KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has launched a surprise ground assault into Russia with troops and armored vehicles, Russian officials and independent military analysts said Wednesday, in what could be one of the largest Ukrainian incursions onto Russian soil in more than two years of war.

Ukraine’s Assault Began Tuesday

The assault, which began Tuesday into the Kursk region of western Russia, appeared to have resulted in heavy fighting, according to images from the battlefield verified by independent military analysts and Russian statements. Russia’s Defense Ministry said midday Wednesday that the fighting was continuing.

Videos verified by The New York Times showed armored vehicles being struck several miles inside Russia, and Moscow said it had rushed troops and fighter jets to respond. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces had “prevented the enemy from advancing deep into the territory of the Russian territory,” while pro-Kremlin military bloggers said Ukrainian forces had captured several settlements near the border.

“Alarming news is coming from the Kursk region for the second day. The Kyiv regime is attacking our borders,” Igor Artamonov, the governor of the Russian region of Lipetsk, which borders the Kursk region, said Wednesday.

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The various reports could not be independently verified, and Ukrainian authorities have not commented on the assault. Two spokespeople for the Ukrainian army did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is not the first time that Ukraine has staged ground attacks across the border into Russia. But while previous assaults were carried out by armed groups of Russian exiles backed by Ukraine’s army, the attack Tuesday appeared to have directly involved Ukrainian troops, according to Pasi Paroinen of the Black Bird Group, which analyzes footage from the battlefield.

Paroinen said a few hundred Ukrainian troops, supported by armored vehicles, had most likely crossed the border.

Attack Could Attempt to Divert Russian Units

Military analysts said the attack could be an attempt to divert Russian units from the front lines, thus relieving the pressure on Ukrainian troops struggling to contain Russian advances. But they added that Russia’s army had ample reserves of troops to commit to the fight and that the attack risked further stretching Ukraine’s already outnumbered troops.

“Operationally and strategically, this attack makes absolutely zero sense,” Paroinen said. “This seems like a gross waste of men and resources badly needed elsewhere.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that up to 300 Ukrainian troops from Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade, backed by some 30 tanks and armored fighting vehicles, had attacked border units in the Kursk region around 8 a.m. Tuesday. Paroinen reported “multiple sightings” of Stryker armored fighting vehicles, which the United States sent to Ukraine last year.

Rybar, a prominent Russian military blogger, said Wednesday that Ukrainian troops had tried to cross the border at different points near the Russian village of Nikolayevo-Darino and the town of Sudzha. He said Ukraine had captured Nikolayevo-Darino as well as two other settlements and that Russian troops were “almost completely surrounded” in the village of Oleshnya, near Sudzha.

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Ukrainian shelling in the area of the assault killed five civilians and wounded 24 others, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the Kursk region, said thousands of residents had evacuated the area of the fighting, most of them by their own means.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Wednesday that he would meet with his country’s security services to coordinate a military response to the attacks and that instructions had been given to assist residents of the Kursk region.

Although Ukrainian officials have not officially commented on the attack, Andriy Kovalenko, a senior official focused on Russian disinformation operations, appeared to acknowledge it, writing on Telegram that “Russian soldiers are lying about the controllability of the situation in the Kursk region. Russia does not control the border.”

Attack Focused on Russia’s Border Regions

Ukrainian shelling and bombings have targeted Russia’s border regions of Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk, but cross-border attacks have been rare. The first such attacks reported took place in May of last year, carried out by anti-Kremlin Russian fighters aligned with Ukraine. A similar ground attack took place this March.

On both occasions, the attacks were seen as an attempt to unnerve the Russian public and undermine Putin’s efforts to insulate them from the war.

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But Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote on social media that those attacks “had little effect on the fighting” in Ukraine and “did not have serious domestic political ramifications for Putin.”

He and other military experts said that if the aim of this week’s attack was to draw Russian troops away from other parts of the front, it had little chance of succeeding.

“Russia already has greater forces/conventional capabilities in the area, better command and control, and it has conscript units that can be deployed, which are not used in Ukraine,” Lee said. “It is unlikely this operation will force Russia to pull significant forces from Ukraine.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Constant Méheut
c.2024 The New York Times Company