Newly led by a military incursion into Russian territory, commanders of armed anti-Kremlin groups mocked the Russian military for its slow response on Wednesday and threatened Moscow with more raids to come.
Russia, they told reporters at a news conference in a forest clearing in northern Ukraine near the border, should now understand that any section of the long border can become a new place that Moscow will be forced to defend.
Military analysts suggested that the cross-border attack in the Belgorod region on Monday and Tuesday had two objectives, military and political.
It appeared to be aimed at forcing Russia to divert much-needed troops from the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine, even as Ukraine prepares a counteroffensive. And he threatened to embarrass the government of President Vladimir V. Putin by showing Russia’s vulnerability.
The raid prompted a warning from the leader of Russia’s largest mercenary force, who said his country faced more military setbacks unless its ruling elite took drastic — and most likely unpopular — steps to win the war. The Kremlin, said Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner group, needs to order a new wave of military mobilization, declare martial law and force “everyone who can” to produce munitions.
“We must stop building new roads and infrastructure facilities and work only for war, to live a few years in the image of North Korea,” Prigozhin said.
Otherwise, he said, the consequences could prove dire for a Russian elite he described as deeply alienated from the citizenry. “Society always demands justice,” she said, “and if there is no justice, then revolutionary sentiments arise.”
Some Russian pro-war voices openly expressed fear that the attacks on Belgorod would create new battlefield challenges for Russia, whose only significant military victory in the past nine months came in recent days, when it reclaimed control. from the ruins of the city of Bakhmut after a long and costly battle.
Igor Girkin, a military blogger and former Russian paramilitary commander in Ukraine, warned that “the inevitable creation of a continuous front along this border, which will have to be filled from somewhere with combined arms units and formations of the Russian Armed Forces It’s on the go.” the agenda.”
That can only help the Ukrainian army, said Girkin, who calls himself Igor Strelkov.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that the attackers, who are members of two groups calling themselves the Free Russian Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, had been pushed across the border into Ukraine. But the attacks in Belgorod continued overnight, with a “large number” of drone strikes and damage to a gas pipeline that sparked a small fire, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said Wednesday morning.
“The night was not entirely calm,” Gladkov wrote on Telegram, saying that houses, cars and office buildings in the city of Belgorod and other settlements had been damaged.
It was unclear how the aftermath of the raid in Russia might play out.
Russian political analysts said the attack could spark discontent over the incompetence of the military among pro-war groups, but it could also offer Putin an opportunity to try to rally people around the flag. . The Kremlin has already said the raiders had abandoned US-made military vehicles inside Russia, and Moscow may use the far-right stories of some of the raiders to bolster its largely false claim to fighting the Nazis in Ukraine.
The Kremlin, eager to discredit renegade Russians, labeled them neo-fascists on Wednesday.
A major in the Russian Volunteer Corps, Denis Kapustin, is a known far-right extremist. The Anti-Defamation League has said that he was involved in the world of Mixed Martial Arts in Europe and that he has trained younger members of Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party. At the news conference in northern Ukraine on Wednesday, he introduced himself to reporters by his call sign, White Rex.
When asked about his ultranationalist ideology, he described himself as right-wing, saying his views were “traditionalist” and “patriotic”.
Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, called the cross-border attack a terrorist act. “In response to a similar action by Ukrainian fighters, we will respond operationally and very harshly,” he told a meeting of security officials in Moscow, Russian media reported.
Ukrainian officials denied leading the assault and said only Russian nationals had crossed the border.
The raiders, a ragtag group of Russian exiles who have been fighting on the Ukrainian side in the war, said much the same thing when they met reporters in the woods in a region of northern Ukraine wrested from Russian occupiers last spring.
The Ukrainian military said Kapustin “wish us good luck” but did not cross into Russia.
But the fighters made it clear that they were consulting with the Ukrainians.
“Everything we do within the Ukrainian state borders we obviously coordinate with the Ukrainian military,” Kapustin said. “Everything we do, every decision we make, beyond the state line, is our decision.”
The fighters were buoyant. Commanders and soldiers, some wearing camouflage uniforms over their faces, stood with machine guns in front of an armored vehicle they said they had captured and driven out of Russia.
They mocked the Russian response to the attack.
“The reaction was slow, panicked, disorganized and took hours to start,” said a commander who asked to be identified by his nickname, Cesar.
The press conference in the woods was intended as a kind of victory lap, but the fighters kept a strict time limit on the meeting, lest they be targeted by a Russian missile. After about 40 minutes, the soldiers drove away in pickup trucks and, with the rumble of a diesel engine, what they said was the transport of captured Russian personnel.
evelina riabenko and milana mazaeva contributed reporting.
