Russian military response questioned after rare attack inside borders
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Fighting raged for a second day in Russia’s Belgorod region on Tuesday as a Ukraine-affiliated paramilitary group claimed to be taking villages and repelling counter-attacks in its most dramatic case to date to bring the war into Russian territory.
The Free Russia Legion, a group of Russian volunteers who have taken up arms to fight for Ukraine, claimed responsibility for the incursion, while Kiev publicly denied direct involvement, turning the tables on a Russian strategy that preceded the invasion of Ukraine. last year to send unlicensed weapons. and soldiers to Ukraine.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday afternoon it had pushed the militants back across the border, adding that dozens of “saboteurs” had been killed. That claim could not be verified, and people who said they represented the fighters insisted that the attacks continued and had gained new ground. Those statements could not be verified either.
The incursion could force Russia to divert soldiers from a long and unevenly defended front in southeastern Ukraine in anticipation of a long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive, military analysts said. It also seemed designed to unnerve and embarrass the Russian leadership by showing a weakness in border defenses.
Against a rural backdrop of green fields, smoke billowed from explosions during the fighting, according to drone video verified as authentic by The New York Times.
Representatives of the Legion of Free Russia said on Tuesday that Ukrainian officers were aware of the operation but had not directed it. The tanks used in the attack on Russia, they said, had been captured from the Russian army in Ukraine. Russia claimed it captured a US-made armored vehicle designed to resist landmines used in the attack.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said that even if the attackers were ethnic Russians, they are “Ukrainian militants” whose violence justifies Moscow’s wider war against its neighbour.
“This confirms once again that Ukrainian militants are continuing their activities against our country,” Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.
A deputy Ukrainian defense minister, Hanna Maliar, described the attackers as “Russian patriots” who were “rising against Putin’s government”.
“These are internal Russian trends dictated by citizens’ desire to change the country’s political system and end the bloody war that the Kremlin has unleashed,” Ms Maliar said on Ukrainian television on Tuesday.
Belgorod region governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said the region had been hit with artillery 15 times on Tuesday morning. He later said a civilian was killed.
Soldiers and armored vehicles, including some with Ukrainian markings, were seen in videos posted online from Belgorod on Monday.
In another Russian border region to the north, Bryansk, a warehouse of a military factory near the town of Dyatkovo caught fire on Tuesday, local news media reported. Details were not immediately available.
The Free Russia Legion operates under the umbrella of the Ukrainian International Legion, a fighting force overseen by Ukrainian officers.
Ukrainian commanders of the International Legion knew about the operation but had not directed it, Ilya Ponomarev, a Russian politician in exile who described herself as the political representative of the Free Russia Legion, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Mr Ponomarev claimed that Free Russia Legion soldiers had captured about a dozen Russian border guards and were “digging trenches inside Russia and preparing to defend the country they had liberated”. His claims could not be independently verified.
Mr. Ponomarev described the raid as an attempt to “liberate a certain part of Russian land”, to force the Russian army to divert troops fighting in Ukraine and to destabilize the government of President Vladimir V. Putin.
“We think they should now reconsider and deploy more troops along the Ukrainian border,” said Mr. Ponomarev.
A spokesman for the political wing of the Free Russia Legion, Aleksej Baranovsky, said the group captured two villages on Tuesday and controlled a total of about eight square kilometers of Russian territory.
A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive mission, said the Free Russia Legion had suffered losses, but not enough to affect the fighters’ combat readiness.