For the first time, a Russian corrugated board plant made it into a military report

Until now, our industry’s experience of this war had mostly been a story of Ukrainian plants — destroyed, occupied, looted, halted, or repeatedly attacked. That’s how our LinkedIn page started back in 2022 — those updates were, in their own way, how we told the world what was happening to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion. Shebekino is the first notable case of a corrugated board plant on the Russian side of the border landing in a military report. Before the war, our editorial team, based in Kyiv, covered the corrugated industry across 15 former Soviet countries — so I know this plant well, along with many others.

What is “Shebekino Board”?

“Shebekino Board” is not a nameless warehouse or a small converting shop. It belongs to a vertically integrated industrial group built around two production sites in Belgorod Oblast: the corrugated packaging plant in Shebekino and the “Gofrotara” facility in Belgorod.

The group combines recycled containerboard production with converting into corrugated board and packaging. Its stated combined corrugated output capacity is around 164 million m² per year.

The Shebekino plant has long been known in the industry as a modern facility with premium equipment. In 2013, trade media reported the modernization of a Fosber corrugator, expected to raise the line’s rated output from roughly 11,340 to 15,120 m²/hour, with running speed up to 200 m/min.

At the time, the business was linked to Vasily Potryasaev (his surname could be rendered in English as “Shaker”) — an influential politician and businessman in Belgorod Oblast who served as mayor of Belgorod and later headed the regional duma. Over roughly fifteen years in regional leadership positions, he became a wealthy and influential local figure, and the packaging plants were only part of a wider set of business interests tied to him and his family.

Before Shebekino, the industry’s war story was Ukrainian

Throughout the war, Corruga.Expert has written about the destruction of Ukraine’s paper and corrugated board industry.

The Rubizhne Board and Packaging Mill, once one of the country’s most important packaging production centers (50% owned by DS Smith), came under fire early in the full-scale invasion. Reports described damage to or destruction of paper machine No. 3, the corrugated packaging plant, and raw material and finished goods warehouses. In 2021, the Rubizhne group, together with the Trypillya Packaging Plant, produced approximately 277.4 million m² of corrugated packaging. In 2022, their combined output fell to roughly 132.6 million m².

The Dunapack plant in Oleshky was cut off from the company due to occupation. The group’s western Ukrainian facilities gained strategic importance, while the southern site effectively disappeared from the accessible production network. The Rohan board mill in Kharkiv region was unable to resume normal operations after sustaining damage. “Mena Pak,” by contrast, resumed production after Ukrainian forces retook control of Chernihiv region.

In 2026, the Kyiv Board and Paper Mill in Obukhiv — one of the largest producers of civilian paper, board, and packaging products — was struck twice within a few weeks. Buildings, production assets, and utility infrastructure were damaged, and operations were temporarily suspended. The company publicly stated it has no connection to military infrastructure, defense facilities, or military orders.

People died in the strikes on Ukrainian industrial plants. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, their homes, or access to their workplaces. Equipment accumulated and modernized over decades was damaged, dismantled, or abandoned. These are human and industrial losses whose consequences will be felt for years.

What happened in Shebekino doesn’t make these cases equivalent. Russia invaded Ukraine, and neither the origin nor the scale of the destruction can be blurred. But this case shows that the war Russia unleashed is now undermining the industrial security of its own border regions too.

A plant six kilometers from the border

On a battlefield increasingly watched by satellites, reconnaissance drones, electronic intelligence systems, and local informant networks, almost nowhere remains where military activity can be reliably hidden.

Military units on both sides constantly search for buildings, workshops, warehouses, and infrastructure usable for logistics, repair, storage, communications, and drone operations. In recent months we’ve seen Russian strikes destroy military depots concealed on the grounds of civilian industrial facilities in Ukraine.

For Ukraine, a country pushed to the edge of survival, the line between the front and the civilian economy has all but disappeared. You can die at any moment — not because you’re an important military target, but because the sky is filled daily with missiles and drones from both sides.

One industry that used to connect two countries

Before 2022, many owners and industrial groups held assets in both Ukraine and Russia. Engineers, suppliers, and executives knew one another. Specialists moved between plants, took part in joint equipment installation projects, and met at technical conferences. Commercial ties crossed the border because the two markets had formed within a shared Soviet industrial system and remained closely linked after independence.

After the invasion, these relationships collapsed. Even the owner of the Rubizhne mill in Ukraine was accused of collaboration with Russia simply because he held business assets there. Yet before the war, cross-border ownership of enterprises was nothing unusual.

The war tore apart a professional community of people who had trained together, worked on the same equipment, and solved the same production problems.

Belgorod Oblast itself has a complicated border history. In 1918, Ukrainian governments laid claim to areas around Belgorod, and in parts of the region there was a Ukrainian presence or influence during the revolutionary period. A sizable Ukrainian-speaking population also lived there. This history shouldn’t be simplified into an automatic present-day territorial claim, but it helps explain why today’s border runs through territory with deeply intertwined identities, families, and economic ties.

What does the air strike on “Shebekino Board” mean?

Civilians and civilian enterprises have become a fairly conditional concept in a Russian-Ukrainian war that has now lasted nearly five years. It may lead to the largest geopolitical crisis of the third millennium — the collapse of the Russian Federation. Only a “small victorious war” could have saved the empire. But it dragged on and turned into a long, grinding war. Moscow cannot stop it, because for Moscow that means the threat of collapse and the start of internal civil war. Preventing exactly that was the point of the “small victorious war” against Ukraine.

Ukrainians often don’t call Russia “Russia” but “Muscovy.” Because Rus, in essence, is Ukraine. The military union between the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Zaporozhian Host formed a joint state that later took the name Rus. It’s a bit like the name “Great Britain”: the Britons were Welsh, and the English aren’t Britons. In the same way, Muscovites aren’t literally Rus.

Putin can’t stop the war — not because he’s a fool or unwell. He governs a state home to roughly 160 nations and dozens of quasi-state entities — Chechnya, Tatarstan, Komi, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Yakutia, and others. He has no strategy for holding this state together except the imperial one: divide and rule. Give these peoples real democracy, and they’d go their separate ways. Chechnya declared its withdrawal from the federation back in 1992 and was effectively independent for nearly a decade. After two bloody wars, and realizing the world would never recognize their referendum, the Chechens returned under Moscow’s control.

There’s no internal problem in an empire that hasn’t, at some point, been “solved” with a small victorious war. A few days before the invasion, U.S. senators heard military experts testify that the war would last three days, maybe three weeks — and Ukraine would capitulate.

When empires lose wars, they fall apart (unless the victors choose to take them over themselves). That was true of the Chaldean, Median, Persian, and Greek empires — all of which tried to preserve a bureaucratic structure and duty-free trade between their satrapies.

So Putin can’t stop the war, because for him that means the death of the Russian Federation itself. He has said himself that if Russia falls apart, not even the name would survive — because no region is actually called “Russia.” Rus is the ancient name of Ukraine, which Muscovy adopted after its 17th-century union with the Zaporozhian Host.

Whatever crimes Moscow commits, no one will truly hold it accountable until the Federation-empire ceases to exist. But the United States doesn’t know what to do with forty new countries, some of which would hold nuclear weapons. Faced with a choice between the collapse of a nuclear empire and letting it devour its small neighbor, the choice wasn’t much of one. So the US effectively sacrificed Ukraine — all the more so because Ukraine had disarmed, and the “three-day war” promised to be relatively bloodless.

In practically every conversation I’ve had in the United States, someone has asked me: why should America pay for Ukraine?

And I’ve answered: let me explain something you might not know.

Before 1994, Ukraine was the world’s third-largest nuclear power. We had enough warheads to destroy the world dozens of times over. The missiles the West calls “Satan” (the SS-18 and others) were built in Ukraine. Elon Musk once called our Zenit rocket one of the best in the world. The first song ever sung in space was Ukrainian — performed by Pavlo Popovych for chief designer Sergei Korolev.

In other words, Ukraine was fully capable of building its own nuclear arsenal and defending itself.

But in 1994, President Clinton persuaded our president that if Ukraine chose non-nuclear status and gave up its missiles and strategic aviation, it would receive assurances that the US would not attack it…

“So what exactly did you get in exchange for nuclear weapons?” — “Assurances that the US would refrain from attacking Ukraine…” — “Are you idiots?” — “The thing is, they signed a slightly different document. Our text said ‘guarantees’; the English text said ‘assurances.’ Which means the Americans were never obligated to guarantee our security or extend us a nuclear umbrella.” — “You gave up nuclear weapons for nothing?” — “No. We got an image as great pacifists. Three generations of Ukrainians were taught in school that Ukrainians are the most peace-loving nation: we gave up nuclear weapons, chose peaceful labor, and trusted US assurances. Today, Chinese state media no longer calls us great pacifists — they call us great fools, and hold us up as an example of what happens to those who disarm on the strength of American assurances.”

Now you know it all.