex Kokcharov, an analyst at Bloomberg Economics in London.

Civilian casualties in Russia remain a fraction of those suffered in Ukraine, where at least 328 people were killed in attacks in September alone. On November 2, a Russian strike hit a former school used for humanitarian aid in Ukraine’s Zaporozhye region, killing more than 50 people, with dozens still missing.

Life in Russia also still remains relatively normal compared to Ukraine, where residents have to endure long power outages and disruptions to heating and water supplies. Moscow restaurants, theaters and exhibitions are full of people. Even in Voronezh, a city of around 1 million people and the capital of a region bordering Luhansk in Ukraine, life continues largely uninterrupted despite daily drone and missile warnings.

The Kremlin is trying to limit the domestic political impact of the Ukrainian strikes. State media coverage of the aftermath of major strikes tends to be brief, and television footage is rare.

Regional governors routinely call the attacks “acts of terrorism” on Telegram, reinforcing the Kremlin’s image of the Ukrainian “regime” as a threat to ordinary Russians.

Centuries of arbitrary official power have left most Russians distrustful of the authorities, while they do not hold the Russian leader accountable to them for his actions. Since the start of the war, the Kremlin has cracked down on even mild public dissent while imprisoning activists as “extremists,” largely isolating any opposition at home or in impotent exile abroad.

The authorities have banned taking photos and videos of the strikes and posting them on social media, although this is often ignored. Comments about war in public spaces may also be scrutinized and may lead to legal consequences. Communication was made more difficult by disruptions to mobile data networks and the internet, with many Russians having to use VPNs to access social media.

Despite his tarnished image at home, Putin remains popular with many Russians as the leader who restored stability after the turmoil of the 1990s, ended the war in Chechnya and presided over years of relative prosperity. A growing sense of war inside Russia’s borders and growing economic pain are unlikely to lead to protests and pressure on him to end the fighting.

The conflict only began to take a serious toll on household incomes in the last year, while the Kremlin shielded major cities from its direct effects and avoided a new wave of mobilization, said Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In Russia, according to her, there is also a weaker understanding of the connection between government actions and the economic impact on ordinary people. “Russian society is not a Western-style society,” she said. “Dissatisfaction is likely to build very slowly and take even longer to turn into any form of resistance.”

According to Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center in Moscow, Putin’s popularity fell over the summer, although it is recovering, as the public views the escalation of the war as “the West forced Russia to fight.”

Indeed, anger was greater over the petrol crisis, he said, when drivers in one of the world’s biggest oil-producing countries were forced to spend hours waiting for their tanks to fill up.

Moscow and St. Petersburg have faced several large-scale attacks this year, causing deaths and creating dramatic images of fires in the heart of Russia’s two largest cities. And the strikes are increasingly affecting Russian regions that were previously considered safe from combat operations, such as Yekaterinburg in Siberia or Perm in the Urals.

Disruption at major airports has become routine in recent months, with drone attacks canceling or delaying hundreds of flights each week. On October 23, passengers at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo, Russia’s busiest airport, were evacuated to shelters during a raid.

Some Russians describe feeling helpless as Ukraine hits back at Putin.

“You’ve been given a long sentence and you can’t do anything – maybe you leave early, maybe you don’t,” said Olga, a 60-year-old employee of a large state-owned bank in Moscow. “But you must behave and follow the rules of the warden.

As Russia strikes Ukraine’s cities and civilian infrastructure on a daily basis, Kyiv is also targeting a wider range of assets in Russia.

In addition to oil refineries, Ukraine hit dozens of warehouses operated by Wildberries and Ozon, Russia’s largest online retailers. Residential buildings are also damaged more often than before.

Last month, Ukraine first hit three data centers operated by Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company. The strikes temporarily disrupted cloud services, payments, deliveries, taxi apps, navigation and other online services, showing how easily Ukraine can disrupt Russia’s highly digitized daily life.

In January, Russian air defense intercepted about 120 Ukrainian drones and missiles per day. That had increased more than fivefold by September, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov told Putin on October 16.

The war also brings significant economic consequences for the population. Households have been hit with higher utility bills and face rising taxes as the government looks for other ways to contain rising military spending.

Strikes at refineries have contributed to acute gasoline shortages, while attacks on warehouses have forced retailers to reassess their logistics networks, raising operating costs and putting pressure on prices.

For Ksenia in Kolomna, it’s a case of coping. They are among a phalanx of Russians, especially those with more traditional views and stronger memories of the Soviet era, who seem more inclined to conform.

“We’ve preserved more food, we’ve even stored water in the basement and we’ve bought a gas bottle and we have flashlights and a supply of candles, just in case,” she said. “We have a war.

This article was generated from an automated news agency source without text modification.