Illustration photo – Russian soldier training with SVD Dragunov (Samozarjadnaya Vintovka Dragunova) in Donetsk on January 31, 2023.
Moscow – Soldiers of the Russian National Guard are fighting with members of two Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups who have infiltrated two villages in the border region of Russia's Bryansk region, the Russian state news agency TASS reported today. The Ukrainian server RBK-Ukraine warned that it was most likely a Russian provocation, Kyiv denied the attack on Russian territory. The conflicting claims of the warring parties cannot be immediately independently verified. According to Russian media reports, the security council, which brings together the president's closest associates, is to meet under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. Russian volunteers fighting alongside the Ukrainians against Putin's regime claimed responsibility for the action on social networks.
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Photo gallery: Russian invasion of Ukraine
Putin himself declared that Ukrainian saboteurs who penetrated Russian territory deliberately shot at civilians, which he called a “terrorist act” and a “crime”. He praised Russian soldiers and officers for defending the homeland “against neo-Nazis and terrorists” in a “special military operation” in Ukraine. In a speech broadcast on Russian television, he also declared that “the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and their masters will not succeed”, although the West will most likely not even notice “today's crime”.
While Russian media speculated whether the Security Council had already met or when it would meet, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov meanwhile confirmed that the president had canceled today's trip to the Caucasus and was receiving a report from the scene of a “terrorist attack” in the Kremlin. He claimed a meeting of the Security Council was scheduled for Friday, March 3.
The spokesman did not respond to a question about whether the incident could change the status of a “special military operation,” as the Kremlin refers to the war it is already waging against Ukraine more than a year. “I don't know, I can't say yet,” Peskov said.
Kyiv denied the action on Russian territory. “We are not attacking Russian territory, Ukraine is waging a defensive war for the liberation of its territory,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, wrote on Twitter. He pointed to the “panic and disintegration” in Russia, which is reflected in the increasing number of attacks by “unidentified flying objects” on infrastructure objects deep in Russia.
“Groups of Ukrainian saboteurs broke into two villages, in one they took hostages from local residents. Guardsmen are fighting the attackers,” TASS quoted an unnamed source from the security forces. According to him, the fight resulted in victims and wounded among the villagers, the Ukrainians were allegedly able to seize up to six hostages. The FSB secret service announced that, together with the soldiers, it is taking measures to eliminate “armed Ukrainian nationalists”. line reporting on your website.
The governor of the region, Alexander Bogomaz, said earlier that Ukrainian vandals shot at a moving car, one person was killed, and a child was injured. According to the governor, a Ukrainian drone attacked in the same area and the village of Lomakovka was shelled with mortars.
“The Russians are probably carrying out a provocative plan again. In the Bryansk region, they invented an alleged shootout with a Ukrainian reconnaissance and sabotage group that penetrated the area, and also fantasize about 'large-scale fighting' and 'hostages,'” the RBK-Ukraine website wrote. According to the portal, the choice of location was not random, the two villages of Ljubečany and Sušany, where fifty Ukrainian vandals allegedly penetrated, are near the border with Ukraine. since last summer as part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. According to the corps, no Ukrainian vandals penetrated Russian territory, which is a lie of the Kremlin's propaganda, but its fighters “to show their compatriots that they have hope and that free Russian people can fight against the regime with weapons in hand”.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov described the events in the Bryansk region as a “conflict between Russian citizens” within the “completely unstable” Russian Federation, torn by a huge number of internal problems. According to him, the statement of the volunteer corps “testifies to the fact that the Russian people are probably starting to wake up against Putin's bloody dictatorship”. Yusov reminded the corps' statement that it is not fighting against civilians, but exclusively against the Putin regime and its servants.
