There are only a few weeks left, or perhaps only days, for Valeri Zaluzhny to give the order to launch the most decisive counteroffensive of the war. Only the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and a handful of others know when and where the blows will be struck to break through the Russian defenses and retake as much territory as possible. But the machinery of the counteroffensive is already in motion. The incursion launched last Monday into Russian territory by Russian paramilitaries opposed to Vladimir Putin constitutes a key piece in the new phase of enemy confusion operations.
Two groups of Russian militants opposed to the Kremlin entered the Russian province of Belgorod from Ukraine on Monday morning. The organizations are called the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Free Russia Legion and are led by known Russian far-rights. Within minutes they took control of the Kozinka border post, between the Russian province of Belgorod and the Ukrainian province of Sumi. Infiltrated units entered Russia in US armored infantry vehicles and were supported by at least one Soviet tank. All the vehicles bore insignia of the Ukrainian Land Army.
In a lightning operation, a hundred men (a figure provided by Telegram accounts close to the two organizations) took control of about 30 square kilometers, entering about eight kilometers into Russian territory and eventually occupying sectors of several border villages. The Russian government decreed the entry into force of an “anti-terrorist operation” to force the withdrawal of these infiltrated groups. The governor of Belgorod, Viacheslav Gladkov, announced on Tuesday morning that the operation was still underway. At noon, the Russian Defense Ministry declared the fighting over. “The remnants of the nationalists have been expelled to Ukraine from the Belgorod region,” proclaimed the agency’s spokesman, Igor Konashenkov.
The response of the Russian Volunteer Corps was not long in coming and they released new videos that supposedly would show that they were continuing to fight in enemy territory early in the afternoon. According to the Moscow version, the enemy units suffered more than 70 fatalities and the loss of four armored infantry personnel carriers. From Russian military accounts, it has been possible to verify that at least two International MaxxPro have been captured, a vehicle provided by the United States and several more destroyed armored vehicles. Images have also surfaced of six Swedish AT4 rocket launchers that the infiltrators would have abandoned. Both the AT4 and the MaxxPro are weapons designed for ambushes and urban combat. For their part, the attackers would have managed to capture two armored Russian infantry.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
Denis Nikitin, leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, has assured in an interview in the Financial Times that his men were still on Russian soil on Tuesday afternoon. Nikitin is a well-known far-right who took part in another sabotage raid in Russia’s Briansk province last March. In the Free Russian Legion he also acted as the ringleader of the Alexei Levkin operation, another far-right radical exiled outside of Russia. Confusion has dominated the situation in Belgorod from the outset. An independent Russian media like marsh assured on Tuesday afternoon that the infiltrators still occupied part of the territory. Russian Telegram channels for analysis of the reference war, such as Rybar, on the other hand, declared the infiltration definitively liquidated at five in the afternoon.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office has reiterated that it has no direct link to the attack, but this claim is difficult to substantiate considering that the infiltrators carry weapons used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and have entered Russia since its inception. territory. In addition to the vehicles, the paramilitaries were equipped with mortars and reconnaissance and attack drones. The Russian authorities further state that Ukrainian artillery has been supporting the infiltrators. Members of the Ukrainian special forces have indicated to this newspaper that there has been Ukrainian participation in the preparation of the mission. These same sources indicated that the withdrawal had begun in the afternoon.
Concern among allies
Jimmy Rushton, one of the most quoted British defense analysts of the war, warned on Tuesday on his social networks that Kiev’s international allies view the Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil with concern: “Russia had assumed, probably correctly, that Ukrainian attacks on Russia would unnerve their Western partners. That is why kyiv is using Russian proxy forces.” A red line that the White House has reiterated is that its weapons supplied to Ukraine should not be used on Russian soil.
Both Rushton and other military experts, such as US Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, take it for granted that the operation in Belgorod is part of a Ukrainian diversion plan in the face of the imminent counteroffensive. “It is a very clever confusion operation that seeks to put pressure on the Russian forces before the counteroffensive,” he wrote in the newspaper. Ilta Sanomat Jyri Lavikainen, a security expert at the Finnish Institute for International Studies.
Klaus Eriksen, a retired officer of the Danish Navy, and a regular analyst of the invasion, commented on his social networks that what Ukraine had achieved with the situation in Belgorod is to force the Russian army to cover a much larger territory: “With its raid on the On the other side of the border, the Ukrainians have managed to double the front that the Russians must now protect. Moscow has to assume that there will be other similar raids in the future.” “The Russians will have to allocate more resources to protect their own borders from now on,” Eriksen concluded.
In the months of April and May, Ukrainian amphibious assaults on the Dnieper River as it passes through the Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk provinces have also increased. In this part of the front, the river is the dividing line between the two armies. These operations serve both to test the Russian defenses and to temporarily take positions inside enemy territory and force the movement of their troops.
Analysts take it for granted that other movements will take place in the coming days that will upset the troops in Moscow. Russian military Telegram accounts, such as Rusich, close to Wagner, reported on Tuesday that Ukrainian troops and members of the Russian Volunteer Corps had tried to assault other border points between Kharkiv and Belgorod, up to the settlements of Bogun-Godorok and Shchetinovka. These two municipalities are located 35 kilometers further east of the zone occupied on Monday.
In the provincial capital, Belgorod, they watch with concern as the war has crossed the border and is barely fifty kilometers from their homes. “Yesterday it was very noisy, one rocket after another was flying. Today everything is calm”, a source from that city tells this newspaper. However, nervousness is palpable in any conversation. The mayor of Belgorod, Valentin Demídov, has asked his neighbors for peace of mind. “Please keep calm, there are many false reports about bombs in buildings in Belgorod. You and I know that this is one of the ways of disinformation attacks (…) there is only one goal: to destabilize the situation, make people afraid and panic,” Demidov wrote on his social media profile. The regional authorities have raised the number of civilian victims of the attack to one dead and 12 injured.
The surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive last September that liberated the Kharkiv province was also preceded by diversionary maneuvers by the enemy. On that occasion, the trap was a much-heralded movement of troops toward the Kherson front. The Russian General Staff assumed that the offensive would take place there. In October, a sabotage by truck bomb partially destroyed the Kerch bridge, the infrastructure that connects Russia with Crimea, the peninsula illegally annexed in 2014. That attack severely reduced the supply capacity for Russian troops on the Kherson defensive line. A month and a half later, in November, the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated the western part of Kherson Oblast, including its capital.
Peskov, speechless
It has been difficult for the Kremlin to justify fighting like this on its territory a year and three months after launching its offensive on Ukraine. “What happened yesterday [en Bélgorod] It causes us deep concern. This once again confirms that Ukrainian fighters continue their activities against our country, and this requires a great effort on our part,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said.
The representative of the Russian president was left speechless when asked by the press why his Armed Forces have not been able to repel the incursion of saboteurs in a single day. “I can’t say exactly what’s going on. This topic is more appropriate for our law enforcement officers, the Ministry of Defense and the Federal Security Service (FSB).”
Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
75% discount
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#Ukraine #intensifies #confusion #operations #Russian #soil #prior #counteroffensive