Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called a deadly drive-by shooting in the southern border region of Bryansk a “terrorist attack.”
Putin made the charge during televised remarks after the governor of Bryansk said in a Telegram post that saboteurs had killed one person and wounded a 10-year-old child when they fired from a moving car.
“They won’t achieve anything. We will crush them,” Putin declared.
Ukraine, meanwhile, accused Russia of staging a false “provocation.” At the same time Kyiv appeared to suggest that some sort of operation had been carried out by Russian anti-government partisans.
Russia “wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country & the growing poverty after the year of war,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
But Ukrainian military intellegence spokesman Andriy Yusov told a Ukrainian news outlet, “These are people who with weapons in their hands are fighting the Putin regime and those who support it.”
In fact, a group calling itself the “Russian Volunteer Corps” appeared to claim credit for the attack on social media.
The group, which identifies itself as a “volunteer formation in the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” said on its Telegram channel, “The Russian Volunteer Corps went to Bryansk region to show their compatriots that there is hope, that free Russian people with weapons in their hands can fight the regime.”
Russia’s border regions have become increasingly volatile in the year-plus since Russia invaded its sovereign neighbor Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered tighter security at the Russian-Ukrainian border amid reports of several drones attacking inside Russia territory—including one that crashed just 60 miles from Moscow. Putin’s order came hours after flights out of the airport in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, were temporarily suspended and airspace over the city was briefly shut down amid an unconfirmed report of a drone there.
On Thursday the Russian intelligence agency FSB said in an initial statement that the army and FSB were trying to liquidate “an armed group of Ukrainian nationalists” who had crossed the border. However, Russian news agency RIA later quoted FSB as saying the situation in Bryansk was under the control of law enforcement agencies.
RIA went on to report that a number of explosive devices had been found and demining was taking place.
