Ukraine stages assaults, drone strikes on Moscow’s turf
Russia contends hundreds killed as election nears
‘We are the same Russians as you. We also have the right to a statement of will.’ MAKSIMILLIAN ANDRONNIKOV
Deputy commander,
Free Russia Legion
KYIV — Ukraine staged a flurry of cross-border ground attacks and long-range drone strikes into Russia on Tuesday, assaults that appeared aimed at disrupting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reelection campaign messaging that the war had turned in Moscow’s favor.
Three armed groups of Russian exiles who operate in coordination with Ukraine’s military said they had crossed the border into southern Russia overnight and were fighting in border regions. Farther from the border, drone strikes hit a Russian oil refinery and fuel depot.
Throughout the war, Ukraine has struck targets inside Russia to disrupt military logistics, hit airplanes parked on runways, and blown up railway bridges. The cross-border attacks, Ukrainian officials have said, are also intended to unnerve Russians and undermine Putin’s efforts to insulate them from the war.
Putin has through his 2 1/2 decades in power — and through multiple elections, the next of which is scheduled to be held next week — portrayed an image of bringing order to Russia. The Kremlin has also barred the only vocally antiwar candidate from running in the election.
The attack by waves of drones across eight regions of Russia displayed Kyiv’s expanding technological capacity as the war extends into its third year.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that Moscow’s military and security forces killed 234 fighters while thwarting the cross-border incursion. In a statement, the ministry blamed the attack on the “Kyiv regime” and “Ukraine’s terrorist formations,” insisting that the Russian military and border forces were able to stop the attackers and halt the raid. It also said the attackers lost seven tanks and five armored vehicles.
It was impossible to ascertain with any certainty assertions by both sides on the border fight. Such attacks in the area have occurred sporadically since the war began and have been the subject of claims and counterclaims, as well as disinformation and propaganda.
The reported border-area fighting occurred in two regions, Kursk and Belgorod in southern Russia.
The groups saying they crossed into Russia — the Free Russian Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps, and the Siberian Battalion — operate in coordination with Ukraine’s military.
Some members of the groups, including the leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, hold farright nationalist views.
Members of two of the organizations, the Volunteer Corps and the Legion, also crossed into Russia last spring to skirmish with Russia’s border patrol and military. But whereas the incursion last spring was considered to have a military purpose — diverting Russian forces to the border before a planned Ukrainian offensive elsewhere — the attacks Tuesday delivered a more overtly political message.
A deputy commander of the Free Russia Legion, Maksimillian Andronnikov, posted a video on social media describing the incursion as being timed to the lead-up to the presidential election, which is set to extend Putin’s tenure into a fifth term.
“We are the same Russians as you,” Andronnikov said in the address. “We also have the right to a statement of will.”
Meanwhile, one Ukrainian drone struck and set ablaze an oil refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region, according to regional governor Gleb Nikitin. That region is about 480 miles from the Ukraine border.
In another deep strike, a drone was shot down in the Moscow region, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Though it was brought down well south of the city center, the drone was close to Zhukovsky Airport, one of Moscow’s four international airports.
Another drone hit an oil depot in Oryol, 95 miles from Ukraine.
Ukraine has recruited exiled Russians from a strand of the Russian nationalist movement that years ago broke with Putin over immigration policies allowing Central Asian migrant workers into Russia and over subsidies paid to ethnic minority regions in the North Caucasus after the Chechen wars of the 1990s.
Most prominent among them is the leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, Denis Kapustin, who openly espouses far-right views and uses as his military call sign White Rex.
German officials and the Anti-Defamation
League have identified Kapustin as a neo-Nazi.
The Free Russia Legion operates as a unit in Ukraine’s International Legion, a force that also includes American and British volunteers and is commanded by Ukrainian officers. After the incursions in May, the Ukrainian military said no Ukrainian citizens crossed the border.
The assault Tuesday was the first known cross-border operation by the Siberian Battalion, a unit formed last year in Ukraine that draws from ethnic minority groups in Siberia, such as the Yakuts and Buryats.
It is a politically hued organization, Ukrainian officers have said, intended both to bring recruits into the fight against Russia inside Ukraine and to encourage rebellion by these ethnic groups inside Russia. Ukrainians have appealed for support from these groups over a shared history of cultural repression by Russia and over Moscow’s policies of recruiting heavily for its military operation in Ukraine from impoverished and politically marginalized ethnic minority regions in Siberia.
In interviews in the fall, two recruits in the Siberian Battalion said they sympathized with the Ukrainian cause and wished to learn combat skills to apply at home in Russia.
“I don’t consider myself Russian,” said one soldier from Yakutia, who used the nickname Vargan. “I am not a traitor.”