The Kremlin has claimed Russia has been attacked by “terrorists” after conflicting reports of firefights emerged from the Bryansk and Kursk regions, which Russian media blamed on Ukrainian “sabotage groups” and Ukrainian sources called a “provocation”.
The reports of fighting in Russia near the Ukrainian border began on Thursday morning. The head of the Bryansk region claimed that a “sabotage group opened fire on a moving automobile. As a result, one resident was killed; a 10-year-old child was injured.”
Other reports of hostages being taken or school buses being fired upon have been discredited, even by local Russian officials. In an online statement later corroborated by the independent Russian news site iStories, a Ukraine-based group called the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) claimed its fighters had crossed the border into Russia on Thursday but denied reports of civilian casualties.
The group, which is comprised of Russian émigrés and includes a number of notorious far-right figures, called themselves a “liberation army that came to its own land” and urged Russians to “take up arms and fight [Vladimir] Putin’s bloody regime”.
“[It is] time for regular Russian citizens to realise they are not slaves,” the group said.
The reports of the attack set off a flurry of activity in the Kremlin and at Russia’s security services. Russia’s FSB security service claimed it had launched an operation “to destroy armed Ukrainian nationalists who violated the state border”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Putin would plan to hold a meeting of the security council, Russia’s main military decision-making body, on Friday. Peskov said he had also cancelled a trip to Stavropol.
“We are talking about a terrorist attack. Measures are being taken to eliminate them,” he said.
In remarks during a conference, Putin also alluded to the attacks as “yet another terror attack, another crime”. He accused the alleged infiltrators of deliberately opening fire on civilians. “They saw the car was a civilian one, they saw the kids inside – but they opened fire,” the president said.
In Ukraine, the reports were initially interpreted as a “false flag” attack launched by Russia to discredit the Ukrainian armed forces.
“The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group in [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser.
“[Russia] wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country and the growing poverty after the year of war. The partisan movement in [Russia] is getting stronger and more aggressive. Fear your partisans …”
Asked whether Russia could change the status of its “special military operation” after the reported attacks, Peskov said: “I don’t know. I can’t say for now.”
There was no immediate video or photo of the fighting to confirm the reports of deaths.
One video appeared to show Denis Kapustin, a far-right Russian football hooligan who founded the Russian Volunteer Corps, in a video taken in front of a medical clinic in Liubechane, a village in Bryansk near the Ukrainian border.
Another video appeared to have been shot in front of a post office in the same region. Shooting from an automatic weapon is audible in the background.
“I never thought that the Russian border even during a war would be as leaky as these Z patriots,” Kapustin wrote in another post, posting a photo with another man in military gear on a forest road.
In its report, iStories said a member of the group claimed that 45 of its fighters crossed the border. “We came, we shot [the videos], we ambushed two [infantry fighting vehicles],” the person said. “I didn’t see any children injured. But there was one border guard. We didn’t take any hostages.”
Commenting on the claim by the RVC, Andriy Yusov, a Ukrainian military intelligence official told the BBC: “These are people who are fighting with arms against the Putin regime and those who support him … perhaps Russians are beginning to wake up, realise something and take some concrete steps.”
