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You're conflating several different things. The region from Kupyansk to Sumy was almost completely quiet until the last set of major raids across the border last year. Since then there have been some cross border fires, but Russian strikes were mainly limited long range strikes against strategic targets. This is completely different from the current situation where Russia is focusing very heavily on the immediate front line area near the border, and hitting it hard with air and artillery. It's one thing if Russia does the occasional SEAD mission, or hits a warehouse or powerplant somewhere in Kharkov. It's another thing if your tiny village eats 20+ FABs and several hundred artillery shells because Ukrainian forces used it as a staging area to raid into Russia. Ukraine didn't have to evacuate this area until fairly recently. There is a clear escalation in the damage to Ukrainian border areas that has come during and after the attempted offensive into Belgorod region. Claiming nothing has changed is simply not correct.
On to the moral dimension. Clearly the increase in fighting in this area has increased the negative impact to local civilians. This is what I'm pointing out. You continuously try to draw an equals sign between Russian strikes into Ukraine and Ukrainian shelling of Belgorod. I firmly disagree with this. Russian long range strikes are conducted using PGMs and have shown to generally target legitimate military targets. They're hitting military-industrial facilities, bridges, powerplants, SAM sites, and suspected military storage and staging areas. They don't always get it right, and sometimes the activities of Ukrainian air defenses contribute to Russian inbounds hitting residential areas or civilian infrastructure (consider the case of the Kh-22 which collapsed a residential apartment building in Dnepropetrovsk). This is radically different from indiscriminantly lobbing MLRS packets into a densely populated urban area full of civilians, with no clear military targets in sight. The potential existence of such targets somewhere and around Belgorod doesn't justify that. We've looked at impact patterns of Ukrainian Grad/Vampir/Uragan packets where they landed inside Belgorod and they clearly weren't even targetting a specific structure or buiding complex. It's a packet of unguided and not particularly accurate munitions casually tossed into the middle of a densely populated city with heavy civilian traffic. This is absolutely not the same as a downed Russian PGM hitting a residential building by accident. There is a major difference of intent here.
My opinion of politicians in general isn't very high. From where I sit he's worse then the average. My interpretation of his statement is this: no matter how badly Ukraine acts, the west will do their best to close their eyes to it.
Clearly he doesn't do that because he doesn't want to withdraw from Ukraine. I'm not sure what the confusion here is. Countries are complex structures with multiple overlapping goals and priorities. If Russia didn't care about the civilians in Belgorod, why would they rebase air defenses there to intercept Ukrainian inbounds? Russia clearly cares, just not enough to give up on their entire war effort.
There was a clear pattern in the first ~6 months of the war of Ukraine actively hiding combat vehicles in urban areas that were still densely populated. This took place across a wide variety of areas from Severodonetsk to Mariupol' to Odessa to Kiev. Ukrainian officials in some cases dishonestly claimed that Russia hit civilian objects of no military value, like the shopping center in Kiev, only to later be revealed as liars when the shopping center was shown to have housed artillery pieces and munitions in its covered parking area. This is what I mean when I say they were hiding troops.
Ukrainians have sometimes asked residents to evacuate, more so lately then in that first part of the war.
Do you have proof of Russian troops intentionally hiding from Ukrainian forces in densenly populated urban areas? What would they even be hiding from? In Ukraine's case they were hiding from Russian air power primarily (I include long range missiles under this). Are there Russian tanks and artillery actively hiding behind populated buildings in Donetsk?
Russia provided corridors for civilians to exit. We have had testimony from civilians that Ukrainian military personnel prevented them from using them, in some cases firing on civilians. You can disbelieve the claims I guess, but this is what I'm referring to. Feel free to go back to the earlier parts of this thread where much of this material was covered.
