Ukraine Invades Deep into The Front Lines, Russians are Puzzled

 

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

The New York Times

 

Fierce fighting raged inside Russia on Thursday after Ukrainian armored columns reportedly advanced as far as six miles into Russian territory and captured several small settlements.

The incursion, which was filmed on videos posted online and reported by Russian officials and military analysts, prompted the local governor to declare a state of emergency. On Wednesday President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia convened with top military and security officials to strategize about the attack.

The assault is a new and surprising turn in the war, the most concerted push by Ukraine into Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. It appears to represent an effort by Ukraine to turn the tables on Moscow. In May, Russia caught Ukraine off guard when it sent troops across the border in the area north of Kharkiv, where it still has a narrow foothold.

Ukraine has remained mostly silent about the attack, which began on Tuesday. The Ukrainian military has not acknowledged its troops are in Russia.  

The incursion is the third significant Ukrainian ground assault on Russian territory since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. But it appears to be the largest, according to open-source intelligence analysts studying photographs and videos from the area of Russia under attack, a rolling expanse of farm fields, forests and small towns.

Some analysts estimate that Ukraine has sent hundreds of troops into Russia. That would be a major commitment at a time when Ukrainian forces are under heavy pressure along the front lines in the south and east of their country.

In a statement on Thursday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said it was destroying Ukrainian formations and repelling the attack.

But a prominent Russian military blogger who writes under the name of Rybar said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had Sudzha, the main town in the area, “practically under full control.”

The Russian claims could not be independently confirmed.

Videos from Sudzha, verified by The New York Times, show cars trying to leave Sudzha amid sounds of gunshots and roads littered with burned vehicles and what appeared to be mines. 

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration offered its first commentary on the incursion on Thursday in a statement by a senior adviser that did not acknowledge any Ukrainian role but portrayed the Russian populace as collectively backing Mr. Putin’s invasion.

The adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said the attacks “provide an opportunity to see how ordinary Russians relate to the current authorities in Russia.” Russians, he said, were not going to “come out with flowers to greet the anti-Putin tanks” — noting that a million had volunteered to serve in the country’s military.

In response to the developments in the Kursk region, Peter Stano, a European Union spokesman, told the Ukrainian news outlet Suspilne that Ukraine “has the legal right to defend itself, including by striking at the aggressor on its territory.”

Analysts and Russian military bloggers have said the Ukrainian push involves regular Army units. That would be a change from the previous incursions, which were carried out by armed groups of Russian exiles backed by Kyiv’s army.

The fighting was intensive enough for the acting governor of the Kursk region in Russia, Aleksei Smirnov, to declare a state of emergency late Wednesday in order to “liquidate the results of an incursion into the region’s territory by enemy forces.” 

“Difficult conditions for operations persist” in the border region, Mr. Smirnov said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app, without specifying where or how intensively the fighting continued.

Since the incursion began, Russian officials have wavered between assurances the attack had been rebuffed, or soon would be, and acknowledging the scale of the breakthrough along the border.

That likely reflects a balancing act between condemning Ukraine for what Mr. Putin called a “provocation,” and risking anger from the population over the breakdown in security, the Institute for the Study of War wrote in a research note on Wednesday.

Photographs and videos posted online and verified by independent military analysts suggest that Ukrainian forces pushed past the border defenses in the region and were maneuvering on the roads inside Russia.

A video filmed by a Russian drone and posted by a Russian military blogger who writes under the handle Dva Mayora, or Two Majors, showed a damaged, U.S.-made armored vehicle at a road intersection six miles inside of Russia. The video, which could not be independently verified, was posted as a way of showing a successful Russian strike on Ukrainian armored columns. 

It was unclear whether Ukrainian forces intended to dig in and try to hol d Russian  territory or pull back, having reportedly captured prisoners and destroyed a Russian border post.

The attack left some military analysts pondering why Ukraine would throw scarce men and resources into a risky assault that opened a new front at a time when it was fighting pitched battles to hold onto positions on its own territory.

The earlier incursions across the border by militant Russian exile groups achieved little militarily — the Ukrainian-backed fighters were quickly routed and driven back. They were seen as efforts to force Moscow to divert troops from inside Ukraine to defend the border, embarrass the Kremlin over security lapses, and boost morale at home.

Russia’s assault across the border in May toward Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, prompted both armies to divert troops from the front lines in eastern Ukraine to the new area of fighting.

Ivan Nechepurenko, Constant Méheut and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.

Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014. More about Andrew E. Kramer