Ukraine war sees blurred truths, complex geopolitics
As news spread of a raid by suspected Ukrainian-backed Russian fighters into Russia’s border region of Belgorod last week, the head of the Kremlin’s RT media outlet, Margarita Simonyan, took to social media to encourage her followers to avoid repeating rumours without knowing what was happening.
On Ukrainian television, pro-government pundits talked of a “special military operation” being conducted within Russia, mimicking the language used by Kremlin officials to describe last year’s February invasion of Ukraine.
While the details remained unclear, footage on Russian TV last Wednesday showed several US-made Humvees and mine-resistant armoured vehicles it said were captured on Russian territory.
It looked like an escalation in the shadow war Ukraine is suspected of conducting behind Russian lines as Kyiv simultaneously steps up its global diplomatic offensive.
Fifteen months after Russia’s invasion, the war is now very different from its opening stages, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave the country even briefly, and the capital appeared to be at risk of being overrun.
Recently he visited the G7 summit in Japan, where US President Joe Biden backed joint allied training programmes for Ukrainian pilots on F-16s warplanes, although Kyiv has not won specific public commitments for delivery of the jets.
Most Western-allied leaders — and particularly Eastern European nations — have repeatedly said Russia must be defeated in Ukraine. But US officials appeared keen to distance themselves from the Belgorod attack, initially suggesting talk of the use of US equipment might be deliberate Russian disinformation.
Open source experts say the images appear to show genuine US-made equipment at specific locations in Russia near Ukraine — although some suggested the photos may have been staged with equipment captured elsewhere within Ukraine.
Such confusion reflects the increasingly complex dynamics around the conflict. Western states want to back Ukraine but are uncomfortable over several of its actions, while Ukrainians complain Western military support has been too limited.
Within Russia, the conflict has become increasingly tied to wider political divisions and what may be the opening shots of a battle to succeed Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.
That has proved apparent in the monthlong battle for the strategic town of Bakhmut, which has seen the founder of the Wagner Group of mercenaries and former Kremlin contractor Yevgeny Prigozhin rail against Russia’s military leadership in foul-mouthed rants.
“We are in such a condition that we could f ****** lose Russia,” Mr Prigozhin told an interviewer recently. The mounting divide between ordinary Russians whose children were conscripted to fight and the country’s elite could “end as in 1917 with a revolution”, he said.
Some pro-Ukrainian voices have long presented Ukraine’s war as one against wider Russian imperialism, one they hope will ultimately see Mr Putin toppled and the Kremlin abandon its centuries-old efforts to dominate the neighbourhood.
Mr Putin, meanwhile, has been determined to prevent more of Russia’s satellite states embracing the West ever since pro-Western revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 evicted Kremlin-leaning leaders.
That never-ending contest has seen senior Nato and US officials this month visiting Armenia, previously a close Russian ally but which now says it may quit the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, an alliance of ex-Soviet states, over what it sees as lukewarm support in its Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan.
The contest also overlaps with much wider geopolitics, which have seen mounting Russian-Chinese cooperation but with Beijing still holding back on supplying significant weaponry for the Kremlin to use against Ukraine.
For now, escalation in Ukraine seems the most likely option, even as Nato leaders meeting in Vilnius in July hope to move towards a new “European security architecture” that will ultimately include Ukraine and keep Russia isolated for as long as Mr Putin rules.
This week, Denmark announced its hopes of hosting a peace summit in Copenhagen in July to be attended by Ukraine but for now Russia’s attendance is doubtful. In the aftermath of the Belgorod attack, Mr Putin used an awards ceremony at the Kremlin to double down on his long-running suggestion that Ukraine is not a state, saying that it had never existed “in the history of mankind”.
For its part, it seems likely Russia will continue to push unproven stories of Ukrainian actions within Russia — including this month claiming that a Koran was burnt in Chechnya by an individual who admitted to being paid by the Ukrainian state. That story prompted mass pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian protests in Grozny.
Some analysts suggested an alleged drone attack against the Kremlin reported at the start of the month might also have been a Russian “false flag” attack falsely blamed on Kyiv.
Simultaneously, however, US media have quoted intelligence officials saying Kyiv has conducted attacks within Russia, likely including several assassinations.
Ukrainian officials said the Belgorod attack was conducted independently of Ukrainian forces, but multiple pundits on Ukrainian TV suggested the attack had been “overseen” by the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence, known by its initials HUR.
Russian analysts said they suspected the Belgorod attack was intended to deflect attention from the loss of Bakhmut. If that is the case, then it likely succeeded — it dominated coverage on both Ukrainian and Russian social media and some mainstream news.
Speaking on Ukrainian TV, HUR spokesman Andriy Yusov did not confirm involvement but said the attack was conducted by members of the Russian Volunteer Corps and Freedom of Russia Legion.
First appearing on social media in March 2022, the Freedom of Russia Legion describes itself as Russians fighting with Ukraine against Mr Putin’s government, presenting itself as a predominantly centrist, pro-democracy group.
The Russian Volunteer Corps, in contrast, espouses a much more unorthodox form of right-wing Russian nationalism, calling for a much smaller and ethnically “pure” Russian state, one that would explicitly abandon control over non-Russian ethnic areas including within the current Russian Federation.
How appealing such an eccentric worldview is within Russia is hard to say.
With Ukraine fighting for its life, there is clear enthusiasm within the country for using whatever means available to hit back. If Ukrainian-backed Russian forces did use US equipment in Russian territory this week, some in Kyiv worry that may prove self-defeating, jeopardising their access to all-winning Western weaponry such as F-16s.
For now, however, officials in Washington have signalled that should not be the case.
“As a general principle ... we do not encourage or enable strikes inside of Russia, and we’ve made that clear,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “But as we’ve also said, it’s up to Ukraine to decide how to conduct this war.