Moscow has claimed it repelled an attack on Russian soil led by Ukraine-aligned militias, who have insisted their campaign is continuing.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, announced on Tuesday evening that he was cancelling a “counter-terrorism regime” that introduced restrictions tantamount to martial law, while claiming Russia’s defence ministry and security agencies were still engaged in a “mopping up” campaign.
The Russian defence ministry earlier claimed to have “trapped and liquidated” units of anti-Kremlin Russian fighters who have said that their goal is to liberate their country from Vladimir Putin.
The Russian defence ministry released videos that it claimed to show artillery and bombing strikes targeting members of the two units: the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion.
Those videos could not be independently verified. They included an airstrike on a building that appeared to resemble the Grayvoron border outpost, where the militias had uploaded video that included a Russian border guard lying in a pool of blood.
Members of those units said their campaign was continuing and denied the Russian claims that it had killed dozens of them. One video posted by the Russian Volunteer Corps showed fighters riding on an armoured vehicle in what it called a “small, but already [liberated] part of our homeland”. Another showed them firing mortar rounds from a location they claimed was inside Russia.
The fighting began on Monday. Russians posted videos of helicopters dropping flares over a town, while Ukrainian media posted drone video showing smoke rising from a village after shelling. Such scenes have become ubiquitous in Ukrainian cities and towns attacked by Russia, but are rare on the Russian side of the border.
The cross-border raid was seen by some as a potential “shaping” operation meant to divert Russian attention on the battlefield before an anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive.
While Ukraine has denied any connection to the units, they are based on Ukrainian territory and appeared to be equipped with US-manufactured military vehicles, including Humvees and what look like International Maxxpro 1224 mine-resistant vehicles. The US said in 2022 that it would deliver several hundred such vehicles to the Ukrainian military.
In Washington, officials cast doubt over claims that US-supplied weapons had been used.
“I will say that we’re sceptical at this time of the veracity of these reports. As a more general principle, as we’ve said and I believe I said yesterday, we do not encourage or enable strikes inside of Russia, and we’ve made that clear. But as we’ve also said, it is up to Ukraine to decide how to conduct this war,” said the state department’s spokesperson, Matthew Miller.
Members of the anti-Kremlin units, which include anti-Putin fighters with ties to the Russian far right, had posted videos of themselves saying the border was “split open” and claiming to have hijacked a Russian armoured personnel carrier.
Conservative estimates put the number of militia fighters at 80, while some Russian military bloggers close to the defence ministry said the number could be as high as 500.
The use of Russians against the Kremlin, which Ukrainian military intelligence said could create a “defensive corridor” to prevent shelling across the border, has been directly compared by Ukrainian officials to Russia’s use of “little green men”, or unmarked soldiers, during its annexation of Crimea and the early war in the Donbas.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said on Tuesday that the attack had provoked “profound concern” and meant that Russia had to continue its war in Ukraine. At an awards ceremony in Moscow, Putin said Russia “was experiencing difficult times” while calling for a “national consolidation” around the war effort.
A UK intelligence report stated on Tuesday: “Russia is facing an increasingly serious multi-domain security threat in its border regions, with losses of combat aircraft, improvised explosive device attacks on rail lines, and now direct partisan action. Russia will almost certainly use these incidents to support the official narrative that it is the victim in the war.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian government adviser, said: “Seriously, it’s time for the Russian regime to think about objective reality: the sooner you leave all the territories of Ukraine, the less of a catastrophe Russia will end up with in the end.”
Details of the raid and the number of casualties continued to emerge on Tuesday evening. The Kommersant newspaper reported that a Russian base called Belgorod-22 was shelled, leading to the deaths of two Russian soldiers. The base has been used in the past as a storage facility for nuclear warheads. The strike on the base had not been previously reported.
The Russian defence ministry blamed the Ukrainian armed forces and said more than 70 “Ukrainian fighters had been killed and four armoured vehicles and five pickup trucks destroyed. The Belgorod regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a civilian had been killed by “the Ukrainian armed forces”.
Drones also struck local administrative buildings used by Russia’s FSB security service and the interior ministry, along with a customs checkpoint, late on Monday. The deputy head of the border Grayvoron district was reported to have been wounded in a shelling incident.
Gladkov said on Tuesday evening that Belgorod had come under fresh attack from a drone which dropped an explosive device and damaged a car. Later, he said that a second drone had been shot down.
Hundreds of Belgorod residents were evacuated from their homes on Monday and placed in temporary housing after fighting broke out. On Tuesday, amid continued fighting, the governor warned people not to return to their homes.
