KYIV: Russia said on Monday it was battling a cross-border incursion by saboteurs who burst through the frontier from Ukraine, in what appeared to be one of the biggest attacks of its kind since the war began last year.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said a Ukrainian “sabotage group” had entered Russian territory in the Graivoron district bordering Ukraine, and was being repelled.

But the Ukrainian outlet Hroma­dske cited Ukrainian military intelligence as saying two armed Russian opposition groups, the Liberty of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), both consisting of Russian citizens, had carried out the attack.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian President Vladi­mir Putin had been informed and that work was under way to drive out the “saboteurs”, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported.

A senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Kyiv had nothing to do with the incursion, putting it down to Russia’s emerging “violent resistance movement”.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram that the Russian army, border guards, presidential guards and the FSB security service were involved in the operation. He said at least six people had been wounded and three houses and an administrative building damaged.

A group calling itself the Liberty of Russia Legion — a Ukraine-based Russian militia led by Russian opposition figure Ilya Ponomarev that says it is working inside Russia for Putin’s overthrow — said on Twitter it had “completely liberated” the border town of Kozinka. It said forward units had reached the district centre of Graivoron, further east. “Moving on. Russia will be free!” it wrote.

In a written statement, a senior Zelenskiy aide Mykhailo Podolyak agreed with Ukrainian military intelligence.

“The Russian liberation movement can become something that will contribute to the correct end of the war in Ukraine and significantly speed up the beginning of transformational events in the Russian political elite,” he said.

The reported incursion comes two days after Russia said it had captured the final few blocks of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Moscow’s first substantial claim of victory since last summer after the bloodiest land battle in Europe since World War II. But even as the Russians have pushed forward inside Bakhmut, their forces on the city’s northern and southern outskirts were retreating last week at the war’s fastest pace for six months, giving both sides reasons to claim momentum.

Moscow says capturing Bakhmut now opens the way to further advances in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine says its advance on the Russian forces’ flanks is more meaningful than its withdrawal inside Bakhmut itself, and Russia will have to weaken its lines elsewhere to send reinforcements to hold the shattered city.

“Through our movement on the flanks — to the north and south — we manage to destroy the enemy,” Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minis­ter Hanna Maliar said on Monday in televised comments.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2023