Putin attacks ‘terrorist act’ in Russian village
Kremlin hawks push for retaliatory strikes but officials in Kyiv claim this is ‘false flag’ provocation
A fringe group of Russian volunteer fighters on Ukraine’s side have claimed responsibility for a raid on two villages in Russia. The incident provoked a furious response from Moscow, with Vladimir Putin calling it a “terrorist act” and Kremlin hawks urging retaliatory strikes on Kyiv. It was reported that the president was arranging an urgent meeting of his security council. Officials in Kyiv described the incident as a deliberate false flag attack.
A FRINGE group of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine yesterday claimed responsibility for a brazen raid that targeted two villages across the border.
The incident, the first involving troops staging an attack inside Russia since the invasion began more than a year ago, provoked a furious response from Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin called it a “terrorist act” and Kremlin hawks urged retaliatory strikes on Kyiv.
Russia’s FSB intelligence agency said the villages of Sushany and Lyubachene in the Bryansk region had been attacked by “armed Ukrainian nationalists” and Russian troops were tackling them.
Later, the agency said the area was under its control and that bomb disposal teams were working to defuse explosive devices in the villages.
The attackers reportedly fired at a civilian car, killing two adults and injuring an 11-year-old child, according to Alexander Bogomaz, the region’s governor.
Mr Putin, who scrapped a trip to another region, denounced the attack as “yet another crime”. He said: “They infiltrated the border area and opened fire on civilians. They saw it was a civilian car, that there were children. They still fired on it.”
The president’s spokesman said Mr Putin would hold an urgent meeting of the security council to discuss the cross-border raid.
Neither Russian officials nor state media published any photographs or videos from the area, but an obscure group of volunteers fighting alongside Ukrainian forces released two short videos claiming responsibility for the attack. In one of the videos, two armed men, dressed in camouflage, body armour and yellow identification armbands, can be seen standing on the steps of a clinic with a sign behind them identifying it as the village Lyubachene.
Holding up the banner of their group, the Russian Volunteer Corps, they said they had crossed the border into Russia.
The Russian Volunteer Corps, whose recruits appear to be Russians who had moved to Ukraine well before the war, makes no secret of its nationalist leanings. Out of the four people who posed in the video, two have been identified as Russian neo-nazis who were active in Ukraine before the invasion.
One of them is Denis Kapustin, also known as Nikitin, who moved from Moscow to Germany as a Jewish child refugee and was raised in Cologne, where he gained notoriety as a violent football hooligan before moving to Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities yesterday denied they were behind the raid, with Mykhailo Podolyak, a presidential adviser, describing the incident as a deliberate false flag attack. “The story about a Ukrainian sabotage group in Russia is a classic, deliberate provocation,” he wrote on Twitter. “Russia wants to scare its own people to justify an attack on another country and the growing poverty after the year of war.”
But a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence, which is known to have close ties to groups of volunteer fighters, said the attack was perpetrated by “the people who are fighting against the Putin regime”. Andriy Yusov said: “Maybe, Russians are finally waking up and beginning to do something.”
Last week the Ukrainian military command in the north of the country warned of an upcoming Russian false flag operation in the same border area.
Tatyana Stanovaya, a Kremlin watcher and head of the political analy- sis firm R.politik, said the incident, whether it is a false flag operation or a genuine incursion, was likely to provoke a strong retaliation from Russia.