Ukraine staged a flurry of cross-border floor assaults and long-range drone strikes into Russia on Tuesday, assaults that appeared geared toward disrupting President Vladimir V. Putin’s re-election marketing campaign messaging that the conflict had turned in Moscow’s favor.
Three armed teams of Russian exiles who function in coordination with Ukraine’s navy stated they’d crossed the border into southern Russia in a single day and had been combating in border areas. Farther from the border, drone strikes hit a Russian oil refinery and gas depot.
All through the conflict, Ukraine has struck targets inside Russia to disrupt navy logistics, hit airplanes parked on runways and blow up railway bridges. The cross-border assaults, Ukrainian officers have stated, are additionally meant to unnerve Russians and undermine Mr. Putin’s efforts to insulate them from the conflict.
Mr. Putin has by his two and a half many years in energy — and thru a number of elections, the following of which is scheduled to be held subsequent week — portrayed a picture of bringing order to Russia. The Kremlin has additionally barred the one vocally antiwar candidate from operating.
The reported border-area combating in two areas, Kursk and Belgorod in southern Russia, couldn’t instantly be independently confirmed.
The teams saying they crossed into Russia — the Free Russian Legion, the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Siberian Battalion — function in coordination with Ukraine’s navy. Some members of the teams, together with the chief of the Russian Volunteer Corps, maintain far-right nationalist views.
Members of two of the organizations, the Volunteer Corps and the Legion, additionally crossed into Russia final spring to skirmish with Russia’s border patrol and navy. However whereas the incursion final spring was thought of to have a navy objective — diverting Russian forces to the border earlier than a deliberate Ukrainian offensive elsewhere — the assaults on Tuesday delivered a extra 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 a presidential election that’s set to increase Mr. Putin’s tenure right into a fifth time period.
“We’re the identical Russians as you,” Mr. Andronnikov stated within the deal with. “We even have the fitting to an announcement of will.”
The studies of the combating within the border area coincided with Ukrainian drone assaults all through central Russia, together with a strike on an oil refinery close to Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. The refinery operator, Lukoil, stated the ability had halted operations however didn’t make clear why.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s navy intelligence company, Andriy Yusov, confirmed that Ukraine had launched the wave of long-range strikes however he didn’t make clear their intention or verify particular targets.
“Such incidents will happen with the whole lot used for navy functions, a technique or one other,” Mr. Yusov informed Radio Liberty. “This work will proceed.”
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.
