Shadowy attacks inside Russia deliver a psychological win for Ukraine

The announcement from Moscow came as little surprise, at least in its language – claiming that those who had raided Russian villages close to the border with Ukraine had been “completely eliminated”. That it came after two days of fighting raises more of an eyebrow.

The attack has been claimed by Russian militia groups who say their aim is to see President Vladimir Putin toppled. Whatever the state of the raid – with suggestions that the militas’ opperations could be continuing despite the announcements from Moscow – in the context of Russia’s broader invasion it is a skirmish. It is the intrigue around the incursion that will have a more lasting effect as it becomes part of the propaganda war between Moscow and Kyiv.

For Ukraine, there appears little to lose. Officials such as Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, said Kyiv had nothing to do with the incursion, putting it down to Russia’s emerging “violent resistance movement” and that “tanks are sold at any Russian military store”. Andriy Yusov from Kyiv’s intelligence directorate said both groups were working “autonomously on the territory of Russia” and Ukrainians were not involved, while Ukrainian TV said they were militiamen and “Russian volunteers”.

It would be a surprise if those in Kyiv knew absolutely nothing of the attack – and questions could certainly be asked about where the vehicles involved in the raid came from – but there are reasons to keep a distance. Western allies have been clear, at least in public, that the weapons and assistance they provide should not be used on Russian soil, and even Ukraine will be wary of leaving Mr Putin the room for escalation.

The two groups who claimed responsibility, the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), both say they comprise armed Russians fighting as a pro-Ukrainian force. The Legion says it is recognised by Ukraine (although that is unclear) and its members have fought there against Russia. The RVC has claimed responsibility for previous attacks inside Russia, including a cross-border raid in the neighbouring Bryansk region in March. The RVC’s leader is a Russian ultranationalist and the group openly speaks of a mono-ethnic Russian state.

Kyiv appears happy to talk up the general idea of an armed guerrilla movement whose actions allow for claims aimed at boosting the morale of the Ukrainian people and Kyiv’s troops fighting within Ukraine. Indeed, Mr Podolyak mocked the “Russian victory” in Belgorod on Twitter. There have also been suggestions that cross-border raids by militias and assorted drone attacks (which Kyiv also denies it is involved with) could be part of a “shaping” operation seeking to distract Russian attention from the battlefields of eastern and southern Ukraine as it puts the final touches on its counteroffensive plan – and potentially force Moscow to pull back some of its forces from the frontline to tighten the security around the border.

For Moscow, the equation seems more complex. There is a tension being between wanting to give the impression that everything is under control, while also needing to rally the public behind an invasion that has dragged on for 15 months, with little significant movement on the frontline for months until the recent shifts in Bakhmut. Injecting some fear about the risk of Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil achieves the second aim, but at the potential cost of embarrassing Mr Putin by making Russian defences look weak.

The simple route was to proclaim the border incursion a distraction effort by Ukraine to turn attention way from what Russia has claimed is its victory in the eastern city of Bakhmut (Kyiv denies it has total control of the area), which has been the scene of months of intense fighting. The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, tried this tactic on Monday. However, the sheer level of the response from Russian authorities to the attack belies such a dismissal.

First, state media reported that Mr Putin had been informed of the attack and the governor of Belgorod region said the area had been evacuated. On Tuesday morning, the governor – Vyacheslav Gladkov – claimed that Russia’s defence ministry and other security agencies were still “mopping up” the situation, that residents should not yet return to their homes and that the region remained under a special “counterterrorism” regime. Those measures were lifted a few hours after Moscow claimed it had pushed the fighters back across the border into Ukraine.

The Russian military claimed it had killed more than 70 “Ukrainian nationalists” and destroyed four armoured vehicles as Russian forces had surrounded the enemy fighters and defeated them with “airstrikes, artillery fire and active action by border units”, the defence ministry said. “The remnants of the nationalists were pushed back to Ukrainian territory, where they continued to be hit by gunfire until they were completely eliminated”, it added. There was no independent confirmation of those losses, but inflating such figures could play into Moscow’s hands in portraying attacks that are swiftly put down.

“Russia is facing an increasingly serious multi-domain security threat in its border regions, with losses of combat aircraft, improvised explosive device attacks on rail lines, and now direct partisan action,” the UK’s Ministry of Defence said in its morning intelligence briefing on Tuesday. “Russia will almost certainly use these incidents to support the official narrative that it is the victim in the war.”

However, the flip side to that is that Russia has spent time expanding its defences across the territory it holds in Ukraine and its border regions. That such cross-border attacks have proved successful, even if only for a time, will be a cause of embarrassment. Russia’s pro-war bloggers have been quick to flag such issues and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) a think tank that monitors the invasion and the reaction in Russa, said that they “responded with relatively varied concern, anxiety, and anger” to the attack, without convalescing around one narrative. The type of lack of control that the Kremlin hates.

Such cross-border raids are likely to continue. The mystery around them will suit Ukraine’s needs very well – it is Russia that certainly has more to lose from them.