The ‘Gray Zone’ Comes to Russia

Last week, civilians in Russia experienced something new—something Chechens, Georgians, Syrians, Ukrainians, and other civilians in the path of Russia’s military have known about for decades. After Russian tanks withdraw and shelling stops, Moscow holds certain hot spots in stasis. They become “gray zones”: neither at war nor fully at peace, wrecked by heavy artillery, psychologically traumatized and economically ruined, under Russia’s boot but subject to its neglect.

The gray zone has now come to the Russian side of the border with Ukraine. At 8 a.m. last Tuesday, dozens of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles broke across the frontier and entered the southwestern region of Kursk, where more than a million people live. In the Russian town of Sudzha, locals fled Ukrainian shelling, abandoning belongings in their burning homes. Thousands of residents lost electricity, running water, and cellphone coverage. The Ukrainians pushed deeper into Russia, reportedly controlling as much as 390 square miles of Russian territory within a week of the initial incursion. Russian authorities report that 121,000 people have been evacuated from 28 villages controlled by Ukrainian fighters.

Now, for the first time in many decades, a swath of Russia—including not only Kursk but other regions near Russia’s border with Ukraine, such as Rostov, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Krasnodar—could become a gray zone, a functional part of no country, controlled and punished by Russia’s adversary. And there is nothing like experiencing something for oneself to concentrate the mind.

“If there is a civil society in Russia, I hope they can see in real life what it feels like when you have no border left—it’s being demarcated by a foreign state right in front of their eyes, as it was in Ukraine in 2014,” Inna Varenytsa, a journalist and the mother of a 4-year-old boy whose father was killed outside Kyiv in 2022, told me. She said she hoped the intrusion would puncture the indifference of many Russians, “which would not make them feel empathy for Ukraine, but at least it will definitely make them think.”

Gennady Gudkov, a former member of Russia’s Parliament now in exile, also noted the impassivity among Russians. “First, Ukrainian Luhansk and Donetsk, now even Crimea and several Russian regions are turning into abandoned, ruined gray zones, and nobody in Moscow cares,” he told me. “They only think of their own profits and enrichment.”

Certainly, few in Russia have given a thought to the region of Abkhazia. In 1992, Russia fought the Republic of Georgia in a war that killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 200,000. When the fighting stopped, Russia swiftly recognized Abkhazia as independent and installed a base for its security services there. Abkhazia became a gray zone: Gudkov traveled to the area in 2001 and found it economically depressed and physically devastated. “My job was to visit these regions in the Caucasus where Russian citizens lived and voted,” he told me. “I saw minefield signs, abandoned armored vehicles, and sandbags.”

Not much had changed 13 years after Gudkov’s visit, when I reported from Abkhazia for Newsweek. In Gagry, hungry dogs roamed abandoned parks littered with bullet cartridges. Once-graceful old buildings moldered in ruins, and local athletes, artists, and ballet dancers complained that their republic, which they had dubbed Apsna, or the Land of Soul, was like Russia’s unwanted child.

Russia had recognized South Ossetia, too, as independent in the aftermath of the same Russo-Georgian war. And South Ossetia was likewise a gray zone, where life was poor, pinched, and cold. Not a single hotel was operational during the week I visited the region’s capital, Tskhinvali, in 2012, so I stayed in a private home, where my elderly landlady kept water boiling in big pots on the stove day and night just to heat her small house. The average income in her neighborhood was less than $300 a month. South Ossetia had held a presidential election the year before, but the winner, Alla Dzhioyeva, was kept under arrest in a local hospital, where I saw gunmen pacing up and down the hallway of her ward.

Russia maintains military and security forces in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria (another internationally unrecognized territory, this one in Moldova). But it does not care to reconstruct or breathe economic life into these regions. Their indeterminate status also isolates them internationally—years go by, and still none of these territories can issue travel or citizenship documents that would be considered valid abroad—and the sanctions on Russia complicate residents’ financial transactions with almost any bank in the world.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, landing more than 4 million Ukrainian citizens in additional gray zones. Particularly in Donetsk and Luhansk, the fighting never stopped, and in all three territories, civilians have lived under harsh conditions for the past decade. Anton Naumlyuk, the editor and founder of Graty, a Ukrainian media group focusing on law and justice, told me that Crimea’s security services abduct and torture detainees in a manner “sometimes even worse than in the Northern Caucasus.”

Now the gray zone, a signature legacy of Russian wars, may have come home to Russia. Since last week, Russians, rather than Ukrainians, have taken to social media and blogs to wonder whether the nuclear plant nearest the combat area is safe, to watch videos of their young conscript soldiers taken prisoner and civilians stripped of shelter as the Kursk region disappears behind an active front line. The residents in these border regions can look forward to the same conditions that prevail in other gray zones: intermittent utilities, cash machines empty of money, communications gone dark, no investment that would allow them to rebuild. For those who had to leave the region, President Vladimir Putin has promised a onetime payment of 10,000 rubles, or $111.

Naumlyuk has seen this story unfold before.“For as long as the war goes on, the regions along the border will be abandoned,” he said, “and the population will remain in the gray zone, deprived of rights and compensated with miserable pennies.”